Symbian Analysis Workbench designed to optimise code

LONDON, United Kingdom - 21 October 2008 - Symbian Limited, developer and licensor of Symbian OS™, the market-leading open operating system for mobile phones, today announces Symbian Analysis Workbench (SAW), a new tool to make development easier and faster by significantly reducing the time and effort needed to fix defects and optimise code.

SAW is a pre-packaged set of Eclipse-based tools that make life easier for developers by optimising Symbian C++ software via graphical views integrated into the Carbide C++ development environment.

The Symbian Developer Network (SDN++), an online forum providing a range of tools and resources, to develop on Symbian OS, hosts an Eclipse download service which makes it possible to install SAW from within Carbide.c++.

SAW offers analysis, profiling and target management tools in a combined suite, allowing developers to understand software behaviour using reports for trace events, resource usage and system behaviour within a single workspace.

Antony Edwards, Vice President Developer Product Marketing, Symbian, said, "Great software needs to be fast. SAW is designed to help developers exploit the full performance benefits of Symbian OS and the underlying hardware. It allows developers to look at how threads are being scheduled across CPUs, how memory is being allocated, and at other system resources."

SAW complements commercial third party tools by providing Symbian OS-specific analysis to solve hard-to-find defects. It delivers features including 'Trace Event Viewer', 'CPU Profiler', 'Memory Usage Reporter', 'Thread State Reporter' and 'Target Management' to optimise complex code.

The 'Trace Event Viewer' is a text-based display, compatible with output from the Symbian OS Unified Trace Framework. Developers can use the 'trace event viewer' to understand the status of their software and to see a complete record of all events. The feature complements the Symbian Analysis Workbench graphical reporting tools.

The 'CPU Profiler Viewer' visualises processor activity to identify the hot spots and bottlenecks in the software that are using the most processor cycles. The profiler uses debug symbolic data and ROM build logs to resolve function names in the display. This gives the developer an active view of the most active functions for a more detailed inspection.

SAW's 'Memory Reporter Viewer' shows memory usage over time by heap, executable and function to optimise software. Using the reporter, developers can find memory leaks, see peak memory usage and understand complex memory problems, such as fragmentation.

The 'Thread State Viewer' allows developers to visualise thread behaviour without interrupting program execution by showing when a thread state is created and destroyed, and its transition over time. This helps developers understand the relationship between executing threads, which are often difficult to determine using conventional debugging tools.

'Target Management' allows a developer to control the device from the desktop by providing an FTP agent for file management, and a TelNet agent for command execution.

SAW v1.0 supports Symbian OS v9.4 and all forthcoming versions.

- Ends -
About Symbian Limited

Symbian is a software licensing company that develops and licenses Symbian OS™, the market-leading open operating system for mobile phones.

Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world's leading handset manufacturers and has built close co-operative business relationships with leading companies across the mobile industry. During Q2 2008, 19.6 million Symbian mobile phones were sold worldwide to over 250 major network operators, bringing the total number of units shipped up to 30 June 2008 to 226 million.

Symbian has its headquarters in London, with offices in Cambridge, United Kingdom, China, India, Japan, Korea and United States. For more information, please visit www.symbian.com.