Making a mobile OS “open” is one thing, but this is unlike anything we’ve seen to date. The Symbian Foundation — the newly formed group charged with bringing Nokia’s ever-popular OS into the 21st century — needs your help. Finding a way to update that aged UI is a bit trying we presume (though we wouldn’t mind seeing TAT finally give it a shot) so Scott Weiss, the Symbian Foundation’s UI Technology Manager, has officially opened the UI conversation to the world. The newly launched “Symbian UI Brainstorm” blog asks users to email suggestions that will possibly be transformed into sketches and discussed on the blog. Symbian fans and critics alike have become increasingly vocal with regards to the S60 UI so this could be the perfect opportunity to be heard by the one man who actually cares what they have to say. And who knows? Your great idea might become a reality some day — as part of Symbian^7 or ^8, perhaps. Ok Symbian fans, hit the read link and get to work.

[Via IntoMobile]

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Holy. Crap. So, umm, have you been wondering what the Symbian foundation has been up to since revealing the mother of all development schedules? A whole lot, is what it’s been up to. Long story short, the team has cooperated with ST-Ericsson and ARM to build the first working example of multi-core goodness running on production chips with an open OS. Short story long…

Here’s what they slapped together:

• Single chip base band and application processor engine
• HSPA Modem Release7
• ARM® Cortex-A9 MPCore

And here’s what it’s capable of:

• HD 1080p camcorder and video
• Up to 18 Million pixels camera
• ~100 hours audio playback time
• 10 hours HD video playback time
• Simultaneously TV out over HDMI
• Video and Imaging accelerator
• HW accelerated 3D Graphics supporting OpenGL ES2.0
• 2xWVGA (960×854) displays
• Touch UI on 2 displays

Hot damn. We’ll take five. Of course this is just a proof of concept and please, don’t expect first generation Symbian^2 devices to be cooking with all that gas. But it’s all there — today. Right now all this adds up to a synopsis alongside a promo video intending to show potential partners what Symbian is capable of, but for us it means exciting times ahead, people. Exciting times.

[Via IntoMobile]

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It might have taken a while for the Symbian Foundation to get rolling but if its newly-announced development schedule is even close to accurate, play time is most definitely over. Symbian, shall we say, hasn’t exactly been speedy with platform updates in the past. Fast forward to the group’s new schedule seen above and we’re looking at a new platform every six months. Hmm. To start things off, the new platforms now have an agreed naming convention: Symbian^N, where N is the version number. The Symbian Foundation’s David Wood explains:

The simplest way to pronounce “Symbian^2″ is “Symbian two”… You can also view the ‘^’ as an upside down ‘v’. So we’re telling the world that, in a way, we are intending to turn versioning upside down – by opening up our roadmap discussions to the entire community.

Symbian^2 — based on S60 5th Edition — will be feature-complete by the middle of this year and according to the Foundation, we could see devices running ^2 by the end of the year. Next up is Symbian^3 which is already mapped out for the most part and could reach the market by the middle of 2010. Symbian^4 is currently in the mapping phase and is scheduled for hardening before 2010 is through. Ambitious, aggressive and damn near crazy… We like it.

[Via Phone Scoop]

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