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back to article Symbian balances on an Atom

Some chaps at Symbian with way too much time on their hands have compiled the current version of the OS onto an Intel Atom processor - proving that you don't have to follow the ARM road to Symbian nirvana. The chaps concerned work for "S60 in Symbian Customer Operations" and did the port to see if it would work, and if anyone …

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  1. Mark Daniels
    Thumb Up

    A giant....

    .... 5MX!

    Brill!!!!!!

    P.

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  2. Ian Michael Gumby

    Whats the relative difference in horsepower?

    Ok,

    So how much more power is in an atom over the chips currently in cell phones today?

    I can see a convergence of net books and higher end cell phones today.

    Sorry that this is a lame comment. I'm trying to gauge the impact of this port in terms of more powerful portable devices that can do wifi/wimax/cell voice/video communications.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    Nothing new

    Symbian have a long hisory of making their OS 'available' for non-ARM chips, including Texas Instruments platforms.

    This is just one of a long line of alternative processors that Symbian has been available for, and like them, it remains to be seen if any actual products appear. With Nokia wanting to make their own netbook, is it any more likely that we'll see Symbian devices with Atom chips?

    Anything atom can do, Arm can do better, but a big corp like Nokia may prefer to have a catchy brandname to tout on their netbook than better performance for their ignorant customers.

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  4. Andrew Moore
    Coat

    WOW!!!

    Symbian running on a NetBook- Who'd have thought such a thing!!!

    Oh yeah- Psion...

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  5. Chris
    Thumb Up

    new?

    symbian / epoc was originally written for x86 then ported to arm. Additionally the dev environment is wintel.

    Still this is pretty cool news.

    Posted from my N95 :)

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Ten years wasted development

    After several years my wife's just asked me to get her ten year old Psion fixed as no phone or portable has been able to match its usability.

    My seven year old saw it and went "Wow. Can I have one of those."

    You shouldn't have to ask what's in the pocket.

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  7. dave lawless
    Boffin

    because no-one runs Symbian on their Nokia

    > End users tend to choose whatever they already know, so leaving the decision up to them means a default victory for Redmond

    Those pesky Nokia handsets add up to quite a lot

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  8. Charles Manning

    Atom is a bad idea

    Familiarity for current netbook providers is exactly the wrong idea. There is absolutely no point in encouraging the status quo.

    Atom + PCI gives you huge power consumption which leads to massively overweight, over cost and pathetic laptots.

    Want something that is light, cheap, and has reasonable battery life? Gotta go with ARM.

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