i believe Symbian^3 is coded as an open source, no idea what happened to Symbian^2

Some people say it's Symbian^1 with the homescreen (N97)
Not sure about it.

I agree that symbian dual booted on the n900 would be great. the things that let the n97 down such as bad c space etc wouldnt exist on the n900. there would be a ton of diff apps, free nav. im not saying symbian is better... no chance, but running on the n900 it would be pretty smooth and would provide an alternative os.

i asked this question when symbian was announced as open source, and a lot of people agreed that it would be awesome.

symbian^3 UI runs at 60fps so speed, scrolling, transitions on symbian being laggy and slow is thing of the past and its designed to run on hardware like the n900 qwerty/touch hybrids and graphic accelerated
there is project on symbian site they are running symbian on off the shelf components
running it on already built devices should be easier if all drivers are available

Dual booting Symbian is a half-solution.
What would be awesome, is Symbian emulation layer allowing running Symbian apps in sandboxed Symbian environment under Maemo.

Even if all the hardware works perfectly with symbian, isn't it overkill? I mean, in most cases it would be nice to have a fast OS, but the speed won't really be useful on S60.

Of course you could downclock everything and have a longer battery life....

Symbian^1 is essentially N97 UI, Symbian^2 would have been the first real OS repackaged by Symbian Foundation, but it was meant for manufacturers that where already been using 5th edition(so Nokia, SE and Samsung). In the end it was left out by the manufacturers.

Symbian^3 is graphically superior to any other Symbain release and is a big jump from Symbian^2. It will be rather eye candy heavy UI when it comes to effects. When it comes example kinetic scrolling i honestly think it will be great with Symbian^3.

Yes i'm a big Symbian fan so i'm very interested to see Symbian^3 in action on N8 or E7. Thought not really interested to see it inside N900.

I remember that VMWare was working on virtualisation for the N810 about 6 months ago at their convention in Sydney. Not sure where the project is at but was interesting to see that the N810 was made to boot different ARM based OS's (Native, Android, BB from memory and S60 was meant to be supported as well as WM).

Cant find anything on the net concrete about it however - although they did have a live demo that did allow multiboot

Moved to Alternatives!
Please don't spam brainstorm with questions, it's a problem solution system and not a help-desk.

Would running Symbian on the N900 then make it a phone and not an internet tablet ;-)