I just went through a white paper from Nokia on system 90. It looks to me as though there are three ways of implementing applications on this and the other Symbian OS platforms.
1) Symbian native applications, these use Symbian for their implementation and can not work without it.
2) Java applications, that as far as I can see, do not use Symbian.
3) Legacy applications running through the Series 40 Implementation, but this appears to be Java again. and is essentially to aid developers in producing applications from the older platforms
If my understanding is correct, the both Pierrot and I would be correct

Have I understood correctly now?