S60 (software Platform)

S60 (software Platform)

The S60 Platform (formerly Series 60 User Interface) is a software platform for mobile phones that runs on Symbian OS. It was created by Nokia (with Sony, as co-creator of the software), who made the platform open source and contributed it to the Symbian Foundation. The first S60 was developed in 2001 and released in 2002 for the Nokia 7650, and the OS platform has since seen 5 updated editions. The S60 has since been replaced for smartphones by Nokia Belle OS, as well as the non-Nokia Windows Phone.

Symbian (all Symbian products) was the most popular smartphone OS in the market back in 2010 with 37.6% of the sector’s total sales and 111.6m handsets sold in 2010. But now with the strong presence of the Android and iOS, the share of Symbian OS has been reduced to an all time low of 6.8%.

S60 consists of a suite of libraries and standard applications, such as telephony, personal information manager (PIM) tools, and Helix-based multimedia players. It is intended to power fully featured modern phones with large colour screens, which are commonly known as smartphones.

The S60 software is a multivendor standard for smartphones that supports application development in Java MIDP, C++, Python and Adobe Flash. Originally, the most distinguishing feature of S60 phones was that they allowed users to install new applications after purchase. Unlike a standard desktop platform, however, the built-in apps are rarely upgraded by the vendor beyond bug fixes. New features are only added to phones while they are being developed rather than after public release. Certain buttons are standardized, such as a menu key, a four way joystick or d-pad, left and right soft keys and a clear key.

S60 is mainly used by Nokia but has also been used by a few other manufacturers, including Lenovo, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Samsung, Sendo, and Siemens Mobile.

In addition to the manufacturers the community includes:

• Software integration companies such as Sasken, Elektrobit, Teleca, Digia, Mobica, Atelier.tm
• Semiconductor companies Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics, Broadcom, Sony, Freescale Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics
• Operators such as Vodafone and Orange who develop and provide S60-based mobile applications and services
• Software developers and independent software vendors (ISVs).