Over the last couple of years Symbian, the operating system that's been a huge number of smartphones, has been in transition. No longer a proprietary system, it's made the move to a community-based open source project. According to their site

The Symbian Foundation platform will be available to members under a royalty-free license from this non-profit foundation. The Symbian Foundation will provide, manage and unify the platform for its members. Also, it will commit to moving the platform to open source by 2010, under the Eclipse Public License. This will make the platform code available to all for free, bringing additional innovation to the platform and engaging even a broader community in future developments.

Given the sort of ingenuity commonly seen in the open source community I'd not be surprised to see a version of Symbian for netbooks. With netbook hardware architectures now centred on the Intel Atom platform, despite what ARM expects, a version of the Symbian OS could be created that supports a broad range of netbooks. Sure, there's a need for drivers to support Bluetooth, WiFi, cameras and other integrated peripherals but these devices have been long supported in Nokia and Sony Ericsson smartphones.

Innovations like this are incredibly important for the development of a platform like netbooks. Giving the market greater choice will force the various Linux programs and Microsoft to keep improving their software. And that's a good thing.

By Anthony Caruana