Symbian is a OS for mobile devices.Well everybody knows that, then what is this series 60 v2 and v3 and then they call feature pack.What exactly are these?.To know what they are we need to have a look at a bit of history.
Symbian Ltd is the original owner of Symbian OS , Symbian is currently owned by Nokia (47.9%), Ericsson (15.6%), Sony Ericsson (13.1%), Panasonic (10.5%), Siemens AG (8.4%) and Samsung (4.5%).
That time the UI was of different variants, It was fragmented between Nokia and Sony ericsson. Development of different UIs was made generic with a “reference design strategy” for either ‘smartphone’ or ‘communicator’ devices, subdivided further into keyboard- or tablet-based designs. Two reference UIs (DFRDs) were shipped – Quartz and Crystal. The former was merged with Ericsson’s ‘Ronneby’ design and became the basis for the UIQ interface, the latter reached the market as the Nokia Series 80 UI.
Later UIs were Sapphire,Ruby and Emerald. But in end it was Crystal for Nokia and Quartz for Sony Ericsson. By 2002 Symbian stopped development of UI and started giving its OS without UI. The UI development was taken by Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Whereas the Core OS is same for both companies UI’s differ. Nokia went on its development of Series 60 whereas Sony Ericsson came out with UIQ. Till this day this is the norm with both these companies, and even others like Motorola use either one of these UI’s.
Current major version of Symbian core is 9.1 and Nokia’s s60 v3 uses this version.Sony ericsson devices M600 and W950 uses this core. The Symbian 9.1 was a major upgrade from symbian 8.0 with more security and other features.
There have been three releases of Nokia S60: “Series 60” (2001), “Series 60 Second Edition” (2004) and “Series 60 3rd Edition” (2005). The third version is not compatible with earlier two versions and is based on Symbian 9.1.
2nd edition phones were the popular Nokia 3230,Nokia 6085,N70,N90,N72.
3rd edition phones include N73,N93,N95(with feature pack),E61i.
Nokia is planning to bring out the Series 60 v5 (they are skipping on v4 as 4 denotes death in Asia.. Im also from Asia but never knew this) in 2008, with support for touch screen much like iphone. But the only touch screen phone available currently from Nokia is 6708, it uses UIQ(sonyericsson’s) .
Nokia also has S40, the main differentiating factor being the S40 is not multitasking. You cant open more than a single application. Nokia 5300 is latest addition in S40.
S80 is the communicator series with Nokia 9300 and Nokia 9500. S90 being the N7700 or the new N770. S90,S80 and S40 are not compatible with S60.
S60 is also licensed and used by Samsung,LG,Lenova and Panasonic.UIQ is used by Motorola and others. Symbian covers almost 60+% of Smartphone market with Windows Mobile at 15% and Windows CE and RIM devices at 10%.