Symbian grew out of Psion’s EPOC32 and became a company of its own in June 1998, when Psion joined Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia as Symbian Ltd. It was a smartphone operating system built mostly for ARM handsets: a microkernel OS plus a separate user interface. The first open Symbian phone was the Nokia 9210 Communicator in June 2001. Nokia’s S60 interface, first shipped on the Nokia 7650 in 2002, became the face most people knew.
The library that still matters to players sat on those phones. Nokia’s N-Gage (2003) ran S60 on Symbian OS 6.1 and carried titles such as Pathway to Glory, Tomb Raider, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Later S60 devices added Asphalt Urban GT, The Sims 2, and a long tail of carrier and N-Gage 2.0 games. Native C++ apps sat beside J2ME titles, so one handset could feel like both a phone and a handheld.
By November 2006 the hundred-millionth Symbian smartphone had shipped; by July 2009 the installed base passed 250 million. In 2006 it held about 67% of the global smartphone market. Nokia bought Symbian Ltd. in 2008, opened much of the code through the Symbian Foundation, then switched its flagship line to Windows Phone in 2011. The last Nokia Symbian phone was the 808 PureView in 2012. It remains the OS that made smartphones ordinary—and the one EKA2L1 still keeps playable.
Symbian Platform Technical Overview
| Component | Specification / Description |
|---|---|
| Developer | Symbian Ltd.; later Nokia and the Symbian Foundation |
| Origin | Psion EPOC32 (1997); Symbian Ltd. formed June 1998 |
| First open phone | Nokia 9210 Communicator (June 2001) |
| Key user interfaces | S60 (Nokia, 2002–), UIQ, MOAP(S) / Japan |
| Typical CPU | ARM |
| Kernel | EKA1; EKA2 from Symbian OS 9.x |
| Native language | Symbian C++; later Qt |
| Other runtimes | J2ME / Java ME on many handsets |
| Peak installed base | 100 million phones by Nov 2006; 250 million+ by July 2009 |
| Last Nokia device | Nokia 808 PureView (2012) |