Future of Symbian?

Interesting times, certainly, though as Nokia were basically doing all the dev work on Symbian anyway, nothing's really changed. If anything, Symbian will now evolve faster, since there are less political implications to proposed changes. 8-)

I Agree with you Steve, watch this video

You can also read the following or access to its source in the following LINK

Here, some thing about Symbian ^3

Symbian^3 Developer Overview
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Symbian^3 (pronounced Symbian three) - or S^3 for short - is the latest and greatest version of the Symbian platform. It extends Symbian^2 in many ways, including:

    * simplifications across the UI for an improved user experience
    * New features such as a podcast manager and an improved Homescreen
    * Architectural improvements that speed up the user interface and improve the behaviour of network-aware applications

"Symbian^3"

Our little page here on the developer site provides an overview of Symbian^3 from the perspective of - yes, you've guessed it - the developer. We pick out a few of the most interesting features to give you a flavour of what you can do with the kits. Whether you are an app developer or are creating the devices themselves, you'll find something here for you.

If you'd like a quick overview of the new features in Symbian^3 from an end user's perspective check out the S^3 microsite.
Check out the S^3 microsite too
Contents
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    * 1 Status
    * 2 S^3 for App Developers
          o 2.1 Qt
          o 2.2 Web Technologies
          o 2.3 Native C++
          o 2.4 Other runtimes
          o 2.5 Benefits for everyone
    * 3 S^3 for Home Screen Widget Developers
    * 4 S^3 for Device Creators
          o 4.1 Symbian speaks your language
          o 4.2 SHAI phase 1
          o 4.3 Multicore (SMP) phase 1
          o 4.4 Writeable data paging
          o 4.5 Support for hardware acceleration of cryptographic algorithms
          o 4.6 Customise the UI
    * 5 S^3 for Enterprises
          o 5.1 Remote contact look-up
          o 5.2 CalDAV support
    * 6 Further information

Status

Symbian^3 was officially declared Functionally Complete in June 2010. This marked a transition from a focus on feature submission and stability into the hardening phase. The first Symbian^3-based device, the Nokia N8, is expected to ship in September 2010.

The latest source code is available in Mercurial and kits are available for download. For more detail on the current status see the schedule for kits releases and the Release Plan.

The list of all features in Symbian^3 (pulled from the package backlogs and the source for the highlights described here) can be found on the Symbian^3 feature list.

A full spec sheet for the platform as at Symbian^3 is currently under construction.
S^3 for App Developers
Qt

Availability of the Qt 4.6 application framework for Symbian^3 is a key step in the evolution of Symbian's application development environment - it will become the primary application framework in Symbian^4. Availability in Symbian^3 allows developers to start unleashing the power of this new runtime, to plan new applications and to start the migration of their existing applications. Where used, Qt application framework will sit alongside the Avkon UI framework, enabling both forward and backward compatibility.

Qt Smart Installer: for dependency management. We expect device manufacturers to include Qt in their S^3 products, but where they don’t we have added “smart installer” technology in S^3 which makes it possible to fetch and install the correct version of Qt automatically when a user attempts to download a Qt-based application. The Qt application framework will also be made available for earlier Symbian releases, including S60 3.1, 3.2 and 5th Edition devices. Developers can bundle “smart installer” technology with their applications to make the Qt installation process seamless to the end-user and opening up a huge market of exisiting Symbian device users to Qt developers.

Further info: Developing with Qt
Web Technologies

The Symbian Web runtime brings the power of Web 2.0 to the Symbian platform. Developing applications has never been easier: HTML, CSS and JavaScript combine to enable rapid application development. JavaScript extensions - including PhoneGap - provide access to core device functionality such as camera and contacts.

Further info: Developing using web technologies
Native C++

Symbian's powerful middleware layer has expanded further in Symbian^3. We pick out a few highlights below, but be sure to check out the more detailed "What's New" article in the developer library too.
Improved user experience for all apps     There are a range of user experience improvements in Symbian^3, incremental enhancements that make Symbian-based devices easier and more enjoyable to use.

Single tap interaction model - no more "tap to select, tap again to action". Consistent roll-out of a "single tap" paradigm throughout the touch UI removes the need for double tapping anywhere in the user interface, delivering a more immediate and direct user experience. The implementation includes framework changes that allow 3rd party applications to benefit easily - make sure that your app takes full advantage.

Multiple-touch gesture support (for things like drag, flick-to-scroll and pinch-to-zoom) comes to many applications, including the Home Screen, Photos and the video player. Any application can integrate support for gestures - including features like kinetic scrolling - by taking advantage of the framework.
Music store integration     Music store integration in the Radio app makes radio interactive and provides developers with the chance to enhance the radio with a plug-in linking to their favourite music info service or store.

