ARM joins Symbian Foundation, releases tools

ARM has joined the Symbian Foundation and has collaborated on one of two developer tool releases for the soon-to-be-open-source platform.

The processor firm announced its involvement in the Symbian Foundation on Tuesday, alongside other new entrants such as Huawei, Visa, Red Bend and Scalado. Also announced on Tuesday were the ARM Profiler for the Symbian operating system, and the Symbian Analysis Workbench (SAW), which is a set of Eclipse-based tools designed to help optimise Symbian C++ software.

The Symbian Foundation was announced in June, and is the result of Nokia's decision to buy out the mobile operating-system firm, fold in the Series 60, UIQ and Moap platforms, and open-source the resulting platform. However, this work cannot begin until Nokia's acquisition of Symbian is cleared by various regulatory authorities — an event that is expected to occur before the end of the year.

Founding members include Samsung, Vodafone, Texas Instruments and others, while more recent additions include 3, Marvell and Opera.

The ARM Profiler is part of the firm's RealView Development Suite 4.0 Professional, and lets developers target optimisations through visual representations of their applications' runtime performance.

"The new ARM Profiler provides an analysis environment that enables developers to maximise the performance and power efficiency of their applications, on ARM technology-based mobile phones," said Symbian's ecosystem development chief, Mike Whittingham, in a statement on Tuesday.