IN DEPTH Symbian OS

The Symbian operating system had a lot going for it, and even dabbled with open source, so why did it fail? Mike Bedford investigates.

This part of our computing heritage may now be largely forgotten but, from the mid-’80s, the PDA, or personal digital assistant, had an enthusiastic following.

Often thought of as the digital equivalent of the Filofax – a leather-bound loose-leaf paper organiser – these products would be many people’s first foray into computing on the move. Their place in history is hardly surprising, given the alternatives available at the time.

After all, these were the very early days for laptops, which were bulky and heavy, and had multi-thousandpound price tags. Smartphones, on the other hand, were still quite some way off.

The first ever PDA, produced by British company Psion, was the Organiser. It appeared in 1984 and had a tiny one-line, text-only monochrome LCD display, and a 36-key keyboard. It provided an electronic diary, searchable address database, calculator and clock. Other applications, including a programming language, were provided as add-on read-only memory modules called datapaks. This handheld device cost £99, many times less than the embryonic laptops of the time. The Organiser was followed by the Psion Series 3, Series 5 and Series 7, which all looked like diminutive laptops. Indeed, they were commonly referred to as palmtops. Most of these Psion devices used a proprietary operating system called EPOC. The name came from the word epoch, to suggest it was the start of a new era. Not surprisingly for that era, Symbian, as EPOC was later called, was closed source. However, just over 15 years ago, it became an open source OS. This was also around the time that Android was emerging from the shadows. And, as we’ll see later, this was ultimately one of the causes of Symbian’s demise. But there’s a cautionary tale here, because the story of Symbian shows that it would be wrong to always take the view ‘once open source, always open source’. Intrigued? Well, do read on, and all will be revealed.

The beginning of time…

To go back to Symbian’s roots, we need to delve into EPOC. Developed by Psion and released in 1989, it first appeared in the company’s MC 200 and MC 400 products, which were laptops, rather than the company’s more familiar PDAs. This 16-bit OS was designed for Intel x86 compatible processors, and it also ran on Psion’s first palmtop PDA, the Series 3. But things were changing, and this brings us to Symbian.

Following the huge success of the Series 3 – which sold 1.5 million units – Psion started its migration to 32-bit computing with the Series 5, which launched in 1997. But while PC manufacturers tended to stick with the x86 architecture when they moved to 32 bits, Psion took a different approach. Its processor of choice was an ARM7 variant, a move that predated the introduction of ARM chips into smartphones, in which that architecture is now dominant.