Highly recommended read. There isn’t an ounce of fluff in this Symbian One article:
Richard: This may seem like a silly question, but what happened to v9.4?Jorgen: There is in fact a v9.4, but we did not publicly announce it as it is a fairly minor release. Most of its features are under-the-hood. These features are important to our licensees, but have little or no direct impact on developers and end-users.
Richard: Are users going to see real performance improvements, or is performance simply compensating for the additional features?
Jorgen: We feel that users will see a significant performance improvement. These changes are doing much more than simply keeping up with advances in functionality.
Richard: What about device manufacturers, will improvements in RAM handling simply compensate for a larger ROM?
Jorgen: We impose a limit on ourselves in terms of code growth to around a megabyte a year; this is not an awful lot. In addition, many of the new features are configurable, so if a device doesn’t include the hardware to utilize a particular piece of operating system code it can be omitted from the phone. Fortunately, the operating system is very modular from this point of view.
We often get asked whether we may one day release a Symbian OS Lite. We don’t see the need to do this because good engineering allows us to add functionality or renew whole subsystems, like the IP networking stack, without growing the hardware requirements. In fact, features such as demand paging potentially reduce the hardware required.
For example, despite the additional functionality delivered in v9.5 when it is booted up on a reference board there is more free memory than with v9.1 or v9.2 because of demand paging. This means device manufacturers have options to deliver phones with less memory, but similar performance to today’s devices; deliver the same memory as we are seeing in today’s devices, but let the user do more; or add more memory and allow the user to do even more.
Fantastic! I can’t wait!