Symbian

Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for feature phones and smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants on June 5, 1997 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS is a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and was mostly used on ARM processors, although an x86 port existed. A modified version of Symbian for x86 was used on the Fujitsu LOOX F-07C where it was dual booted with Windows 7. Symbian was used primarily by Nokia, and in select models of Samsung, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson devices. It was also prevalent in Japan, used by brands including Fujitsu, Sharp and Mitsubishi. As a pioneer that established the smartphone industry, it was the most popular smartphone OS on a worldwide average until the end of 2010, at a time when smartphones were in limited use, when it was overtaken by iOS and Android. It was notably less popular in North America in comparison to Windows Mobile and Pocket PC platforms. The Symbian OS platform is formed of two components: one being the microkernel-based operating system with its associated libraries, and the other being the user interface (as middleware), which provides the graphical shell atop the OS. The most prominent user interface was the S60 (formerly Series 60) platform built by Nokia, first released in 2002 and powering most Nokia Symbian devices. UIQ was a competing user interface mostly used by Motorola and Sony Ericsson that focused on pen-based devices, rather than a traditional keyboard interface from S60. Another interface was the MOAP(S) platform from carrier NTT DoCoMo in the Japanese market. Applications for these different interfaces were not compatible with each other, despite each being built atop Symbian OS. Nokia became the largest shareholder of Symbian Ltd. in 2004 and...