The world's most widely-used smartphone platform is now completely free and open. Today, the Symbian Foundation announced that the entire 33 million lines of Symbian^3 code is now free under the Eclipse Public License.
The platform was only sort of open source before...sort of. When the Symbian Foundation launched in 2009, parts of the source code were made available to members of the foundation under a transitional license. But now, all of the third-party intellectual property has been removed from Symbian^3 and it can be downloaded and used freely by anyone.
By removing third party protected content, however, a number of gaps have opened up in Symbian's functionality, including features otherwise commonplace in mobile devices.
T9 predictive text input, for example, is a technology commonly found on Symbian handsets, but it is intellectual property licensed from Nuance Technologies. So in the fully open-source Symbian^3, this functionality is missing. Handwriting recognition is missing from the open source release as well.
The Symbian Foundation will be releasing more information about the newly open-sourced platform throughout the week leading up to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
To start playing around with the code, check out the Symbian Foundation's Platform Wiki/getting started guide.
Source: Betanews
Efficiently following to the software released by different producers' updates our recourse makes easier your work. As usual, we are glad to get you know a list of drivers, firmwares, BIOSes, benchmarks, flash, tweaking and information utilities for the passing week.
All updates' versions are in one list, classified on the equipment type for better perception the information.
Macs are often the black sheep in the many enterprise environments which have been dominated by Windows for nearly two decades, but the growing consumerization of IT is slowly changing that perception. Though Macs often have a higher up-front price than many business-class PCs, Macs are usually believed to have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) due to lower support costs. A recent survey of IT professionals in large enterprise environments that have a mix of Macs and PCs overwhelmingly agree that Macs cost less than PCs to support.
The number of apps in the Android Market has almost doubled in just three months, Google confirmed today in an update. Where it had officially reached 16,000 apps by mid-December, the search company now says the official marker has jumped to 30,000. Its figure includes both free and paid apps, although it wouldn't tell MobileCrunch what the ratio might be.
Two steps forward, one step back. That seems to be an emerging trend for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series platform. The snazzy user interface, support for the XNA Framework/Silverlight/Adobe Flash 10.1, Windows Phone Marketplace, and plentiful device manufacturers to choose from are certainly pleasing to potential buyers. However, we're starting to learn a little bit more about the platform at MIX10 and it isn't all rosy.
There were speculations about the hardware requirements of Windows Phone 7, which phones will get the upgrade and now at the MIX10 Microsoft finally gave answers to those nagging questions.

Intel Rapid Storage Technology v.9.6.0.1014
JMicron JMB38x Driver v.1.00.40.01
JMicron JMC25x/JMC26x Driver v.5.0.17.1/6.0.17.1
Intel Turbo Boost Driver v.1.1.1.1007
Synaptics Touchpad Driver v.15.0.2.0
FTDI VCP Driver v.2.06
Siemens DCA-540 Driver v.0.71
FTDI RS232 Driver v.1.12.25
OTI 6858 Driver v.1.12.25
ASUS Maximus III GENE BIOS v.1501
Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME (rev. 1.0) BIOS v.F12
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4 (rev. 1.0) BIOS v.F10
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P (rev. 1.0) BIOS v.F13
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 (rev. 1.0) BIOS v.F12
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 (rev. 1.0) BIOS v.F6
Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3L-TPM (rev. 1.0) BIOS v.F5
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD7 (rev. 1.0) BIOS v.F4
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4 (rev. 1.0) BIOS v.F9
Windows 7 KB978251
Windows Vista/Server 2008 64-bit KB978251
Windows Vista/Server 2008 KB978251
Windows XP/2003 Server 64-bit KB978251
Windows Server 2003 (rus) KB978251
Windows Server 2003 (eng) KB978251
Windows XP (rus) KB978251
Windows XP (eng) KB978251
Windows 2000 SP4 (rus) KB978251

