S60 is Going Away- Symbian ^2 & ^3 Emerge
Nokia’s affair with Symbian has been a long one, spanning the company’s reach from feature phone to smartphone. The phone platform had different variants, with S60 becoming the one garnering most of the innovation and advances as Nokia entered the smartphone market. Nokia spun Symbian off into its own entity awhile back and made the platform open source, no doubt to get developers onboard. Now it appears that Nokia and the Symbian Foundation have quietly closed the books on S60 as recent blog posts indicate.
The web site at S60.com has been shuttered as the box above indicates, as Nokia moves to get the platform more clearly identified. The “new” platform will be known as Symbian ^2 (the ^ is silent) and Symbian ^3, according to packets given to developers. The Symbian system will be updated twice annually going forward, and all development will be concentrated on the new Symbian system. This is no doubt due to the reputation that S60 had garnered as an outdated smartphone platform when compared with WebOS and Android.
I just hope they actually do this right and kick out the entire GUI and start over with something fresh and responsive – and above all, consistent and attractive.
Nokia simply can’t design GUI:s to save their lives, it seems. Maemo is an inconsistent mess and S60 is horrible too.
I have fond memories of Symbian in the days it was still EPOC, in the Psion hand-held devices – clearly the 32-bit pre-emptively multitasking foundations of it are solid and time-tested. The GUI layer on top these days is trash though and has been for years now. Let’s hope they actually manage to sort that stuff out.
Apple caught the industry flat footed. Why has Nokia taken over 2 years to figure out S60 can’t cut it anymore?
How and when can I reflash my i8910 to Symbian^2?
ahahhah
I still had the time to *BEGIN* the basics for programming S60, and now it is already DEAD.
Java Micro edition is dead. Symbian (70% of market is symbian OS) is dead.
They just released QT for S60 hahaha
Just laugh and have fun.
Nokia idiots!! I will buy a IPhone asap, at least Apple has a consistent phone, not X millions of versions (like S60 FP1,FP2, 3rd, 5th, ecc…)