1 Smartphones and Symbian OS
1 Smartphones and Symbian OS Symbian OS is a full-featured, open, mobile operating system that powers many of today’s smartphones. As these smartphones become more pow- erful and popular, the demand for smartphone software has grown. Symbian smartphones are shipped with a variety of useful pre-loaded and targeted applications, which are selected by each phone’s manu- facturer. Today, the average Symbian smartphone ships with over 30 pieces of third-party software pre-installed. However, the exciting aspect of Symbian smartphones is that they are ‘open’, meaning that users can further customize their phone experience by downloading, installing, and uninstalling applications written by third-party developers (or by the users themselves). Users can download applications from a PC to the smartphone through a link such as USB, or Bluetooth technology, or over-the-air via the Internet. With the largest installed base of smartphones worldwide, Symbian OS offers a great opportunity for software developers to establish them- selves in the mobile market by creating novel and exciting software for the growing mass of smartphone users around the world. There is a growing list of Symbian applications available as freeware or as paid downloads on numerous Internet sites (http://www.handango.com and http://www.epocware.com are good examples). They range from pro- ductivity, entertainment, navigation, multimedia, and communications software to programs that can count fast food calories, improve your golfCOPYRIGHTED swing, keep diaries, and calculate MATERIAL foreign currency exchange. And business opportunities aside, sometimes it’s just plain fun writing your own code to run on your own smartphone.
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