Operating Systems for Smart Phones

This article intends to highlight the various Operating Systems (OS) currently being deployed by various mobile phone manufacturers. There are many OS under development for the smart phones and we here only look at the most popular ones.

The popular operating software systems for Smart Phones are

1.Symbian OS
2.Embedded Linux
3.Java (J2ME)
4.Windows Mobile

Symbian OS is the most popular and widely used smart phone OS, enjoying more than 50 % market share with strong support from smart phone manufacturers including but not limited to Nokia, Sony Ericsson , Samsung etc.,

The Symbian OS is a highly developed version of Psion’s 32-bit EPOC platform.

Symbian was formed as a spin-off from Psion Software Ltd, co-owned by Psion, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola. The main purpose of the spin-off was to improve and develop advance software platform for smart phones.

Symbian OS is the name behind the popular Series 60 phones in the mobile world. Symbian is the licensing company that develops and supplies the advanced , open standards operating system for data enabled mobile phones.

The processor used in the Smart Phones, to process various information, is named as ARM Processors i.e., Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computers) Machines. They drive popular high-end phones like Nokia, Panasonic and Samsung.

ARM Processors are capable of running Symbian OS, Linux OS and Windows Mobile.

The table given below summarizes the various operating systems being deployed by the manufacturers onto the latest Smart Phones.

SDKSeriesVersionModels
UIQUIQ 3.0Symbian OS version 9.1Sony Ericsson P990
UIQ 2.1Symbian OS version 7.0Sony Ericsson P910
UIQ 2.1Symbian OS version 7.0Sony Ericsson P900
UIQ 2.1Symbian OS version 7.0Motorola A1000
UIQ 2.0Symbian OS version 7.0Sony Ericsson P800
UIQ 2.0Symbian OS version 7.0Motorola A902

S60S60 3rd EditionSymbian OS Version 9.1Nokia E60 E61 E70
Nokia N71 N80 N91 N92 3250

S60 2nd Edition FP3Symbian OS Version 8.1Nokia N70 N90
Symbian OS Version 8.0Nokia 6630 6680 66816682

S60 2nd Edition FP1Symbian OS Version 7.0 enhanced Nokia 3230 6670 7610 6620 6260
Panasonic X700 X800 Samsung D720

S60 2nd EditionSymbian OS Version 7.0Nokia 7650 3650 3600 3660 3620
Nokia N-Gage XSiemensSX1

S60 1st EditionSymbian OS Version 6.0Nokia 6600

S80S80 Nokia SeriesDeveloper Platform 2Nokia 9300 9500