Symbian spawns SYMBEOSE embedded OS project for cloud-computing & more

Symbian continues to develop in unforeseen ways, and after Nokia confirmed it would no longer be bothering with its Symbian^3/^4 nomenclature, the Symbian Foundation has announced a new SYMBEOSE project.  Standing for "Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe", SYMBEOSE is the result of a €22m European investment and intends to put the platform onto embedded devices, internet-connected gadgets and cloud-computing tech.

"The SYMBEOSE initiative will develop new core platform capabilities, providing the best possible levels of power efficiency and improving Symbian's current, market-leading offering in this area. This will be achieved by delivering fresh optimizations which harness the rapidly developing area of multi-core processing used in conjunction with new techniques in Asymmetrical Multiprocessing" Symbian Foundation

"All mobile, Internet-connected devices share a number of common requirements on their underlying software system" the Foundation suggests, which it believes are best served by Symbian's relatively frugal abilities.  Part of the focus moving forward will be  in "improving platform efficiency and the performance of cloud-based services" and refining Symbian to suit.

It doesn't mean the end of Symbian or the OS on mobile phones, but it could give developers coding for the platform a much broader portfolio of devices on which their apps might run.  The SYMBEOSE project is being led by a consortium of mobile device manufacturers, hardware and service integration professional services, major consumer electronics companies, mobile network operators, application developers, universities and research institutions.