Ever heard a great song on the radio and wanted to know what it was or buy it then and there? The new "Buy now" button in the Radio app solves this problem by using RT+ RDS metadata to link through to the user's chosen music store, providing them with relevant info on the current song and artist and letting them make an immediate purchase if they wish to. Music store plug-ins can be supplied by a device creator or carrier or downloaded and installed by the user themselves.

For further information see the Radio package and feature 880.
Next generation graphics     A new 2D and 3D graphics architecture paves the way for a faster and more engaging user interface by enabling hardware acceleration of all graphics operations. Combined with industry-standard OpenGL ES, the new architecture also provides a great platform for high performance games – all without slowing the phone down. And all these features can scale to the capabilities of the hardware, allowing everything from simpler, cheaper phones to feature-rich, high-end devices.

Applications such as Photos take full advantage to enhance their look and feel, integrating effects such as fades and transitions between their various screens. Semi-transparent UI elements are supported, great for example when overlaying controls or notifications onto video during playback. Any native application can take advantage of these features to enhance their look and feel.

See feature 176 and the Graphics package for further information.
Smart network management     Under the covers Symbian^3 delivers a new core data networking architecture (known variously as "Three Plane Comms" or "FreeWay"). An application is able to indicate that it has particular service requirements such as high bandwidth (eg for speedy video upload) or jitter control (eg for smooth streaming of internet radio). The system seamlessly balances each individual application’s needs to deliver the best possible overall user experience. Read on if you would like to take advantage of these new features in your application.
Zeroconf     The Zeroconf standard (implemented as Bonjour by Apple) enables easy and automatic set-up of IP-based networks, dealing with issues such as address assignment and host name resolution. It also provides an extensible framework for service discovery, allowing clients to advertise and detect an arbitrary set of services. It can be used, for example, to discover printers, to share audio and video files between devices or to set up an ad hoc network for multiplayer gaming. The Zeroconf implementation within Symbian allows any application to add network sharing and service discovery features with minimal effort.

Further info: See the Zeroconf page
Other runtimes

    * Standard C - Symbian^3 maintains support for a wide range of standard C interfaces, enabling easy porting of existing C-based assets
    * S^3 includes JRT, enabling execution of Java-compatible applications
    * Python is not included in standard kits but is available to developers and can be bundled with Python-based apps
    * Silverlight for Symbian is available from Microsoft and Flash Light is coming soon from Adobe

Benefits for everyone

Better memory management, achieved through writeable data paging, leaves more free RAM for applications.

A faster UI - the Symbian^3 user interface uses the new graphics architecture to great effect to ensure that devices feel snappy and responsive.

One-click connectivity greatly simplifies the process of connecting to the Internet, doing the right thing without interrupting the user. It delivers a consistent and simple experience across all network-aware applications, streamlining the UI to remove all unnecessary prompts and dialogs. New global settings allow the user to configure platform-wide behaviour, for example ensuring the device automatically switches from cellular to WLAN when a free WLAN network is available. See the One Click Connectivity page and feature 565 for more details.

Core networking improvements: Symbian^3's new networking architecture and related optimisations also deliver throughput and jitter improvements to all data-enabled applications. This future-proofs the platform ready for the high bandwidth 4G networks that will roll out over the next few years. This industry-leading architecture provides a great basis for VoIP, audio and video streaming and efficient use of high bandwidth networks of all kinds. For further information on Symbian^3's new networking architecture see the introductory article (and feature 217 to track delivery).
S^3 for Home Screen Widget Developers

The Home Screen, starting point for all user interaction, evolves in Symbian^3. It gains support for:

    * Multiple pages of widgets, with a simple flick gesture to move between them.
    * Multiple instances of a native widget (Have you written a weather forecast widget? Now the Home Screen can house a couple of instances for forecasts for different locations)
    * The Widget Cataqlog, an improved configuration interface that provides a rich UI for downloading new HomeSscreen widgets.

Widgets themselves gain the ability to extend their UI, for example when the user selects a widget. The extended UI can be any size and is displayed on top of other widgets as a floating element. Widgets can also now have a canvas-like scrollable area which supports kinetic scrolling and can incorporate a text editor for user input.

As in previous releases, widgets can be created in either web runtime (using HTML, Javascript etc) or natively using Qt, C++ or standard C. Symbian^3 sees the addition of support for Adobe FlashLite widgets (so long as a FlashLite player is available in your device).

Remember that widgets arent just for simple apps and interfaces to web-based services. If you writing an application why not provide a widget front end too to give the user an overview of key information from their Home Screen - it can really help to differentiate your application.

