By
Alaaddin Abbas Abdul-Hassan
The smartphone is categorized as a device having
the size and form factor of a normal phone, while
providing a graphics-capable color screen, value-adding
applications such as messaging tools (e.g. e-mail,
advanced calendar, and contacts book) and the ability to
install new applications. Smartphone examples can be
seen in Figure (1).
Figure (1) The Smartphones
Smartphone's History
 The first smartphone was called Simon; it was
designed by IBM in 1992 and shown as a concept
product that year at COMDEX, the computer industry
trade show held in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was released
to the public in 1993 and sold by BellSouth. Besides
being a mobile phone, it also contained a calendar,
address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail,
send and receive fax, and games.
Smartphone's History
 The Nokia Communicator line was the first of Nokia's
smartphones starting with the Nokia 9000, released in
1996.
 The Nokia 9210 was the first color screen
Communicator model which was the first true smart
 The GS88 phone, released in 1997, was the first of
Ericsson's smartphones. The GS88 was followed up by
the touch screen smartphone
 R380 in 2000, the first device to use the new Symbian
OS, and by the P800 in 2002, the first camera
smartphone.
Smartphone's History
 In 2002 RIM released the first BlackBerry which was the first
smartphone optimized for wireless email use and had achieved
a total customer base of 32 million subscribers by December
2009 [46].
 In 2007 Nokia launched the Nokia N95 which integrated a
wide range of features into a consumer-oriented smartphone:
GPS, a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash, 3G
and wi-fi connectivity and TV-out. In the next few years these
features would become standard on high-end smartphones .
 Later in the same year, Apple Inc. introduced its first iPhone. It
was initially expensive, costing $500. It was one of the first
smartphones to be mainly controlled through its touchscreen,
the others being the LG Prada and the HTC Touch (also
released in 2007). It was the first mobile phone to use a multitouch interface .
Smartphone's History
 In July 2008 Apple introduced its second generation
iPhone which had a lower upfront price and 3G
support. The App Store has been a huge success for
Apple and by April 2010 hosted more than 185,000
applications. The App Store hit three billion
application downloads in early January 2010.
 In January 2010, Google launched Nexus One using its
Android OS. Although Android OS has multi-touch
capabilities, Google initially removed that feature from
Nexus One, but it was added through a firmware
update on February 2, 2010
Symbian OS
Symbian OS was designed for use in small batterypowered devices with extensive communications
capabilities. The main key design features include the
following points
• Performance - Designed to maximize battery life
through careful device-specific power management.
• Memory management optimized for embedded
software environment-very small executable sizes and
ROM-based code that executes in place.
• Runtime memory requirements are minimized.
Symbian OS
• Security mechanisms for enabling secure communications and safe data
storage.
• Application support for an international environment, with built-in
Unicode character sets and eases of localization.
• Integrated multimode mobile telephony – Symbian OS integrates the power
of computing with mobile telephony, bringing advanced data services to the
mass market.
• Open application environment – Symbian OS enables mobile phones to be a
platform for deployment of applications and services (programs and content)
developed in a wide range of languages and content formats.
• Open standards and interoperability – with a flexible and modular
implementation, Symbian OS provides a core set of application programming
interfaces (APIs) and technologies that is shared by all Symbian OS phones
• Multitasking and Hard Real-time – Symbian OS is based on a micro kernel
architecture and implements full multitasking and threading.
Symbian OS
• Fully Object-Oriented and Component Based – the
operating system has been designed from the ground up
with mobile devices in mind, using advanced ObjectOriented techniques, leading to flexible component based
architecture.
• Flexible user interface design – by enabling flexible
graphical user interface design on Symbian OS, Symbian is
fostering innovation and is able to offer choice to
manufacturers, carriers, enterprises and end-users. Using
the same core operating system in different designs also
eases application porting for third party developers
• Robustness – Symbian OS maintains instant access to user
data. It ensures the integrity of data, even in the presence
of unreliable communication and shortage of resources
such as memory, storage and power.
Symbian OS Generic Technology
Most parts of the generic technology remain unchanged
between different devices utilizing Symbian OS. The
architecture of the system is modular, and it is designed
with a good object-oriented approach. Most of the
operation is based on a client-server model to allow all
applications to use the services provided by the system, as
well as other applications. This provides a very flexible
system, allowing secure and robust resource allocation. It
also saves significantly in the binary size and development
effort of the applications, as the most used functionality is
provided by the platform. Generic technology also contains
a security framework that provides certificate management
Symbian OS Generic Technology
 Symbian OS Base: This includes the kernel, file server,
memory management and device drivers. The kernel
library includes support for all peripheral hardware that is
resident on the chip and that is essential to the operating
system. The peripheral hardware includes such things as
timers, direct memory access DMA engines and interrupts
controllers. The kernel library is customized for a
particular chip. Applications are not permitted to access
peripheral hardware directly. Instead applications must
link to the User library whose functions may invoke
peripheral control through the kernel
Symbian OS Generic Technology
 The Servers: It is the layer provides communication
and extensive computing services, such as TCP/IP,
IMAP4, SMS and the database management. Symbian
OS components provide data
management,
communications, graphics, multimedia, security,
personal information management (PIM) application
engines, messaging engine, Bluetooth, browser
engines and support for data synchronization and
internationalization
Symbian OS Generic Technology
 The Application Engines: Some core application
engines, written as servers, enable software developers
to create their own user interfaces to the application
data and databases. The Application engines include
Contacts, Calendar, to-do, alarm, agenda (schedule),
world servers, help engine, Multimedia Services
(decoding and rendering of image formats) and
Messaging
Symbian OS Generic Technology
 Symbian OS UIKON Library: It is a layer that
provides generic controls to the application developers
it provides the application launching service, a set of
standard UI components and user input handlers for
the applications
Series 60 Smartphone Platform
 There are two versions of the series 60 platform
 Series 60 1.x is based on Symbian OS 6.1:
 Series 60 2.x is based on Symbian OS 70s.
 Some features in Series 60 come from enhancements
to Symbian OS and others come from Series 60
Platform enhancements. Includes Java APIs, including:
1. Mobile Information Device Protocol (MIDP) 1.0 ,2.0
2. Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) 1.0
3. Wireless Messaging API (JSR-120)
Series 60 Smartphone Platform
4. Mobile Media API (JSR-135)
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
APIs for Bluetooth (JSR-82)
Security (JSR 118)
XHTML browsing over TCP/IP
MMS messaging
Symbian native APIs
Symbian OS v6.1 native APIs