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]