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Symbian Won

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Symbian Won

#21

Post by braythwayt »

edent wrote: post #9
rvz wrote: post #4

That's like saying because everyone else has 'pervasive multithreading', BeOS won even when it was a commercial failure. Everyone else did it better. It's not about who invented it first, its about innovating over other inventions. Symbian still failed commercially in the market and couldn't compete or innovate with the other competitors.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. In the marketplace of ideas, both Symbian and BeOS eventually won the argument. They didn't win commercially.

I make a similar argument when I say that “CoffeeScript was merged to main.” Yes, JavaScript 2015 won... By adopting all of the ideas that CoffeeScript made mainstream for front-end web development.

I realize this is a philosophical distinction, but it really does come down to whether you are attached to the fundamental characteristic of a thing, or the label/name/brand of the thing.

Financially, the brand matters. If Uber fails commercially, but ushers in an age of gig economy transportation, the idea won but the brand did not. As an investor or employee, you care deeply about the brand.

But as someone trying to change the world, you care deeply about the idea coming to pass by any means necessary. Sutherland did not get rich. But do we say he lost because “The Mother of All Demos” was not an Apple II or Macintosh?

Re: Symbian Won

#22

Post by thepangolino »

arpa wrote: post #5

I don't miss symbian. Maemo on the other hand... was a loss. Nokia N900 was absolutely the best smartphone i ever used. Would use it still, but usb port issues forced me to upgrade.

I really liked the Meego iteration. Its UI was top notch.

Re: Symbian Won

#23

Post by LeonM »

edent wrote: post #14
Bud wrote: post #11

This analysis elides the fact that all OSes in the Symbian era had to compulsively ask about accessing the Internet because data usage was at such a premium.

That's not completely correct. My NEC smartphones didn't. Nor did the early BlackBerrys that I used.

I guess that's why NEC and Blackberry never took off in Europe, as the data usage would financially ruin you.

With prices of about 5 euro per megabyte you lived in constant fear of accidentally using data.

Re: Symbian Won

#24

Post by dogma1138 »

edent wrote: post #14
Bud wrote: post #11

This analysis elides the fact that all OSes in the Symbian era had to compulsively ask about accessing the Internet because data usage was at such a premium.

That's not completely correct. My NEC smartphones didn't. Nor did the early BlackBerrys that I used.

I remember SK feature phones with WAP support that did ask. BB worked slightly different before 3g and it's advancements made mobile internet pretty much "free" for most people.

BlackBerry came with it's own data plans and they had they used integrate with the mobile providers on a much lower level than just internet traffic.

Re: Symbian Won

#25

Post by arpa »

Brakenshire wrote: post #16
arpa wrote: post #5

I don't miss symbian. Maemo on the other hand... was a loss. Nokia N900 was absolutely the best smartphone i ever used. Would use it still, but usb port issues forced me to upgrade.

Was Maemo open source, including the shell? I wonder whether anyone will try and revive it now we have mainline kernel Linux phones, like Librem and Pinephone.

I _think_ it mostly was, with the exception of binary driver blobs. At least a few years ago it still had very active dev community at maemo.org, so it is not inconceivable for it to be revived. Alas, the neo900 project died.

Re: Symbian Won

#26

Post by qwerty456127 »

> With the latest releases of Android and iOS, we’re back to where we started. Both now prompt you the first time an app asks for access. Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps.

Every OS should do this, desktop OSes included. For the last 2 decades I've been using personal firewalls on Windows to do just this, now I use LittleSnitch on Mac (I just hope it's going to keep working on ARM macs), AFWall+ and XPrivacy on Android and miss this level of control terribly on Linux (it sort of can be achieved with AppArmor or SELinux but both are nightmares to use).

If only iptables would allow to filter by the executable path and other process parameters - that would be just so awesome. There was such a feature in some 2.x kernel but, sadly, it was deprecated long ago.

Re: Symbian Won

#27

Post by Fnoord »

It is unfair to compare. An application with an offline map is different, by design, that one where you can download the map or require a connection. Compare TomTom and Garmin with Google Maps and Apple Maps. Which one's used much more nowadays?

What has won is capability-based design, and the fact that the review system in iOS is better (but not perfect) compared to Google. The install base is also much larger though, and the amount of personal data on a smartphone has also increased greatly.

The question we need to ask ourselves is the following: do we really need all this data available on our smartphone? Or, put different: do you need to be able to access this data while on the go, 24/7? Do you need to take your smartphone with you 24/7?

Re: Symbian Won

#28

Post by dogma1138 »

LeonM wrote: post #23
edent wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not completely correct. My NEC smartphones didn't. Nor did the early BlackBerrys that I used.

I guess that's why NEC and Blackberry never took off in Europe, as the data usage would financially ruin you. With prices of about 5 euro per megabyte you lived in constant fear of accidentally using data.

Blackberry was quite popular in the UK amongst the corporate users, however BBM universally came with it's own data plans and they had their software running inside the cell providers as well as within the organization itself.

Re: Symbian Won

#29

Post by Someone »

alecmg wrote: post #10
epx wrote: post #6

Got depression doing Symbian development. (I am not kidding.)

not enough information was it related to symbian design choices?

I don’t know what the OP refers to, but using strings was ‘different’ from doing it in other systems. http://descriptors.blogspot.com/:

“Most programmers come to Symbian OS from some other development environment, and tend to think they’ve already got strings pretty much sussed. After all, there’s not much to C strings to understand, although there are plenty of ways they can go wrong. The Java String and StringBuf classes have about the best combination of power and simplicity that you can get. And the various String and CString classes found in different flavours of C++ environments are usually mastered fairly quickly.

But then they encounter Symbian OS descriptors. If there was anything invented to bring a high flying C++ developer firmly back to ground during their first week of Symbian OS development, it’s descriptors.”

Re: Symbian Won

#30

Post by kanox »

mola wrote: post #18
rvz wrote: post #4

That's like saying because everyone else has 'pervasive multithreading', BeOS won even when it was a commercial failure. Everyone else did it better. It's not about who invented it first, its about innovating over other inventions. Symbian still failed commercially in the market and couldn't compete or innovate with the other competitors.

They innovated away privacy and security by relying on the human poor ability of impulse control and hardship with delayed gratification. Basically they made everything shiny and addictive. Is that really innovative? Perhaps 'bad' ui is better when you consider higher order consequences as opposed to concentrating only on first order popularity contest? I'm not saying Nokia and symbian were better BTW. Just noting ho…

This is a ridiculously shallow dismisal.

Android and iOS "won" because the phones were vastly more capable.

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