16 April 2009

Symbian Foundation Showcases
S60 Platform Running On Intel's Atom

There has been a lot of discussion about the potential of Symbian once combined with S60 and completely unleashed. The fancies of the wildest and most pragmatic imaginations are most likely to be limited not by technical limitations, but by business realities.

A few talented codders over at the S60 on Symbian Customer Operations (SOSCO) team have managed to compile Symbian via GCC and get it running on an off the shelf Atom based device from Intel.

Although it is originally designed to power mobile phones, they’ve shown that it’s possible to run it on a Intel powered notebooks which is pretty cool and leads to conclusion that Symbian powered ultra portable computing systems may come sooner than expected or maybe it is a little bit early to jump to that conclusion!?

Well, to be totally honest with you I don’t believe that Symbian has the potential to compete with Windows even on the low-end notebooks and after all notebooks are able to run fully functioning OSes and using a phone OS on them is pretty pointless if you ask me.

From other hand, it’s really cool and interesting to see that Symbian is not limited to AMR based chipset and that it runs well on a totally different Atom based motherboards. “I was most impressed with the responsiveness of the UI and upper application layers, and could only smile when we were able to quickly use a baseband modem port to make a call” Lee Williams, Foundation chairman commented.

Let’s not replicate the PC, Wintel, Netbook model, but instead really showcase the power of our code base, and an ecosystem of highly skilled providers of mobile technology. He added.

*click to enlarge

Anyway, there are three photos, first one shows the classic S60 active standby screen while the second is a shot of the gear, off the shelf atom board in a vanilla bookshelf pc case. The third shot is a standard OpenGL demo running on the platform port and I would like to see how fast it is :]