Documentation/Maemo For Symbian Developers Guide/Comparing Maemo and Symbian OS

= Comparing Maemo and Symbian OS =

The picture below (figure 2.1) presents a direct comparison between the software components of both operating systems, although the the structure of the Maemo platform and the underlying GNU/Linux operating system differ significantly from Symbian OS. The picture shows the layered architecture of Symbian OS and tries to distribute the Maemo software components in layers according to their correspondent functionalities on the Symbian OS.

In some cases Symbian OS subsystems and APIs can be directly mapped to Maemo platform components, but usually the relations are not 1:1. Therefore, this chapter provides just a generalized comparison of the platforms.

The table below (table 2.1) compares the main software components of the Symbian platform with those of the Maemo platform. This table can be used as a quick reference to find the proper software component that should be used in the Maemo platform given the desired component of the Symbian platform. Also, the table shows some components that are specific to Maemo platform, explaining their use.