Symbian was apparently successfully ported for Intel's Atom CPU and the development team claims it runs just dandy on an off the shelf Atom based Intel motherboard.

Obviously, it's still in the experimental stage, which means you probably won't be able to get and Atom powered device with Symbian for quite a while yet, but it's a step in the right direction.

Lee Williams, the head of Nokia's S60 unit, says he was "most impressed with the responsiveness of the UI and upper application layers," and that the team had no troubles using a baseband modem port to make a call.

Various x86 ports of Symbian were developed over the years, but none of them ended up in actual products. However, with newer version of the OS, which deal much better with bigger screen sizes and offer more features for serious applications, this could easily change, provided someone steps up and invests in further development.

At least the Symbian team can count on the ever growing popularity of Intel's Atom platform this time around.

More here.