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S40, IIRC, is Symbian. It's related to the S60 that powered lots of Nokia smartphones, mostly the ones that actually work. Keeping to it and ditching the newer versions would be clever.

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Never having seen the code, I can't say for sure that there's no Symbian OS code in the S40 series devices. I can say, however, that there's no Symbian OS access for developers in those devices. The S40 phones are semi-smart -- they allow J2ME applets to run and that's it.

You remember incorrectly. See e.g. http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/ for comparison.

It's a marketing barrier, not a technical one. The core is very much the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40#Operating_system

Sorry, but your link doesn't support your assertion. It only says that S40 is simpler than S60 and that S60 is based on Symbian.

With a bit of googling I found this quote from a Forum Nokia champion: "Series 40 (S40) is not based on Symbian at all, but a Nokia proprietary real-time operating system. Series 40 does not allow any native (C/C++) development (with or without Qt). The primary app development for Series 40 based phones is Java (JME, J2ME, MIDP/CLDC), or Flash Lite." http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?21666...

Here's another link: http://eve-c.org/2011/syskwyawan/

Interesting. The use of the word "variant" on Wikipedia misled me.

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