Symbian Platform release plan has showed up

After Nokia has established its Symbian Foundation, Symbian, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) have been unified in order to deliver a flexible open-source platform for all developers that wish to take part in the development process. Now, the Symbian Foundation Blog has showed an image, depicting what would be the release plan of the Symbian Platform. It looks like the next releases of the platform have already been scheduled in time, beginning with Symbian^2. Basically, the idea is that the contributors from Symbian Foundation will be developing their features until a pre-scheduled moment, called “functionally complete”. From then on, the efforts of the developers will be focused on testing and fixing defects of what has been created so far. The next milestone date is reached once the platform has been fully stabilized. This is the “hardened” period, which should bring with it the first set of devices to run it. Meanwhile, the contributors will be working on the next development packages, which should find their place in the next platform release.


So, according to the image, it seems like the following platform release, Symbian^2, would enter its “functionally complete” phase in the middle of this year. This basically means that the platform based on S60 5.1 has grown to a level, when contributors will be working on increasing the stability of the release. About half a year later, Symbian^2 should reach the fully stable “hardened” phase. Therefore, this is the time when we should expect the first devices to run it, which however, depends on the integration plans and customizations made by the manufacturers (back at the MWC 2009, Sony Ericsson’s has announced the Idou as the first phone to run the new platform). The third platform release is scheduled to become functionally complete sometime in the beginning of 2010 and then get stable by the middle of the year. The same goes for Symbian^4 – functionally complete in the middle of 2010 and hardened at the end of the year, or maybe in early 2011.

source: SymbianFoundationBlog