"Symbian^3 is almost ready to fly towards the masses according to a tweet by Mark Skrebels, who is the Senior Release Manager and Chairman of the Release Council at the Symbian Foundation. His tweet stated that the OS is now 'functionally complete', which in layman's terms means that it is now ready to go into the hands of OEMs, developers and networks for testing, evaluation and bug fixing. This isn't a mass market release yet, but it is the step right before that as the community gets a chance to put the OS through its paces in what is known as the 'hardening' stage. Hopefully, and probably, this hardening period won't take a huge amount of time. We say probably because the Nokia N8 is due for release later this year and it will be the first handset to run Symbian^3 so a time period of a fe months is likely for the hardening stage. There is expected to be an alpha version of the SDK released late this month with a beta SDK following at some point in August and the full on final version of the SDK hitting developers around October. That puts the actual release of the OS itself not too long after that, just in time for Christmas actually." via mobile-review.com