Symbian Facts for Kids

Homescreen of Symbian Belle FP2 in landscape mode on a Nokia 808 PureView.

Symbian OS is an operating system for mobile devices. It is designed for smartphones.

History
Versions
Images for kids
See also

History

Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Psion and others joined to create Symbian association. This let them promote using EPOC designed for mobile phones. Symbian is a follower of EPOC system. It is used in pocket PC Psion, running on the ARM processors. This operating system has had many changes since it was first created. Nokia smartphones are the major users of Symbian OS.

Versions

Symbian 6.0 / 6.1	The first usable version of Symbian. It was used on Nokia 9210 communicator. Nokia sold over 500 000pcs of this type. Basic changes were: add bluetooth support, VGA camera.
Symbian 7.0 / 7.1	Very important version of Symbian OS. Developers add support of EDGE technology and IPv6. Change from pJava to Java ME. A virus, spread by bluetooth, caused problems with this version.
Symbian 8.0 / 8.1	Safer version of Symbian (because of the first virus), with CDMA, 3G, DVB-H and OpenGL support.
Symbian 9.0	There was only few changes, mostly for developers.
Symbian 9.x	Version 9.1 was released in 2005. Nokia added support of Bluetooth 2.0, but some developers were angry because of the new security changes.

A new version came out every year after 2005. Because of fast technology research, mobile phones and operation systems made very large improvement quickly. The most recent Symbian OS is designed for touch phones and the newest technologies.