The Symbian Foundation has outlined a timeframe for rollout of the new open source version of the Symbian platform and is expecting the first devices based on the platform to launch before year-end. Writing on the Foundation’s official blog, Symbian’s executive VP for research, David Wood, said that the first release – known as Symbian^2 – would be “functionally complete” by the middle of the year and “hardened” by year-end, paving the way for the first devices. Symbian^2 is based on the S60 5.1 platform. The plan is for two platform releases a year with Symbian^3 following on six months later – reaching a functionally complete state at the end of this year, and hardened by the middle of 2010. Wood wrote that there would typically be five platforms under engineering development at any one time, at various stages of development. He added that the feature set for Symbian^2 is already “virtually frozen,” but invited developers to contribute to Symbian^3 and Symbian^4.

The Symbian Foundation was created last year when Nokia acquired Symbian Limited and repositioned it as an open source platform that will be offered to Foundation members under a royalty-free license. The platform will compete with rival open source mobile platforms such as Google’s Android. However, Symbian’s reliance to date on Nokia devices for market-share has meant it has lost ground over rivals recently. According to Gartner figures last week, Symbian’s share of the smartphone operating system market fell to 47.1 percent in fourth-quarter 2008, down from 62.3 percent a year earlier.