Symbian 3 is finished
Symbian 3, Nokia’s latest baby was officially completed on June 17th, of course that doesn’t mean the N8 is coming tomorow. It means all the new features and improvements have been added, now the hard work of testing and tweaking begins, the boring bit basically but a bit Nokia needs to get right to avoid the debacle that was the N97 at launch last year. Symbian 3 includes 250 new features and nokia’s official blog listed some more of the important features here :
Some notable improvements and new features
- Better Graphics Graphics have been given a boost with a new graphics architecture, hardware acceleration and faster software that improves some of the shiny bits in the OS such as Kinetic scrolling and cover flow styling in the music app
- Multitouch A very important feature that Nokia phones have lacked and is finally available. The Symbian UI allows flicks, pinch and zoom and single taps to select
. It also means that multiple fingers can be used to operate which means certain tasks like when typing on an on screen keyboard, so sounds like the N8 does have multitouch keyboard. Possibilities are endless with what you can do with multitouch it all depends if Nokia wants to into that direction and introduce new gestures that el jobso hasn’t patented yet . - Better Multitasking Everyone knows that Symbian is the ONLY mobile OS to offer TRUE mobile multitasking none of the save the state of the app rubbish and well the Symbian foundation have improved it with better memory managment so you can leave more apps open without running out of memory and get more stuff done
- Location services New protocols have been added in the OS to take better advantage of the location data. A new app set to debut is Here and Now which offers services according to the location you are in at any given moment of time.
- Networking The Symbian OS includes a new networking architecture that improves a whole lot such as the data flow performance, easier for services to create networking extras such as fire walls and hotspot log in apps. One click connectivity has also been included to make it easier to connect to access points.
- Development for Developers Symbian will come with Qt installed (so get developing developers ) Makes it easier for you developers to develop apps for as Nokia phones as possible. The Symbian web runtime will also let developers create Web 2.0 style applications that interact with the devices core functions like the camera and address book.via
thanks to chandru for the heads up!
Category: Cseries, Eseries, Gestures, News, Nokia, Qt, S60, Symbian, Xseries
Multiple Touch
The Symbian^3 UI now scrolls with a swipe, you can pinch to zoom and tap to select. The interface also supports multitouch, which typically means that you can type faster on a virtual keyboard, or perform more complex actions such as holding a virtual ’shift’ key and then typing a letter. It should spell some interesting new options for games developers as well.
Umm, Sadly, multitouch is NOT supported on the virtual keyboard
I know it sucks and so you still won’t be able to type fast. Hopefully Nokia will allow that by the time N8 is released or in future updates……..
if they dont have a multitouch keyboard at launch.
i might just have to hurry and make an app for one , and i am sure alot of other people will be thinking that too.
Multitouch keyboard is DEFINITELY in Symbian 3 – I saw it referenced somewhere official yesterday. So it will be strange if it’s not in the N8 – Nokia would have to disable it.
Can you give me the link?
Hope this turns out well, Nokia really needs it!
This is the kinda stuff that makes Symbian fan boys clowns. Multitasking is present on Maemo and is miles ahaed of what this dying platform (Symbian) ever hopes to be.
Symbian is still going strong, development on Maemo ceased a long long time ago.
We’re not Symbian fanboys regardless
Hmm… I think the argument can be made that Symbian multi-tasking can be better than Maemo, given the statement:
“Everyone knows that Symbian is the ONLY mobile OS to offer TRUE [mobile] multitasking…”
*emphasis mine
This could possibly infer that Maemo multi-tasking is more like traditional pc multitasking. It can be argued that mobile multitasking has other criteria besides being able to throw multiple apps in the background but may include better memory management and other things. If at the end of the day what really happens is that Symbian pages more and that’s how it uses less memory in the background then I agree that Symbian can’t touch Maemo.
Loving the comment Rocky, full of insults and completely meaningless – comedy troll!
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I’m using Nokia N8 and it doesn’t have the multitouch onscreen keyboard. It only has an onscreen keyboard which is also not a Qwerty keyboard. I hate to wait for the up coming firmware updates. But hopfully they’d have this features enabled in the new update….