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With the excitement over the iPhone 3.0 preview next week it’s easy to forget about the other smart phone OSes out there that are vying for attention.  Even then, however, the main competitors are usually Windows Mobile and Android.  We tend to forget Symbian every once in a while, though it could be because Nokia phones which tend to use it aren’t nearly as popular here in the states.  But, there are some important developments coming out of Symbian.

The Symbian Foundation has announced their outline for development of the OS in the coming years.  It has a new version of the OS, which their calling Symbian^2, out by the end of 2009.  At the same time as the S^2 will be “hardened” and ready for release onto cell phones, S^3 will be “functionally complete” which means all it would lack is stability.  That would bring S^3 out by mid-2010, and S^4 through the same process by the end of 2010.  The Symbian foundation is able to do this by having no less than five versions of the OS being developed at one time, each in a different stage of development.

There’s a chance that some may be put off by this.  Sometimes too many releases can be annoying and confusing to some users.  But, a similar system seems to work well for Ubuntu on desktops with two releases of the OS every year.  Having two releases per year could easily put Symbian up on some other OSes if they innovate enough.  Though it might not beat the marketing machine that is Apple or the overwhelming popularity of WinMo and BlackBerry, it could easily put it up there with Android.  For an old smartphone OS, its nice to see The Symbian Foundation try harder to push out updates than Microsoft seems to be doing.

Read [The Symbian Foundation]
Read [Electronista]