What is UIQ interface?

Speaking of Symbian, we must mention PSION and its EPOC operating system, from which Symbian developed.

Psion company was founded by David Porter in 1980 ... At that time, Psion was a leading technology company in Europe, and had been committed to the development and research of digital products. At the same time, Psion is also the first major PDA manufacturer in Europe, and its PDA products have always enjoyed a high reputation in Europe. As for EPOC, it is an operating system launched by Psion Software, which is specially used for mobile information devices, including PDA.

The word "EPOC" originated in the world and will enter a "new era of personal civilization".

EPOC is an open operating system. At the beginning, EPOC added a wireless communication system and an additional application program, so it has inherent advantages over other operating systems in wireless communication.

At the same time, EPOC, like Microsoft's Windows CE, is a 32-bit operating system with the characteristics of real-time, multi-tasking, multi-threading, low power consumption and less memory occupation. The familiar Ericsson R380SC is an operating system based on EPOC.

June, 1998, with a view to gaining opportunities and market position in the field of intelligent mobile terminals in the future.

Psion joined hands with mobile phone giants Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola to establish Symbian Company. The company inherited the authorization of EPOC operating system software from Psion, and is committed to providing a safe and reliable operating system and a complete software and communicator platform for mobile information equipment. As an open platform, anyone can develop software for Symbian-enabled devices. This means that development partners have more applications to choose from and a bigger market. To this end, symbian launched the Platinum Cooperation Program, which attracted people including ARM, Motorola SPSRealNetworks,

A large number of manufacturers such as TI Texas Instruments joined in.

Symbian also participates in the formulation of WAP, WirelessJava and Bluetooth to ensure that EPOC will fully support the market demand for modularity, scalability, low energy consumption and compatibility with RISC chips such as StrongARM. Therefore, compared with Microsoft's Windos mobile operating system, Symbian has a unique advantage in communication. With the participation of Panasonic, Siemens and Samsung, Saipan has now become a company jointly controlled by Psion, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Panasonic, Siemens and Samsung.

Although Motorola later sold its shares in Symbian, in the first quarter of 2004, LG, Ar and Lenovo became the latest mobile phone manufacturers to obtain Symbian license agreement, thus bringing the total number of licensees to 18, covering almost all heavyweight mobile phone manufacturers in the world. Saipan's series: pearls, seasonality and crystals.

Saipan gave poetic names to its three products, namely Pearl, Timely and Crystal. They are used in smart phones, pen-type input communicators and keyboard input communicators respectively. Each series adopts 80% code of Symbian core platform.

The difference between different series mainly lies in the user interface (such as pen or keyboard input) and screen size. In the three series, Shi Ying and Crystal are both called "communicators", but Pearl is a "smart phone". Quartz is a handheld version of EPOC operating system. The system has strong support ability, and the user interface design and operation mode are more user-friendly than Palm OS operating system and Pocket PC operating system. Basically, it combines the advantages of two operating systems. It features a mobile phone with pen input, 320x240 screen pixels, a color screen and a graphical user interface. Motorola's three-band GPRS/GSM communicator completli belongs to Shi Ying series, while Crystal is a handheld PC version of EPOC operating system, with wireless information devices with software and hardware input keyboards. For terminals that support keyboard operation. The object is a mobile phone with color display screen (640×200 pixels), keyboard operation function and graphical user interface. NOKIA92 10 is the representative of crystal. The familiar Nokia 7650, 6600 and 76 10, Sony Ericsson P800, P900 and P9 10 are all "smart phones" of Pearl Pearl series.

Symbian version

Symbian launched Symbian5.0 operating system in March of 1999. Its main kernel integrates network, wireless text, email, business card book and personal information assistant. At the same time, it also has a browser that supports standard web pages. With the support of java language, Symbian can run small applications. However, there are few models used in this version, which is basically not much different from EPOC.

Symbian 6.0 adds support for GPRS, WAP 1.2 browser and Bluetooth technology on the basis of 5.0, and users can run programs developed by third parties based on C++ and J2ME.

Compared with Symbian 6.0, Symbian 6. 1 mainly adds support for USB. The main features of Symbian 6.0 are: supporting voice call and data communication, Bluetooth and WAP, equipped with security functions (SSL, HTTPS, WTLS), adopting 16bit Unicode, supporting multilingual display, and adopting "PersonalJava 3.0" and "JavaPhone 1.0".

