Smartphones are poised to dramatically change the worlds of mobile communications and mobile computing. One company sits at the heart of this revolution: Symbian, the provider of Symbian OS, the industry-standard operating system for smartphones. Hundreds of partner companies and many thousands of independent developers are busily creating smartphone products to take advantage of the power of Symbian OS and the opportunities it offers.

Smartphones are mobile portals into the ever-expanding, ever-more-important digital universe. As with any revolutionary new technology, Symbian OS poses challenges to software developers at a management as well as a technical level. This is the first book to address the wider set of skills and thought processes necessary to successfully complete smartphone development projects.

As a co-founder of Symbian and former executive of Psion Software, David Wood has been actively involved in well over 100 smartphone development projects worldwide. Over the time spent on these projects, he has come to understand the key issues which determine the difference between successful and unsuccessful projects for Symbian OS. This book highlights and explains:

• How to tame the awesome inner complexity of smartphone technology
• Optimal project team organisation, combining agility and reliability
• The design and the philosophy behind key features of Symbian OS
• The potential trouble spots of smartphone integration, testing, and optimisation
• How to receive the full benefit of the diverse skills in the extensive Symbian partner ecosystem
• The methods that are most likely to deliver commercial success when using Symbian OS
• The wider significance of Symbian OS skills and expertise in the evolving mobile marketplace
• The particular importance of software leaders in bringing breakthrough smartphone products to the market.

The latest versions of Symbian OS are based upon Symbian's new real-time kernel. This kernel is designed to make phone-related development easier: base-porting will be easier, device driver development will be easier, software development will be easier.
Symbian OS Internals is a detailed exposition on the new real-time kernel, providing the reader with the insights of the software engineers who designed and wrote it. In the main it is an explanatory text which seeks to describe the functioning of the kernel, and, where relevant, to indicate key differences from its predecessor.

This book is invaluable for:

• Those who are involved in porting Symbian OS. This book is not a base-porting manual, since this is already provided by Symbian; but it benefits the base-porting engineer by giving him or her a more solid understanding of the OS being ported.
• Those writing device drivers. This book provides an in-depth explanation of how Symbian OS drivers work. Device drivers have changed considerably with the introduction of a single code, so this helps fill the knowledge gap for those converting them to the new kernel.
• Those who wish to know how the Symbian OS kernel works. This book provides a detailed commentary on the internals of Symbian OS, providing information for the varied needs of readers, helping: students studying real-time operating systems, middleware programmers to understand the behavior of underlying systems, systems engineers to understand how Symbian OS compares to other similar operating systems, and, for those designing for high performance, how to achieve it.

Smartphone Operating System Concepts with Symbian OS is a tutorial that uses Symbian OS as a vehicle to discuss operating system concepts as they are applied to mobile devices. It is written in an academic style and includes exercises that can be performed in the context of laboratory activities or as experimental assignments; thus making the book ideal teaching material for educational institutions and extremely valuable to both teachers and students.

In addition to presenting and discussing operating system concepts, this book also includes exercises that compare and contrast Symbian OS, Unix/Linux and Microsoft Windows.

Readers will be taught Symbian OS concepts so that they can start developing applications for the new mass-market for smartphones.

Programming PC Connectivity Applications for Symbian OS is designed to enable Symbian OS applications to be integrated with desktop PCs, and for mobility to be added to Windows PC applications by integrating them with Symbian OS smartphones. It will help you to create PC connectivity applications, based on standard services and APIs, purely by programming on the PC and also to create more specialized applications that involve programming on the Symbian OS smartphone as well as on the PC.
This book will teach readers how to improve Symbian OS applications' usability by integrating them with a PC.  For instance, applications could support a user interface on the PC when the Symbian OS smartphone is connected, or applications could store or archive data on the PC. Alternatively readers could use this book to improve Windows PC applications by integrating them with Symbian OS smartphones. This has been considered difficult and expensive, but, with the information in this book, it can be straightforward. You may be surprised at the quality of integration you can achieve just by creating PC software - for example, you could manage media files such as image, audio and video files just by using the APIs described in Chapters 4 and 5. If your application is more specialized then a small amount of Symbian OS programming may give you a unique service that increases its attractiveness (and therefore its sales).

All the examples are of stand-alone PC connectivity applications, but this is by no means the only way to create PC connectivity applications. This book also shows you how to create:

• a file browser that will provide a convenient user interface to the filing system on Symbian OS smartphones
• an application to read SMS messages on the smartphone and to send such messages by means of the smartphone
• applications to directly read and modify the Contacts and Agenda data on the smartphone

If you are an enterprise or corporate developer this book is also aimed at you. Symbian OS provides a selection of methods to connect a smartphone to a server, of which PC connectivity is one of the cheapest and fastest.