Symbian gets Posix compatibility

Symbian phones like Nokia's E61 could gain more applications

Symbian is to add support for Posix libraries to its smartphone platform, a move that will help developers port existing business applications to run on Symbian-based phone handsets, the company said.

Portable operating system interface (Posix) is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) specified by the IEEE and originally designed for Unix, but now widely supported by other operating systems, such as Windows.

PIPS, which stands for ‘PIPS is Posix on Symbian OS’, will make it easier to translate desktop projects and middleware to run on Symbian devices. This is expected to broaden the platform’s enterprise application support and attract more developers.

“We’re trying to attract more people to the platform,” said Symbian product manager Erik Jacobson. He added that phones are getting more powerful – similar in capability to desktops a few years back – and that now was the right time to try and mobilise applications that might otherwise prove too costly to rebuild from the ground up for Symbian handsets.

The kind of code that might be ported includes database components and web servers, according to Jacobson. “Apache could probably be ported right now, but we want to make it as frictionless as possible,” he said.

Support will take the shape of an update to Symbian OS 9.1, to be made available to download in mid-February, about the same time as the 3GSM World Congress and Exhibition takes place. The update will be integrated into future handsets from Symbian licensees, with models featuring this support expected before the end of 2007.

PIPS will not make Symbian OS fully Posix-compliant because this would add considerable bloat to the platform, Jacobson said, but the update implements the APIs relevant to mobile applications.

“It’s about reducing the amount of effort [for developers]. If you already have an application, you don’t want to re-write it,” he said. The aim is for application code to need little more than a re-compile and a few tweaks to port it to Symbian OS.