Single core processor development drives Symbian OS into mass market

The Symbian Smartphone Show, London, UK, October 11th 2005 - At The Smartphone Show today Symbian Limited unveiled the Symbian OS™ Real Time Compatibility Layer (RTCL).  This unique technology further enhances Symbian OS's suitability as a platform for the development of lower cost, higher volume, mid-tier phones by reducing build and development costs for phones based on Symbian OS.

The Symbian OS RTCL enables proprietary signalling stacks to run on Symbian OS.  Smartphone and advanced phones are usually based on designs that use two processors, one processor to run the GSM / EDGE / UMTS signalling stack, and a second processor to run Symbian OS.  By using Symbian OS RTCL to host the signalling stack, handset makers can seamlessly migrate from two processors to a single processor architecture while still benefiting from the advanced features and high performance of Symbian OS.  Because Symbian OS can be run on lower cost hardware platforms traditionally aimed at high volume feature phone and voice-only phone markets, this development provides handset makers with significantly lower phone build and development costs.

The Symbian OS RTCL provides API-level compatibility with leading RTOSs, enabling code to be ported with a simple recompilation.  Simplifying migration to Symbian OS still further, existing RTOS toolchain and binary formats can be preserved, avoiding the need to fix legacy problems and so further reducing the cost to handset manufacturers of developing mass market phones based on Symbian OS.

As part of the RTCL testing process, Symbian and a leading stack vendor have successfully made both voice calls and run GPRS data on Symbian OS.  The Real Time Compatibility Layer exploits the advanced real-time capabilities of Symbian OS's real-time kernel architecture - introduced in Symbian OS v8 - to enable Symbian OS to host the signalling stack and meet its real-time processing requirements.  Symbian will be making the RTCL available to Symbian OS in future releases of Symbian OS.

Symbian
"The Symbian OS Real Time Compatibility Layer makes it easier for handset manufacturers to take advantage of Symbian's real time kernel and build Symbian OS smartphones using the same lower cost single processor hardware platforms that are used to build midrange phones," said Charles Davies, CTO, Symbian Limited. "This will help drive Symbian OS into higher volume segments." 

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About Symbian Ltd

Symbian is a software licensing company that develops and licenses Symbian OS™, the global open industry standard operating system for advanced, data-enabled mobile phones.

Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world's leading handset manufacturers and has built close co-operative business relationships with leading companies across the mobile industry.  In the first half of 2005, more than 14.5 million Symbian OS-based mobile phones were sold worldwide to over 200 network operators, taking the installed base of Symbian OS phones to almost 40 million.

Symbian has its headquarters in London, United Kingdom with offices in the United States, Europe (Cambridge, UK and Ronneby, Sweden (UIQ Technology AB), Israel and Asia (Bangalore, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo).

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