Today at CTIA, Symbian is announcing version 9.5 of its operating system. The new version delivers improved performance including lower memory and processor requirements, more multimedia features including support for advanced camera features, better PC connectivity, support for DVB-H and ISDB-T Mobile TV standards and improved network and connection management features. Symbian 9.5 is fully backwardly compatible with all member of the Symbian 9.x family. Read here for more.
Symbian OS 9.5 Announced
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I love how it provides better performance with lower requirements. Why can’t mainstream operating systems do that?
It was called BeOS…
Nah, what you meant to say was AmigaOS/MorphOS/AROS. 😛
Maybe because mainstream operative systems are already optimized?
One of the big “innovations” in Symbian 9.5 that improves performance so much is demand paging. That’s right, demand paging. Apparently, until 9.5 Symbian just loaded the whole executables in memory, then started executing it. Now with 9.5 Symbian will be doing what those inefficient “mainstream operative systems” have been doing for decades: loading only the parts of the program that the program actually needs. This improves software startup and memory requeriments by a lot, and makes possible smarter memory managing – if you’re low on memory, you can just drop the parts of memory you think aren’t needed, demand paging will load it again if needed.
Reading about thse big innovations, I’m not surprised there’s so many people getting interested in linux and WIndows CE for mobile devices.
Edited 2007-03-27 11:05
It’s worth pointing out that Symbian OS (and I assume other OSs designed for embedded applications) will quite happily execute programs directly from the ROM, i.e. eXecute In Place (XIP). As a result it’s not been as necessary for Symbian OS to be clever about the parts of the executable that it loads as it doesn’t need to load it into memory anyway.
This of course isn’t true for user-installed applications though so there is still some advantage to the new demand paging functionality.
It’s worth pointing out that Symbian OS (and I assume other OSs designed for embedded applications) will quite happily execute programs directly from the ROM, i.e. eXecute In Place (XIP).
Yeah. But then, Linux has had XIP support since 2.6.13 (1,5 years ago), and also it supports demand paging from its first days. It still looks to me that Symbian has specialized in a very thin segment of the market, and now that mobile phones are becoming more and more and more like real computers, the general-purpose operative systems are starting to show the advantage of being “general-purpose”
One of the big “innovations” in Symbian 9.5 that improves performance so much is demand paging. That’s right, demand paging. Apparently, until 9.5 Symbian just loaded the whole executables in memory, then started executing it.
Paging requires a memory management unit, Symbian runs on many processors which don’t have these, thus demand paging would have been a completely useless feature to add before now.
For example the current SonyEricsson line that is using 9.1 oand 9.2, would be great if this new 9.5 version would be available as an upgrade for all p990i, m600i and w950 users.
That is exactly what I was thinking. Sony should do this considering how half baked the firmware for the P990i was when it was first released.
Symbian has gone the way of desktop OSes.
Even with faster CPUs, applications run slower than ever. Boot times on latest models are over 90 seconds.
The development process is fraught with pitfalls, documentation doesn’t delve into details w.r.t building real apps.
The Symbian concept -micro kernel- is great, but its recent implementers seem to have added layer after layer, producing the bloat we are seeing.