Symbian: We're Going To Release A New Mobile Platform Every Six Months

The Symbian Foundation recently shared some huge news about how it will operate moving forward. A key part of its revised strategy is to release new versions of its mobile platform each six months, which will enable it to keep up with the competition better.According to the Symbian Blog, there's a lot of mobile software under development. David Wood notes in a recent post that Symbian is working on up to five different versions of Symbian concurrently.

Here's how it will shake out. Gone is the 9.x nomenclature of Symbian releases. Wood explains that the next version of Symbian will be called Symbian^2, which is based on S60 5.1. The Symbian Foundation expects to have this version "functionally complete" by the middle of 2009, and "hardened" by the end of 2009.

Before versions are functionally complete, the platform grows as new features are added by Symbian Foundation contributors. Once complete, but before hardened, the development community will focus on stabilizing the platform. Once hardened, releases are considered stable.

In case you're wondering, "hardened" means that not only will the platform be stable, but it will also be available on hardware. So, that means we can expect to see Symbian^2 devices in the market by the end of this year.

Each successive version will receive bug fixes for about a year following release. Rather than focus on fixing and shoring up old releases with new features, however, Symbian will focus most of its efforts on getting the next version of Symbian functionally complete and hardened.

Symbian^3 will be complete by the end of 2009 and hardened by the middle of 2010. Symbian^4 will be complete by the middle of 2010 and hardened by the end of 2010, and so on. In other words, Symbian is focusing on getting a new version of its mobile platform out in the world every six months.

I must say, this is exactly what Symbian needs to do right now. It's almost as if Symbian anticipated my post from earlier today...