See the Symbian^3 Homescreen feature article for further information.
S^3 for Device Creators
Symbian speaks your language

With 40+ localisations contributed to Symbian^3, the Symbian platform perfectly adapts to language, preferences and culture across markets worldwide.
SHAI phase 1

The Symbian Hardware Abstraction Interface (SHAI) makes it cheaper and easier to adapt the Symbian platform to new hardware, both by thinning down the adaptation layer (the code that a hardware vendor must write) and by providing a more consistent and industry-standard set of adaptation interfaces. This lowers the cost of device creation and leaves more energy to be focussed on creating innovative products.

SHAI delivers incrementally up to and including Symbian^5. In Symbian^3 existing adaptation APIs are reviewed and some approved as good enough to become a part of SHAI directly, providing confidence in forward compatibility as SHAI continues to roll out.

Further information: See the Kernel:SHAI page and feature 218.
Multicore (SMP) phase 1

Symmetric multiprocessor (SMP, or "multicore") hardware, based on architectures such as ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, is coming to mobile. With it come the twin promises of more powerful devices and better battery life.

Multicore devices are designed to provide a path to increasing the amount of available processing power in a device without increasing battery consumption. It has been proven in other architectures than ARM that running a number of relatively low-spec cores can provide a similar level of processing power to a single high-spec core but with a greatly reduced energy budget. This opens the way for much more powerful mobile devices that can still live within the battery usage constraints inherent in the mobile world, and of mobile devices similar in processing power to those of today but with markedly better battery life.

Support for SMP delivers incrementally into the Symbian platform across Symbian^3, Symbian^4 and Symbian^5 (see the SMP proposal for further details). The first phase, in Symbian^3, delivers a prototype SMP nano kernel suitable for hardware bring-up and to test the robustness of the rest of the system when running in an SMP environment. In addition the Core OS layer of the platform will achieve "SMP safe" status, having stability in an SMP environment as good as that for a single core environment.

SMP phase 1 is targetted primarily at hardware manufacturers, device creators and middleware and UI package owners.

Further info: See the SMP page, feature 286 and the release plan (the latter for status on "SMP safe" testing).
Writeable data paging

Demand paging is a kernel-level feature focussed on efficient use of memory, allowing multiple applications to run at the same time without driving up the cost of devices by physically adding more (relatively high cost) RAM to the hardware. The demand paging support already present in Symbian^2 allows libraries (such as running applications) to be "paged out" from RAM to (relatively cheap and available) storage memory when they are in the background and not actively running. This "paging out" in turn allows available RAM to be focussed on the actively running applications without having to shut other applications down. From the user's perspective this leads to a much more responsive system when switching between a number of running applications.

Writeable data paging, new in Symbian^3, builds on existing support by allowing the in-memory data associated with applications (and other libraries) to be paged out to storage memory along with the libraries themselves. This improves the level of memory efficiency that demand paging can achieve, effectively freeing up more memory at any given time for actively running applications.

Further info: See the Kernel and Hardware Services package (work complete here as of pdk3.0.b)
Support for hardware acceleration of cryptographic algorithms

The security sub-system in Symbian^3 has been enhanced to allow device creators to integrate hardware acceleration modules to improve performance of cryptographic algorithms. This is particularly valuable in intensive real-time use-cases such as streaming audio or video over a secure link, where bulk data needs to be encrypted and decrypted in real time. Allowing this cryptographic work to be handed off to dedicated hardware frees the main processor for other tasks (for example keeping high bandwidth video streaming super-smooth) and making the device more responsive for users.

Further info: See the OS Security package (work complete here as of pdk3.0.b)
Customise the UI

Any application can integrate support for gestures by taking advantage of the framework and the set of gestures recognised can be customised and extended by device creators.
S^3 for Enterprises
Remote contact look-up

Contacts in Symbian^3 is extended to provide a plug-in framework to allow easy integration of remote contact look-up for a variety of popular protocols. Any plug-ins available on a device will automatically integrate into the Contacts UI, allowing the directory service favoured by a particular enterprise to be easily integrated at run time whilst rolling handsets out to their workforce. Plugins for different protocols (Intellisync, Notes, MFE...) can be contributed or developed on a commercial basis by the parties that require them.

Further information: See the Contacts package and feature 438.
CalDAV support

The Calendar application in Symbian^3 has been enhanced with support for the CalDAV protocol (RFC4791) thanks to a contribution from Sun Microsystems. CalDAV enables a user to access scheduling information on remote servers. This is "more than just synchronization", allowing you to view up-to-the-minute busy/free information for colleagues' calendars and resources also on the server - i.e. full group scheduling with support for multiple calendars. This support will give Symbian^3 devices a new level of interoperability with popular calendaring services.