Andy Moran, head of enterprise at the London-based company, said two of the multimedia APIs come from the Khronos Group, another consortium, this one established in 2000 by a group of companies including 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, NVIDIA, SGI and Sun Microsystems to create open-standard APIs for the authoring and playback of rich media on a variety of platforms and devices.
They are OpenSL ES, a hardware-accelerated audio API tuned for embedded systems and OpenMAX Integration Layer (OMX IL), which provides streaming media codec and application portability. Another, called OpenAL, was originally from Loki Software but is now hosted and developed by Creative Technology. It is another audio API designed to promote efficient rendering of multi-channel 3D positional audio.
As for bearer mobility, Moran explained that this will enable a Symbian phone to hunt for the most cost-effective bearer, i.e. WLAN or 3G, and move the traffic across automatically.
On the processor side, he went on, Symbian will implement the Thumb-2 instruction set into the OS so as to provide enhanced levels of performance, energy efficiency and code density for a wide range of embedded apps running on ARM cores. It enables you to compress more features into less memory, he explained.
Beyond that, he went on, Symbian intends to implement OpenGL ES, another Khronos Group API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics, enabling mobile TV, videoclips on a phone and so on. Moran said this last development was more likely to take place in a two-year timeframe rather than 18 months.
Our View
These plans from Symbian show the consortium paying attention to the direction 3G telephony is going, namely it is growing more in the consumer-focused, multimedia market and less in business smart phones. It’s no coincidence, indeed, that statistics out this week for smart phone market shares show Nokia in the lead, of course, but Sony Ericsson in second place, which it has achieved thanks to its Walkman phones.
