Symbian

Symbian

Developer	Accenture Nokia Symbian Foundation Symbian Ltd. Psion
Source model	Proprietary software, formerly Free software (2010–11)
Initial release	EPOC32 R1 (5 June 1997)
Latest release	Belle Feature Pack 2 (2 October 2012)
Supported platforms	ARM, x86, Super-H
Kernel type	Microkernel (EKA)
Preceded by	EPOC16 (SIBO)

Symbian was a mobile operating system developed by Psion in 1997 as the successor to EPOC16 and was widely used in the 2000s for various portable communication devices such as PDAs, Subnotebooks and Mobile phones.

Symbian began development in November 1994 by a small team led by a few Psion Software employees. The project was dominated by a few key individuals and largely divided among the teams they gathered around them. Colly Myers was responsible for the core (EKA) and core layers, Charles Davies for the middleware, and David Wood for the initial user interface (Eikon UI) developed for Symbian.

The system was released on 5 June 1997, pre-installed with the Psion Series 5. In June 1998, Symbian Ltd. was established as a major joint venture between Psion and phone manufacturers Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia. (It would be replaced by the Symbian Foundation in 2008.)

Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, including Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Fujitsu, and Sharp. 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.

The Nokia 808 PureView officially became Nokia's last Symbian smartphone. However, NTTDoCoMo continued to offer new OPP(S) and MOAP(S)-based models in Japan until the end of 2014. The last phones to run Symbian included Fujitsu's F-07F, F-08F, and F-01G and Sharp's SH-07F released in 2014. Some of these latter Japanese models continued to be sold in the Japanese market until the end of 2016.

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