02 February 2010

Nokia To Skip Symbian S^2
To S^3 In The Third Quarter Of 2010

According to Digitimes, Finnish mobile phone giant plans to radically speed up the development of the new Symbian Foundation’s platform by jumping over the second version to offer version 3 with full multi-touch and gestures support that enables user interaction with more than one finger, and combines sequential touch inputs to a 'gesture'.

The main benefits of this new functionality will allows users to interact with applications in better ways, simplifying finger-based interaction with UI components, allowing common basic gestures and multi-touch gestures as well as enabling extensibility.

General manager of Nokia Taiwan, Michael Hsu, also confirmed t that development process of the next gen Symbian user interface is going well and is scheduled to be in the release later this year.

The Symbian version 4 is believed to bring a nice array of eye candy features, as well as support for capacitive screens, multitouch, gestures, multiple desktop filled with widgets and advanced graphics effects.

The Symbian S^4 is believed to be based on the Qt cross-platform application development framework developed by Trolltech, which Nokia acquired in June 2008, said industry sources. With addition of an advanced graphics effects like opacity, drop-shadows, glow and filtering, new animation framework Qt will make it possible to develop modern, advanced UIs on Symbian and Maemo devices as well.

For terminal end products, Nokia will continue to offer Maemo-based mobile computing devices, Symbian S60-based smartphones as well as Symbian S40-based feature phones, with the prices for Symbian S60-based models likely to be more competitive in 2010, Hsu said.

By 2011, smartphones based on the Symbian S60-platform will account for 55% of Nokia's total handset shipments, followed by Symbian S40 feature phones at 35% and Maemo-based devices at 10%, according to sources who are familiar with Nokia's product roadmap.

Nokia also plans to launch Maemo 6-based products in the second half of 2010, the sources added.