Symbian becomes Symbian^3 and now supports multi-touch

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Posted on 18 Feb 2010 at 15:49

MWC 2010: Nokia has announced the latest version of Symbian, Symbian^3, which looks to be a massive improvement over previous versions of the OS. It's also the first major release since Symbian went completely open source.

The major new features in Symbian^3 are multi-touch gestures, a new user interface with multiple home screens and widgets; visual multi-tasking management which enable you to switch between or close applications; and a new media interface which is similar to Apple's Cover Flow view on the iPhone and iPod touch.

Some of Symbian's biggest drawbacks in earlier versions, such as switching between 3G and WiFi without issues, and memory leaks while running multiple applications that led to performance and stability problems, have apparently been fixed.

What's more, Nokia has given a glimpse of Symbian's future with this latest version, as native support for HDMI and being able to handle 1080p video streams is integrated into Symbian^3.

Symbian is the world's most prevalent mobile operating system by some margin, thanks to Nokia's domination of the massive feature phone market, but its shortcomings have become all too clear with the rise in popularity of smartphones.

Symbian^3 looks to address some of those issues, but with Microsoft also releasing its own massively overhauled mobile operating system this week, Nokia still has a ways to go. Symbian^3 will be available to manufacturers from the end of March, so expect handsets to arrive in the coming months.

Author: Tim Smalley in Barcelona

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