ARM and Symbian Limited have announced the ARM Profiler for Symbian OS. As part of the recently-launched RealView Development Suite 4.0 Professional, the ARM Profiler enables developers of mobile phone applications running on Symbian OS to add enhanced features and reduce power consumption.

Developers can target their optimizations with immediate feedback on actual application performance and with the identification of bottlenecks across a broad range of performance measurements.

The capabilities of the ARM Profiler for Symbian OS build upon ARM's profiling technology, which enables non-intrusive, long duration application profiling on hardware or system models; code coverage information, even when source code is unavailable; and the ability to profile fully optimized software.

Many profiling tools require code annotation or system instrumentation, which do not provide an accurate representation of application performance or allow profiling capabilities only for very short durations due to buffer limitations. ARM Profiler provides the ability to analyze fully optimized images, analyze for unlimited durations using the streaming trace feature in RealView Trace 2, and profile the instructions executing on the real-time system models from ARM. In addition, with the capacity to analyze the applications running on Symbian OS, engineers can now obtain insight into how applications are affected by system resources and shared libraries for a better understanding of how applications perform as part of a complex system.