Companies and enterprising individuals have been dabbling with the tantalizing concept of
slapping Android on a cheap netbook for months now, and seeing how
Android and Symbian could end up locked in a heated battle for the hearts and minds of the open-source mobile platform world, it stands to reason that the boys and girls at the Foundation would want to counter the
OHA's every move. Some good people in the S60 On Symbian Customer Operations group (try fitting that on a business card) have managed to compile and run an S60-skinned Symbian build on one of Intel's Atom reference boards, showing a stock S60 screen and an OpenGL demo -- which, as you might imagine, runs circles around the performance of a garden-variety S60 handset. To quote the Foundation's boss, "I was most impressed with the responsiveness of the UI and upper application layers" -- the only question left to be answered is whether there's a place in the world for a Symbian-powered netbook.
posted Apr 16th 2009 1:08PM
At first this seems really pointless...
Just like Android on PC hardware, when you can easily have a proper OS...
^^^ Well said: "At first."
S60 on PC hardware?
Riiight... let me know when we get Windows 3.11 booting on the iPhone.
Psh, it already runs on S60 ;)
You mean it runs on the N95 - a S60 running phone.
Right, Windows 3.1/95/98 already run on S60 (N95)
actually only 3.1 runs on the regular N95 (i tested it on mine :D)
win 95 and 98 run on the N95 8GB and some others because they have more RAM
but it's still in an emulator, it would be awesome if we could get Windows on phones without any emulators. although i'm a fan of Symbian porting it to PCs just seems stupid to me.
stupid
Not at all.
Keyword is ... but let me show you the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE
How ironic, the creators of the original Symbian (Psion) and the original Netbook (Psion) together again?
Hi ray,
not ironic, from my point of view, but the chance to get the genuine successor for the good old Psion-devices. There are many, many people in the world, who are waiting for this - if the software (especially the Agenda) will be worth it.
^^^ I gotta be honest S60 PIM isn't that great, it is one part that is badly in need of an overhaul whenever Nokia gets around to it.
What? So they ported Symbian to x86? This is interesting - Symbian is open operating system now and it would be interesting to see full desktop OS based on it (fully optimized for mouse and keyboard).
I read that Nokia may enter the netbook market, maybe this is linked...
Maybe they're doing a testing to see if S60 is a fit OS for a netbook, but in this form, there's no chance, Nokia will have to go with something else.
Wow, it is AWESOME.
Now, bring us a real emulator to x86.
Symbian s60 is not for any PC or netbook, nor is Android.
Awesome! I think the symbian foundation is gonna overshadow android, if they don't buckle up.
How do you port something to atom? You mean x86?
Too bad they didnt change it enough so that Symbian was running on the entire screen and not the just top 15% of the screen.
So now I can run the SkyFire and Opera Mobile on a netbook? Woohoo!
No, wait...
Seriously, there aren't many applications on S60, and the ones that are available are generally pretty lame. While an Android OS for a netbook with an ARM processor or something might make sense if the right applications are available (incl. a full Webkit based browser), this makes no sense whatsoever that I can see.
"Seriously, there aren't many applications on S60, and the ones that are available are generally pretty lame."
Winner of the most profoundly stupid comment of the year award.
Refly anyone? Apple has ordered millions of ten-inch touch screens for a new product to be announced this summer. Will that be OSX or the very crippled sans multitasking OSX of the iPhone?
They should migrate Symbian to a Linux kernel first. That would eliminate the need to develop a lot of new drivers, etc.
Just for the hell* of it.
Lemme know when they have an Atom powered mobile phone running S60
Amazing stuff this !
Almost as amazing as discovering the possibility to fill a pepsi bottle with coke (and the other way round) !
This is really cool. It would hilarious if this took off and Nokia ended up selling Symbian 'netbooks' like Psion should have if they'd had a sense to continue developing the concept after the Series 7 - I would have bought one at the time if it had been a little bit cheaper. So much potential and they just squandered it - like the Amiga all over again.
To answer the question at the end of the post: Yes, there is a place for a Symbian-powered netbook, if the applications are there. Add a 3G modem in there and you can draw your own conclusions.
I'd love to see a release of this that we could all test out, especially if the EPOC apps could be migrated to Symbian...
Tell me when they make a modern version of the Psion 5mx form factor, then I'll be listening. Atom doesn't make sense, I want an ARM mini netbook.