Symbian and Our Wireless Future
EPOC was developed with the intention that it could be licensed to other device manufacturers. The base could be ported to other chipsets, the GUI could be replaced to give a specific look and feel, while the basic applications could be customised, replaced or simply not provided. This would allow licensees to develop products that were not purely Psion clones and therefore were not competing solely on price. This fact was signalled publicly when the Protea team was placed in a new division called Psion Software in 1996.
Psion knew they had a flexible best of breed product and commenced looking for suitable industry partners. At about the same time Nokia launched the 9000 Communicator. This combined mobile phone and PDA ran on the GEOS 16 bit OS from Geoworks Inc. While initially seeming like a blow to Psion it proved the viability and market interest in such products. Psion also knew that their operating system was technically superior.
Psion then looked at incorporating GSM into their products and at one time examined the possibility of purchasing a small phone manufacturer. However they decided to take a more open approach.
The idea of a joint venture company originated in early 1998 and the formation of Symbian was announced on 24 June 1998. The initial partners were Psion, Nokia and Ericsson. Motorola joined in October and Matsushita (better known for its consumer brands of Panasonic and Technics) in May 1999.
Prior to the creation of Symbian, work had been continuing on EPOC. In November 1997, fax, Internet and e-mail applications were added. This work continued under Symbian and in June 1999 the first Symbian release of EPOC took place in parallel with the release of the Psion Series 5mx. The new release added significant base functionality, including new architectures for messaging, telephony, multiple application access to contact and calendar data and additional user applications. The next release of EPOC will extend these features with a full WAP and Bluetooth stack and worldwide telephony support.
In addition to in-house development, Symbian has become an active member of several industry groups working to deliver key mobile technologies such as Bluetooth. It has also forged partnerships to deliver key enabling technologies such as handwriting recognition.
Another major development is the creation of Device Family Reference Designs or DFRDs. These will provide the blueprints for implementing EPOC on different form factors. It will ensure that data and third party applications are compatible across all EPOC devices, while providing individual licensees the opportunity to customise their own products. Currently there are three DFRDs:
- Pearl, for Voice with Data devices which will be implemented on the forthcoming Ericsson R380 phone.
The first of these reference designs is Quartz (Crystal and Pearl are to follow later). Quartz is intended to be delivered on Communicator type devices, e.g. information centric device with voice capabilities.
Symbian have also launched two programs to increase the penetration of EPOC. The Symbian Competence Centres will provide potential hardware developers with the skills to rapidly get their products to market. The Symbian Training Partners program, which will also include a certification process, is focused on provided high quality training on all aspects of the EPOC platform.
