Simulator to run Symbian applications

Question

Are there any simulators that run symbian applications?

Answer 1

The emulator is included in the Symbian SDK. Assuming that you installed the SDK in the default location, to run the emulator just launch

C:\S60\devices\S60_5th_Edition_SDK_v1.0\epoc32\release\winscw\udeb\epoc.exe

You can find here more detailed informations.

Answer 2

Since its introduction, Symbian has provided an emulator to allow development of Symbian on a PC.

Currently, the Symbian Foundation is developing a simulator which will eventually replace the emulator. At present, however, this is a work in progress and is not really suitable for general purpose Symbian development.

What is the difference between the two? The links above will provide the full story, but the key difference is as follows:

• The emulator is effectively a port of Symbian OS to a new architecture: whereas all Symbian devices in the market today are based on ARM architecture, the emulator is a port to x86. This port is not a particularly faithful representation of a real device however - for example, while Symbian OS on the device provides memory protection between user-side processes, the emulator runs as a single Windows process, with each Symbian process running as a separate emulated thread. This and other aspects of the emulator mean that your app may behave differently when moved from the emulator onto the device.
• The simulator is based on QEMU, which provides instruction-level simulation of the ARM architecture. This means that the same binaries can be run on the simulator and on the device (at least in most cases - each device, including the simulator, still has its own adaptation layer which is not portable in this way). The simulator also more closely models a real device - providing, for example, the same level of memory protection.