From Symbian Developer Community

Did you know that the Symbian platform comprises about 33 million lines of code? This makes Symbian one of the largest projects ever to be moved from proprietary code to open source. Now that huge code base is available under the Eclipse Public License, where and how do you start exploring it?

Of course the answer depends on your background and interests. You might have a good idea which bits you're interested in. If that's the case, then this page, which describes the tools we have to help you find what you're looking for and get stuck in, is the ideal starting point. If you have no idea, feel a little overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the platform and don't know where to start, we have a few recommendations.

• If you'd like to learn a little about how the platform is put together, and how to find your way around, here is a video guide to the System Model.
• If you're used to POSIX compliant operating systems, and would like Symbian to feel a little more familiar, P.I.P.S. is a great place to dive in first.
• If you've worked with Symbian before and want to see how one person can contribute a feature that could ship in hundreds of millions of devices, we'd recommend you investigate the CalDav contribution to the Organizer package (there are even suggestions for things that you could add in the same area).
• If cool graphics are your interest, check out the new graphics architecture.

On the other hand, if you think there's a brilliant piece of code or a feature that everyone should know about, why not contribute by telling us all why you think it deserves attention and linking your own "Did you know?" article from here? Similarly if you find something worth sharing with others on your adventures in the Symbian world, write it up and add a link here for others to follow.

Finally, if you are not quite ready to dive into the code yet, here are a few fun facts about the platform to impress people with at parties!

Origin of the name Symbian

The name was chosen from a shortlist supplied by a professional branding agency. The short list was

• Espira
• Nexian
• Orbica
• Paramon
• Symbian
• Zantos
• Zantus

Symbian was chosen from this list, probably by David Potter (The first chairman of Symbian Ltd.)

First Symbian Phone

The first Symbian phone was the Ericsson R380, released in 2000, running version ER5U (Symbian OS version 5, Unicode build).

Device sales

As of February 2010, the number of cumulative shipments of Symbian devices equates to one for every person living in the United States (with some to spare).

(Source: Symbian market sales data, US Census Bureau)

As of February 2010, if every Symbian device shipped was laid end to end, the chain of phones would stretch around the circumference of the earth.

(Source: Symbian market sales data, Wikipedia)

If all the Symbian devices shipped up to February 2010 were laid flat on an average UK Premiership football pitch, it would be filled to a depth of 3.5 metres.

(Source: Symbian market sales data, BBC Sport )

Symbian might just have been the first to put an 'i' in front of Phone

Because Symbian coding convention uses the prefix i for many of its variable names, iPhone has probably been cropping up in the Symbian platform for ten years. If you search our source today^* you'll find it 718 times. We also have 17 instances of iPod. In fact, you can probably find i-anything, even ii. (*Today happened to be 12th January 2010!)

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