Symbian 7.0 supports multi-mode and 3G mobile phones, which enables manufacturers to launch Symbian OS mobile phones that can run on all the networks in the world, and can reuse many existing software applications without major code changes. 7.0 includes some new communication, messaging, network and application development technologies, and improves some functions related to security and authentication. Other functions of Symbian OS 7.0 include: supporting flexible user interface, such as Nokia's Series 60；; Support multiple audio/image formats and many APIs for game developers; Full encryption and authentication management, application installation and authentication based on secure communication protocols (including HTTPS, WTLS and SSL); And over-the-air (OTA)SyncML synchronization support.

In February 2004, Symbian released the latest version of Symbian8 .0 while authorizing LG and other companies. This version improves the performance of the real-time system and the compatibility with the original operating system. In addition, the software tools of Symbian OS 8.0 improve the functions of the remote access control system, and use adjustment devices to eliminate the interference that mobile phone users will encounter when using value-added services. The system includes absolutely modern multimedia and Java devices, and supports many standards, including JSR/KOOC-0//KOOC-0/8, LDC/KOOC-0/./KOOC-0/(JSR/KOOC-0/39), Mobile Media (JSR/KOOC-0/35) and Mobile Media. Finally, the new operating system also supports SDIO.

The future of Saipan

As an open operating system, Symbian has been supported by most mobile phone manufacturers. At present, more than 4/5 manufacturers in the mobile phone market have become authorized users of Symbian products. Nokia, Siemens, Samsung and Sony Ericsson are the core members of Symbian Alliance. Compared with its main competitor, Microsoft Smarphone2003 mobile operating system, Symbian has the greatest advantages in mobile phone JAVA applications and MMS, and most members of Symbian Alliance are the makers of communication standards. Therefore, the combination with the operating system is better in the basic communication function of the mobile phone.

From the perspective of technical openness, the disadvantages of Symbian operating system are also very obvious. Because Symbian represents the closed operating system of traditional mobile phone manufacturers, Microsoft's smart phones still have strong advantages in connectivity and scalability with PDA, PC and even the Internet. Recently, news about smart phones has come one after another. Some insiders told reporters that the main reason why Microsoft didn't release the China version of smart phone 2003 was that the large-scale mobile phone terminal manufacturers failed to follow up in time.

The advancement of Microsoft's mobile operating system makes the traditional Symbian camp and Palm camp feel uneasy. Analysts believe that compared with Symbian, Palm camp is no longer Microsoft's main rival, so Microsoft's mobile operating system this year is directed at Symbian camp. For Microsoft, Symbian is not only an operating system, but also synonymous with a company, a camp and a mobile phone monopoly alliance.

Symbian Company, founded in 1987, is a joint venture invested by Motorola, Siemens, Nokia and other large mobile communication equipment manufacturers, specializing in developing mobile phone operating systems and supplying them to various mobile phone manufacturers. At present, mobile phones using Symbian operating system account for 70% of global mobile phone shipments, which has formed a de facto monopoly.

Mr. Li, the head of Beijing Symbian Company, said that as an operating system, Symbian's popularity is not lower than that of Windows, but few people know the name, which is not unrelated to Symbian's low-key style. However, the aggressive Microsoft made Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and other mobile phone giants nervous, and they also realized that they had met their number one enemy-Symbian platform with their own "brains".

More people in the industry believe that Microsoft's entry into the field of mobile phone software has awakened Nokia's dream of continuing to maintain the dominance of the next generation of mobile phones through Symbian software. Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Siemens, the world's four largest mobile phone manufacturers, are customers and shareholders of Saipan. These four mobile phone giants all use the mobile phone operating system developed by Symbian. At present, authorized customers of Symbian operating system account for more than 85% of the global market share.

For the two mobile phone operating systems, industry analysts say that Symbian is not superior to Microsoft operating system, because Symbian was originally just a mobile phone operating system, which can complete the basic functions of calling, plus some auxiliary functions, such as phone book and SMS editing. Developers didn't expect to add more functions to mobile phones.

People in Symbian told reporters: "With the gradual diversification of people's demand for mobile phone functions, Symbian is also trying to transform itself and constantly add PDA and multimedia functions to it. In the face of attacks from Microsoft and Palm, Symbian is on the defensive, and its main strategy is to rely on the offensive and defensive alliance between vendors to shut out competitors. " For this kind of mobile phone operating system dispute, people in the industry prefer to regard it as a dispute between "computerization" and "computerization of mobile phones".

For Microsoft, mobile phones play an important role. NET strategy, Microsoft can't give up. For the Symbian camp, the mobile phone operating system is originally its own back garden, and no one can intervene. Therefore, analysts believe that the two operating systems are bound to compete fiercely in many aspects, such as manufacturers and users. It is too early to predict which system will win in the end. But at present, the lack of support from mainstream mobile phone manufacturers is still a problem that Microsoft has to face.