| By the end of March 2005, shipments of Symbian OS phones exceeded an average of two million per month, and cumulative shipments since Symbian’s formation reached 32 million phones. Also at that time, there were more than 4500 commercially available, third-party applications for Symbian OS phones. Year on year, phone shipments have been virtually doubling – and that trend appears likely to continue, or even increase, for the foreseeable future.
These figures would suggest that Symbian OS is approaching maturity as the preferred operating system for high- and mid-range mobile phones, and that it offers an ideal platform to developers, on which they can create new and imaginative applications.
Symbian OS is a powerful, open operating system, which means that anyone with the right knowledge, skills and tools can create exciting new applications which will run on any Symbian OS phone. However, precisely because of that power and openness, the task of acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills can be a daunting prospect for a newcomer. Symbian Press aims to ease that task by providing a series of informative texts, covering a wide range of Symbian OS topics, at a variety of levels.
This book represents two milestones for Symbian Press: it is our first book to be written specifically for beginners in Symbian OS development, and it is the first Symbian OS C++ text in the series to have been written by an author who has not spent at least part of his working life as a developer at Symbian Ltd.
These two facts are not entirely unrelated; Steve’s background means that he is ideally positioned to understand the problems facing a developer who is approaching Symbian OS for the first time. In consequence, this book provides valuable and practical answers at all stages, from obtaining and setting up a development system to the production of an installable multilingual application. |