This week the Symbian Foundation announced that the sourcecode for Symbian devices was now completely open source. To achieve this about 20% of the 200 or so 3rd party developers had requested their code be stripped out due to now wanting to open-source their code.
The information on this was revealed in an interview with Symbian Foundations chief where the future of Symbian was discussed. One of the more interesting points in the interview was where the question was asked about the possibility of Symbian-based tablets and netbooks to which the answer came…
“It’s very likely that, in the next year or two, you would see such a product hit the marketplace. A lot of companies are experimenting with PDA-tablet-style form factors, also for stereo systems, and internet-connected devices running low power on primarily ARM architecture ” we do get occasional interest for a few of those.”
Although we see a lot of Windows based tablets around that didn’t really take off, the Apple iPad might be different which steps away from the usual operating systems and specialises in doing good at the things it needs to. Could Symbian be used the same way to create a decent UI that works well in tablet form? Symbian are creating a new graphical layout this year with their UI and with a number of companies pushing tablets this year we could perhaps see some of them starting to consider Symbian on their devices.
The full interview is available at ZDNet.
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