David Wood wrote an interesting piece on the official Symbian blog, outlining plans for the Symbian Foundation platform development. From what we see, the first Symbian Foundation release based on S60 5.1, Symbian^2, reaches a functionally complete state at the middle of this year, and should be “hardened” by the end of the year. This means that the first devices based on Symbian^2 could hit the market any time around the end of this year. Symbian^3 follows on six months later – reaching a functionally complete state at the end of this year, and should be hardened by the middle of 2010.
Here’s how this should work:
- Prior to functionally complete, the platform grows as new features are added by contributors
- Between functionally complete and hardened, the development community focuses on stability of the platform by testing and contributing defect fixes
- After hardened the release enters a more stable phase. Bug fixes are still being made for around a year, but prime focus will be on later releases.
As for the first Symbian Foundation release, the feature set for Symbian^2 is already virtually frozen. Most of the content for Symbian^3 is already agreed, but there’s scope for contributors to make a difference… Check out full David’s article from here.