Symbian is the operating system being used by Nokia, SonyEricsson, Motorola and many other mobile phone manufacturers as the basis for higher-end phones, aka smartphones, with reasonably large colour screens, 2.5G/3G wireless data, and so on. One example is the Sony Ericsson P800.

Symbian does have a Perl port and Unix tools as add-ons, unlike Palm devices, so it should be quite feasible to port TWiki given a suitable CGI-capable web server. Anyone else with Symbian devices interested in this?

It's also possible to use smartphones to access TWiki servers on other hosts, as discussed in WirelessTWiki.

-- RichardDonkin - 02 Apr 2003

You could always run linux on your symbian device, then there wouldn't be a problem. Or, when the vaporware problem is over, you can run netbsd on psion also..

Speed might be the real problem. These devices are not fast. Running perl might be dead slow.

Personally, I like the netbook, though the product line is near comatose. They also are symbian/epoc devices (and may also run linux soon).

-- JonathanCline - 11 May 2003

Not sure that I want to replace Symbian with Linux on my P800 just yet - I would want all the normal applications so it works as a phone as well.

Good point about speed - might be necessary to use the CacheAddOn or similar to avoid re-computation as much as possible. A lighter-weight Wiki that supports most of the TWiki syntax would be handy.

UPDATE: p5httpd is a lightweight web server for Symbian/EPOC that supports the CPAN:CGI module. It's written in Perl and avoids use of fork(), which is missing on EPOC and might make the various system calls from TWiki a porting issue.

Perl for EPOC looks reasonably complete - unfortunately it doesn't run on the Symbian OS (EPOC R6 or higher, aka ER6), only on EPOC R5 or earlier (ER5). So Perl would need to be ported, which could be a fair bit of work

-- RichardDonkin - 11 May 2003

Good news for Perl developers who want to use Symbian phones! Nokia is porting Perl to the Series 60 Symbian platform. Series 60 is a user interface and API set built on Symbian and intended for phones without touch screens, while UIQ is a user interface and API set that is also based on Symbian and intended for touch screen phones, such as the SonyEricsson P800 and P900. Once the Series 60 port of Perl comes out, it may well be ported to UIQ Symbian phones as well, and in any case would help bring a huge influx of Perl skills onto this platform, making it easier to port TWiki.

Even if the full TWiki is too heavy for a smartphone, it would be handy to be able to run a lighterweight Wiki that is largely TWikiML compatible, and sync to and from a real web-based TWiki.

-- RichardDonkin - 18 Jan 2004

Perl on Symbian is not here yet, but it has been demo'ed by a Perl hacker who works for Nokia. Python is further along...

-- RichardDonkin - 10 Dec 2004

A middleware solution might be the best way to go. For example, Reqwireless has J2ME applications where the server does the heavy lifting and the Java application on the handset just does the final rendering. This would also not limit this to Symbian phones but it would also work on J2ME phones without limiting them to WAP.

-- RichBlinne - 11 Dec 2004

That's a good idea for access from the phone to a TWiki server - Googling for TWiki and XML-RPC as well as the vim editor addon for TWiki will give some ideas on this. However, I was looking more at running TWiki on the phone itself as a personal Wiki or as a way of doing ReadWriteOfflineWiki.

-- RichardDonkin - 12 Dec 2004

Perl for Symbian has finally arrived, though it's still bleeding edge.

-- RichardDonkin - 19 Nov 2005