Symbian is upgrading its smartphone platform to bring to handsets many capabilities now associated with Windows PCs, including support for high-speed networks, advanced graphics, and multi-core processors. With these, mobile workers will be able to roam seamlessly between different networks, join videoconference calls and run more demanding applications, according to the firm.

Announced at Symbian’s Smartphone Show in October, FreeWay and ScreenPlay are new networking and graphics architectures. The first adds support for up to 100Mbit/s data links, while the latter allows new user interfaces using transparency, and enables devices to handle moving video without affecting other tasks.

These features have already been added to the codebase for Symbian OS 9.5, the company said, but it will depend on carriers and the handset makers that license the platform to bring the technology to market over the next few years.

Even then, users may not notice unless they do something that requires the new functionality, according to Andrew Moran, head of enterprise marketing at Symbian.
“If you are using the web browser, it will seem exactly the same as now unless you start a streaming video feed,” Moran said.

While speedier communications and better graphics will appeal to consumers, they are also important in an enterprise context because they improve usability. “A few years ago, multimedia was considered consumer, but is now an everyday feature of business computing,” Moran said.

ScreenPlay offers faster video, animation and transparency, and will automatically make use of graphics acceleration hardware if this is built into the handset. Transparency is already used in Windows Vista’s Aero user interface to let users see things that might otherwise be hidden behind the window you are using.

“Transparency lets you have a task going in the foreground and still see what’s happening with tasks in the background ­ you could be doing your email while keeping an eye on a videoconference call,” said Moran.

FreeWay also supports this multi-tasking scenario by enabling multiple concurrent data links, so that users can run voice over IP (VoIP) while fetching their email and watching a videoconference at the same time. If a handset supports Wi-Fi or WiMax networks, FreeWay can select whichever offers the most cost-effective connection, according to Moran.

“We looked at situations like if you are on 3G doing synchronisation and a Wi-Fi connection becomes available, what should happen? We wanted seamless switchover, so that things like voice calls will continue uninterrupted,” Moran said. Administrators in an enterprise environment will be able to set policies controlling which networks FreeWay can use, he added.

Using multiple applications and network connections could place a heavy workload on the handset’s processor, however, and Symbian is backing plans by mobile chip firm ARM for chips with up to four processor cores. ARM unveiled its Cortex A9 MPCore design in October, but said it may not appear in handsets before 2010.