1. The Symbian Operating System
Symbian is an operating system derived from the Epoc operating system. Epoc was developed by Psion for their handhelds in the 80's. Symbian is an evolution designed to be used in mobile phones, and comes to real devices in different flavors.
More precisely, Symbian Inc develops the base operating system and licenses it out to phone manufacturers. Vendors then build a user interface on top of the base operating system. They can also customize (and often do) the operating system for a specific purpose; the bundle of the operating system plus the user interface is shipped, with the hardware to be sold on the market.
Currently the most widespread is the Series60 platform, used by many Nokia phones like the Nokia 6600 and many many other models.
There also exists the UIQ platform, powering the Sony Ericcsson P800/P900/P910i (see below the second image) and the Motorola A1000/A1010.
Also there are other flavors, like the Series80 that powers the Nokia Communicator series (Nokia 9500 and others) and the Series90, used currently only by the Nokia 7710. There are rumors hovewer Series90 will fold in to the Series 60 platform in the foreseeable future.
Note that since there are MANY versions of each combination OS/UI, there is a different SDK for each combination. For example we can enumerate the SDK for Series60 version 6.1, 7,0s, 8.0, 9.0 etc, and the SDK for UIQ version 2.0, 2.1 etc.
You have to build application for specific devices using the appropriate SDK of the correct version of the target phone.
Since our focus is on the Series 60 platform, it is useful to understand which SDKs are available. This page clarifies a lot of things.
Basically we have editions of the SDK, with enhancements, named Feature Pack. The Nokia site enumerates the following:
- SDK for 2nd Edition, FP 3, beta (FP = feature pack)
- SDK for 2nd Edition, FP 2
- SDK for 2nd Edition, FP 1
- SDK for 2nd Edition
- SDK for 1st Edition, FP1
- SDK for 1st Edition
Unfortunately, for each combination of edition and feature pack there are some variants, depending on the target IDE (Microsoft, Borland or CodeWarrior) to be used, so the complete picture is a mess. There is always a Command Line version (not bound to any IDE).
In this tutorial will stick with the plain SDK, NOT the customized version, although I will show you how to use it (the PLAIN version, I repeat) with the C++BuilderX IDE.
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