The newly created Symbian Foundation which is open-sourcing the Symbian mobile operating system has announced the release plan for the platform.
Symbian^2, which is based on Symbian S60 5.1 will be functionally complete by mid-2009 and hardened for incorporation into new phones possibly by the end of 2009. By that time Symbian^3 will be functionally complete and set for release on new phones by the middle of 2010.
The release schedule will continue in this way with two platform releases each year, 6 months apart. After each platform is functionally complete, developers have six months to contribute bug fixes and get the new OS stable.
Within the Symbian Foundation, typically 5 OS’s will be in development at one time according to the following roadmap:
- One release – Symbian^N say (abbreviated to “S^N”) will be in the hardening phase
- Two previous releases will be in the stable phase
- The next release (S^ N+1) will be in feature submission phase
- The one after that (S^ N+2) will be in early builds.
Now we just have to wait for the S^2 OS to actually be released!
