Note Nokia's comments on WinCE in the following article on Epoc.
Epoc revision targets next-generation wireless devices
By Peter Clarke
EE Times
(06/08/99, 11:25 a.m. EDT)
LONDON — Symbian Ltd. has added enhanced Web browsing technology and support for Java to release 5 of its Epoc 32-bit real-time operating system (ER5), which it introduced at the recent Epoc developers conference.
ER5 is the version of Epoc that Psion plc, the British palm-top maker, is expected to use in the Psion 5mx, a revamped version of Psion's Series 5 handheld computer expected to be announced this week.
In the future, Symbian will focus Epoc only on the market for wireless information devices (WIDs), Juha Christensen, executive vice president for marketing and sales at Symbian, told the recent developers conference. WID is the terminology being applied to the current generation of mobile phones and communicators and to forthcoming so-called third-generation mobile phones and mobile terminals.
However, Christensen indicated that the WID class of machines would include handheld computers such as the Psion 5mx. "Handhelds can already include wireless access today and will do so as standard in the future," he said.
Christensen said the focus at Symbian reflects the ownership of the company, which includes Psion, the originator of Epoc, plus Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Matsushita, four of the world's top mobile phone manufacturers. Psion originally wrote a 16-bit version of Epoc for its successful Psion-3 handheld computer. The 32-bit version of Epoc debuted in 1998 on the Psion-5, but has faced stiff competition in the handheld computer market from Windows CE and Palm OS.
With its high-profile parents as supporters, Symbian's Epoc could become the de facto standard in a booming market for smart phones.
Lauri Hirvonen, senior manager of customer services wireless data at Nokia Mobile Phones OY (Tampare, Finland), began a presentation at the conference by saying that predictions on the uptake of mobile phones had recently moved the date by which one billion subscribers would be achieved from 2005 to 2003.
"At that time, about 10 to 15 percent of sales will be in multimedia type phones," said Hirvonen of Nokia.
Although the European Epoc developers conference was a relatively small affair and independent developers were few in number, most were fervent supporters of the operating system as an alternative to Windows CE from Microsoft.
Nonetheless, a participant at one panel session asked about reported recent talks between Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola, in which Ballmer is reported to have tried to get the companies to consider Windows CE.
Hirvonen answered by saying: "We don't buy paperware and we don't buy release 1 of software. Epoc is a robust and excellent platform."
In his earlier presentation, Hirvonen pointed out that battery life is one of the main drivers of equipment design at Nokia. "Epoc is an extremely power efficient OS; any other OS would require double or triple the size of battery," he said.
"It has a small [memory] footprint and compact code. Compare a spreadsheet on a Windows CE machine and on a Psion-5," he urged his audience.
Referring to Epoc as a real-time operating system, Hirvonen said, "We could not tolerate an OS that could miss a phone call because it is busy doing something in a database." He concluded by saying, "The future standard for wireless devices is Epoc."
Created by Psion as a ROM-based OS for mobile computing, Epoc is now complemented by the addition of a Java Virtual Machine, courtesy of a high-profile alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc., and support for Web browsing through the licensing of a Web technology library from STNC Ltd. (Bury St. Edmunds, England). The multi-tasking Epoc now supports a pen-based graphical user interface and full networking capabilities. Written in C++, it is object oriented and can be scaled from relatively large configurations for a fully-functional handheld computer, to small configurations for embedded applications.
The Epoc process model uses a memory management unit to give each process a separate address space. Within each process, one or more threads represent independent units of execution. Such segmentation contributes to the robustness of the operating system and its almost crash-proof performance, according to Psion.
Epoc includes a set of personal productivity applications, but among the best-liked features of the operating system is the ability to drop the Eikon pen-based graphical user interface and develop an alternative user interface.
So unlike Microsoft's Windows or Windows CE, which have an identifiable Microsoft look and feel, Epoc can be customized by an equipment maker to differentiate its products, said attendees at the developers conference.
The majority of Epoc is platform-independent. At the core of Epoc is the E32 operating system, which provides a user library, microkernel and hardware abstraction layer. Only a very small part of E32 is hardware dependent.
So far the microkernel has been ported to the X86 and the ARM7100 RISC processor from ARM Ltd. Motorola is currently working on an a derivative of its MCore processor architecture to host Epoc.
According to Symbian documentation, a typical high-end PDA configuration including word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail, clock, and contacts database applications requires around 4-Mbytes of ARM 32-bit code. An embedded mobile phone application takes around 1-Mbyte of ARM 32-bit code.
The Epoc microkernel is fully re-entrant, with very low interrupt and thread latency. According to Symbian, standard user-mode threads have a maximum latency in the order of tens of milliseconds, while real-time threads, running in privileged mode, have a maximum interrupt latency of a hundred microseconds. This enables Epoc to run real-time communications software without using a second processor.
While most of the sessions at the developers conference were spent coming to grips with the new capabilities of ER5, it also raised issues that have yet to be resolved either in Epoc or in the WID market in general.
One application developer asked how open but wirelessly connected WID platforms based on Epoc would fare, as the ability to download applications and Java applets provided the ability to crash equipment, he said.
"None of us will deliver a product that allows a third-party to crash it," said Mark Gretton of Psion Computers.
"There is some sort of trade-off between openness and security," Symbian's Christensen said. "But Java is a big part of the answer, while the inherent partitioning of Epoc is another part."
Challenged as to whether another real-time operating system written in Java rather than C++ could steal Symbian's place in future smart phones, Christensen said, "Epoc is much better than a Java OS. Java has problems when it comes to speed of operation. Anyway, up to the beginning of this year we spent 600 man-years developing Epoc, including 400 man-years in 1998 alone. We're going to spend another 300 man-years in 1999. A new OS developer would have to compete with that."
Symbian is planning to hold an Epoc developers conference in the United States sometime in the fourth quarter this year, while a Japanese equivalent should take place in March or April of 2000.
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