Symbian^3 has been unveiled today by the Symbian Foundation. The Symbian^3 platform is the first fully open source release since their switch to open source earlier this month.
It is expected that Symbian^3 will be finished by the end of March although it wont start showing up on phones till early 3rd quarter this year. Improvements on this latest platform (S^3) include usability and interface advances, faster networking, 2D and 3D graphics acceleration and HDMI support to name a few things on the list.
Other features of S^3 include better navigation from previous platforms that now includes gesture support. The system has also been tweaked to allow for more applications to be open at the same time.
The HDMI support on Symbian 3 allows HD video to be output to a TV to watch movies at 1080p. The music store is more tightly integrated with the system and allows music listened to on the FM radio to be identified and information loaded up in the music store allowing you to download the song.
Memory management has been made more effective by using Writeable Data Paging that sees more applications running in parallel. For connectivity the OS is being created along with hardware that will support 4G networks when they become readily available. This will allow for smooth streaming of video and VoIP video calls for example.
The Homescreen takes a big step forward with support for multiple pages of widgets and a simple flick gesture to move between them. The widget manager makes discovery and download of new widgets simple and support for multiple instances of a native widget means that consumers can monitor multiple weather forecasts, news feeds, social networking accounts or multiple email accounts simultaneously through a common interface.
It will be interesting to see what phones will be launched running Symbian^3.
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