Solid Mobile Phone: Symbian sets schedule for OS road map

The Symbian Foundation committed itself to an aggressive operating
release schedule Friday, promising a new version of the open-source OS
every six months for the next several years.

Symbian is the world's most widely used smartphone operating system,
but it has been losing ground to rivals like Apple, Research in
Motion, and Microsoft in recent months. Last year Nokia, formerly
Symbian's largest shareholder, decided to revive its growth by
unifying the software and releasing it under an open-source license as
part of a foundation of companies.

That plan is rounding into shape, according to Symbian's David Wood.
The first unified release created under the Foundation, known as
Symbian^2, is expected to be "functionally complete" by the middle of
this year and "hardened" (debugged) by the end of the year, meaning
that devices bearing the new software could start to appear as the
year closes.

Symbian^3 is scheduled to reach functional completion around the same
time, with a hardened version on tap for the middle of 2010. That
means Symbian and its partners plan to make frequent updates to
software, which could make it much easier to react to changing trends
in how people use smartphones.