Nokia has announced that Symbian^3, the latest iteration of the Finnish manufacturer’s proprietary smartphone operating system, is now stable and almost ready for product availability.

 

Symbian^3 was officially completed on 17 June and is undergoing various tweaking and testing procedures to make sure that it works well with the hardware on the forthcoming Nokia N8.

 

According to the Symbian Foundation there are more than 250 new features in this latest Symbian release, which include the following:

 

 

Symbian’s graphics have been given a boost by the new graphics architecture which incorporates hardware acceleration as well as faster software, meaning that the user interface (UI) will be quicker and more responsive. The entire UI is also programmable, so there will be a great deal of third-party themes and apps available for devices running Symbian^3.

 

 

Users can now swipe to scroll through the UI; pinch to zoom and tap to select are also supported. Multi-touch functionality has been incorporated.

 

 

Symbian^3 supports output to HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) for showing photos or videos on HD TVs and there’s also a new Fusion Player which replaces the current Media Player.

 

 

Memory management is improved with Symbian^3 in order to enable more apps to run and there is also an ‘Alt-Tab’ inspired task switcher to move between the applications that are running on your smartphone.

 

 

The new OS introduces a few new technical protocols for location data, such as a service called ‘Here and Now’ which offers web services that are related to the user’s current location. This would enable the development of advanced applications that will provide information relevant to where you are without requiring you to supply your geographic location.

 

 

There is a new networking architecture being utilised in the new Symbian OS that according to Nokia “makes it easier for service providers to create networking extras such as firewalls and hotspot login apps.”

 

The first public release of Symbian^3 (S^3 version 3.0.0) PDK was released for developers by The Symbian Foundation in July along with the corresponding source code.