Technology has undergone several changes within last decade. After the ubiquitous mobile phones came the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), which combined your mobile phone with computing, telephone/fax, Internet and networking features. PDA is your smart cell phone from where you can fax, browse Internet and organize your personal calendar. PDAs and mobile phones are now combined into smartphones. But, now the fight has begun between the operating systems. PDAs are started with Palm OS, which has good features and is easy to use. Another Operating system Symbian OS then came into being, which is not only better than Palm OS but also has numerous unique features.

Here started the battle between the giants of PDA operating systems. Palm OS, being the ancestor operating system shared the maximum chunk of business which was suddenly marred by a debutant, Symbian OS. This was more than a nightmare for the Palm OS system as more and more customers had started switching over to Symbian OS. Though there are various other operating systems also, but the major pie is shared between Palm OS and Symbian OS. Microsoft’s Smartphone is also participating in this PDA race, but its response is not up to the mark. The reason is quite simple, as this Smartphone seems more like a work in progress than a stable operating system.

Today most of the telephone brands like Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung and Sony are leaning towards the Symbian OS. Palm OS doesn’t show any feature which could match the advanced technology used by Symbian OS. Unless you are a person who is a brand loyal, it’s obvious to choose Symbian OS over Palm OS. Ironically, the truth is that, developers find Symbian OS more mature and marketable than Palm OS. For a Palm OS developer making a switch to Symbian isn’t that easy. Though the interfaces, the ARM processor and the structures are similar in both the operating systems but there are some huge differences between their development models.

Simply Symbian

Symbian OS is a descendant of Psion’s EPOC and it runs only on ARM processors. You can find a variety of tools in Symbian. It has a multi-threaded, object approach. Learning the Symbian system might take substantial amount of time. This system is currently owned by several giants of mobile industry like Ericsson, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, Siemens AG and Sony Ericsson. Symbian is now becoming the most preferred operating system leaving Palm behind.

Though this system can be called matured and marketable but there are few quirks in Symbian. One of the major advantages of Symbian OS, as a handheld device, is the strong emphasis on memory conservancy. Symbian provides Cleanup stack tool and descriptors tool which help you to keep your memory usage low and lessen your memory leaks. You can also conserve the disk space of Symbian OS. Among the various advantages of Symbian is the ability to stretch the battery life of the system.

But, the stand out quality of Symbian is the descriptors which are used for text and binary data instead of regular C strings. This operating system also uses an active scheduler for the active multitasking. Other operating systems use threads to complete the task whereas Symbian OS, through its active object feature, uses active scheduler to achieve multitasking results. Active scheduler gives you more ease of use than the OS threads.

System Configurations

Besides all the usability considerations, there are some fundamental system differences between Symbian OS and Palm OS. Both the systems support C++ and Java as their primary development language. You can have both the systems in your smart phones or mobile phones with limited memory and disk space. Because of its use in mobile devices you can save power to the lowest possible level. Both the systems use ARM processor, though the older version of Palm OS used to target the Motorola DragonBall family. Your interface in both the systems include GUI with check box, radio button, list and scroll bar. Talking about the language, Palm is limited to the native C, C++ and JVM support, whereas you can find C++, JVM PersonalJava, Javaphone technologies in Symbian OS 6.

You can also get JAVA MIDP in Symbian OS 7. Palm OS is available only for the system services and not for applications but Symbian supports the multitasking and multithreading applications, although it’s designed for event based time sharing on a single thread. Memory can be increased in Palm OS 5.2 to a maximum of 128 MB from 16 MB, whereas Symbian is a hardware driven system where you can maximize battery as high as 2 GB. Both the operating systems have Flash and expansion card memory which is used for storage. Symbian’s applications share RAM with operating system with an exclusive access to the allocated memory area.

Despite of the similar GUI components like check boxes, radio buttons, lists and scrollbars, developers using Symbian OS can create applications which can be run on screens with trifle code changes which can’t be performed in a Palm OS.

Multitasking

Symbian OS, unlike Palm OS, can handle multitasking applications with multi threading support. You can find one or more threads in every Symbian OS process. The threads, present in Symbian OS, are coordinated by the system scheduler. These system schedulers allocate thread processor access by their priorities. Multitasking is one of the major advantages of smartphones. Multitasking provides seamless usability, where the user can perform multitasks like checking e-mails while talking and even downloading images at the same time.

Conclusion

Palm OS is till now the most famous and widely used operating system. Many users find it a friendly and adaptive system. With its aberrations, Symbian is gripping the market day –by- day, which is a threat to Palm OS. But, if you want to be a power user within no time, then Palm is the apt gadget for you. The interface is so simple that it can be easily used by technical as well as non-technical users. This simplicity along with the low price makes Palm the leader in PDAs and gets the lion’s share of the PDA market.