While Microsoft has been getting the lion’s share of attention at Mobile World Congress for Windows Phone 7 Series, The Symbian Foundation has been trying to garner buzz by previewing its upcoming Symbian^3 OS. The video above is a “design preview” of Symbian^3 from Nokia and the Foundation. Here’s a snippet from Nokia’s blog:
The Symbian Foundation today unveiled the first release of Symbian^3 which they expect to be code complete by the end of next month. This release features a wide range of enhancements including more advanced usability, faster networking and graphics acceleration in 2D and 3D for games and apps. The first devices running the new platform are expected to ship as early as Q3 this year.
Although Symbian is still the global smartphone OS leader, it is rapidly losing ground to modern operating systems like Apple’s iPhone OS and Google’s Android. Those two products along with Palm’s WebOS make Symbian S60 look extremely primative. While Symbian^3 (in preview mode) appears to be modern and promising, it also looks like an oh-crap-we-have-to-catch-up effort.
What do you think of Symbian^3? Will it help Nokia compete this decade and regain some of its dominance? Or is it too little, too late?
It doesn't look that far behind. I think it will play 4th fiddle in the US though.
Interesting that there is multitouch on a resistive screen though. i'm basing that on the video, the person's finger clicks on the image every time.
That looks promising. Even if they are "playing catch up" they did a good job of doing it. Now if it just really looks and works like that when its released.