Symbian has updated its smart phone operating system to version 9, adding DRM and support for new screens and storage devices. The company has also updated its toolchain, and Nokia today announced a new version of CodeWarrior for Symbian, version 3.0, that supports the updates.

Nokia acquired the rights to CodeWarrior for Symbian OS, along with a couple of dozen Metrowerks developers, last Fall.

It isn't as dramatic as last year's announcement, version 8, which made a one-chip, real-time version of Symbian available. Phones typically use a baseband processor to handle the radio, and a separate processor to handle the applications. But the industry has been working towards one-chip designs for a while, and Nokia has said it will use Texas Instruments' one-chip board when it appears next year. (Optimistically: when TI announced the project two years ago it was predicted to ship this year).

The OS now supports OMA and MPEG DRM, and a variety of screen sizes and orientations. No surprise there, as the most recent iteration of Nokia's Series 60 platform, built on top of Symbian OS, supports four screen sizes. And that's before Series 90 was folded in to the roadmap. The OS also now supports larger removable storage devices.

At the application level, OS 9 supports IMAP and calendar events from Outlook and Lotus Notes. Symbian will bundle ARM's RealView compiler. ®

Related stories

Symbian founder on mobile past, present and future
Nokia blesses mobile Python
Symbian CEO to quit
PalmSource to build Palm OS on Linux
Nokia bows to cellcos in midrange
Intel, Symbian to define 3G smart phone 'standard'
Nokia walks tightrope with Metrowerks acquisition
Symbian owners foil Nokia takeover
Symbian releases real-time, one-chip OS
UI wars tore Symbian apart - Nokia