When Symbian was formed 10 years ago, it inherited a browser from Psion. In the following years, the ability to browse real Web pages became a key differentiator of smartphones as compared to feature phones, and so Web technologies have played an important role in the story of Symbian. At the time of Symbian’s formation, there was much debate in the industry on whether the future of personal and enterprise computing would be in thick or thin clients – that is, in rich client software running mainly on the phone, or software hosted on a network server with a fairly simple browsing terminal. Ten years later and we see AJAX blurring the gap between the notion of thin and thick clients with rich browsing terminals backed with colossal arrays of servers dishing out email, photos, twitters and Facebook messages.
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