Symbian on the rise: open platform drives innovation. (Operating Systems).

Thanks to some new devices on the market, not to mention Sendo's high-profile defection away from Microsoft, the Symbian operating system has been in the news a lot lately. What's the story behind the system, and what does it have to offer developers, end users, and the market in general?

Symbian, Ltd. (www.symbian.com) was founded in 1998 by Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and Psion, using Psion's EPOC OS as a starting point for its new system. David Wood, Symbian's executive vice president, explains that the aim of the founders was to create a standard operating system for advanced mobile phones. "It was getting harder and harder to use the existing proprietary operating systems to quickly and inexpensively come out with new technologies," he says.

By 1998, Wood says, it was already abundantly clear that operating systems of the time were being pushed to their limits. "Any given operating system is designed to cope with a certain amount of complexity," he says. "As more and more features are added in beyond the original voice capabilities, it becomes increasingly difficult to do that smoothly without having to do major surgery on the software system."

Key to the concept behind Symbian was the idea of an open platform, of encouraging developers to build software for Symbian phones in the same way that had driven the sales of PCs. "The idea was that third-party writers would create applications that could be guaranteed on all the phones produced for this operating system--regardless of which manufacturer had created it," Wood says.

As a company created by the major phone manufacturers, Symbian benefits greatly from those manufacturers' insights into what's needed in the phone market. "We've seen in practical terms where the operating system has needed a refinement in real phone projects," Wood says. "So it is uniquely suited for the needs of …