The TI Zoom 2 has been chosen by the Symbian Foundation as the reference platform for the Symbian^3 operating system – the phone that will be used as a target for developers upon which all Symbian features must work. It does not, however, look like a phone that all the Symbian users would want to own.
The TI Zoom 2 is not going to win any awards for Best Looking Handset. It is a curious looking, squat device from Texas Instruments, with a keyboard and joystick that looks like someone took a BlackBerry and squashed it vertically. Its got a full QWERTY keyboard, but the screen is too small for the width of the thing – leaving a bezel so thick you could fit a lesser phone within it.
Looking good isn’t the point, though. The TI Zoom 2 merely has to act as the target for the new,open-source Symbian^3 operating system. This is the phone chosen by the Symbian Foundation as the platonic ideal of Symbianness. If your Symbian OS code is going to work anywhere, it has to work here first.
Every two weeks, the Symbian Foundation will make available the latest version of the Symbian^3 PDK (Product Development Kit) as well as precompiled binaries and source code to combine with code from Texas Instruments to make a software ‘image’ that can be flashed onto a TI Zoom 2. The resulting images should boot up the TI Zoom 2 with a working copy of Symbian^3.
Having this reference platform means that anyone working on Symbian^3 will be singing from the same hymn sheet and there will always be a stable platform to compare against wonky code – hopefully leading to easier, more thorough testing and a better product at the end.
Still looks awful, mind.
TBC | £tbc | Symbian Foundation (via Phone Mag)
