The Symbian Foundation talks Release Plans

Over on their Blog, the Symbian Foundation posted about their Release Plans, earlier today.

In the picture, the yellow arrow roughly indicates the time period in which the code for a platform release is available.  The milestones in a platform release are overseen by the Release Council on behalf of the community:

• Prior to functionally complete, the platform grows as new features are added by contributors
• Between functionally complete and hardened the development community focuses on driving up stability of the platform by testing and contributing defect fixes
• After hardened the release enters a more stable phase.  Contributed defect fixes will continue to be incorporated by package owners for around 12 months, but prime focus will be on later releases.

Progress towards both milestones will be governed by contributions from the community.  The intent is to “timebox” each release by fixing the functionally complete date and including only features that deliver in time at a reasonable stability level.  This is the same principle that has worked so well with integrated releases of Symbian OS in recent years.

We learn that Symbian^2, will be based on S60 v5.1 and we can expect devices running Symbian^2 entering the Market towards the end of this year, depending on the integration plans, the level of customisation, and the design choices made by manufacturers. This means Symbian definitely plans to stick with a touch interface and develop it further, even though S60 v5 can apparently be used on non-touch devices too.

Symbian^3 would follow six months later and devices containing it might make an appearance around the middle of 2010.

The feature set for Symbian^2 is already virtually frozen.  Most of the content for Symbian^3 is already agreed, but there’s scope for contributors to make a difference.  The content for releases from Symbian^4 onwards is much more open for debate.

They also talk about the lifecycle of a platform release. Did you know they usually have 5 platforms under engineering development at any one time:

• One release – Symbian^N say (abbreviated to “S^N”) will be in the hardening phase
• Two previous releases will be in the stable phase
• The next release (S^ N+1) will be in feature submission phase
• The one after that (S^ N+2) will be in early builds.

There’s quite a lot of info over on their blog, so do remember to check out their post and drop them a comment.