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Symbian Won

shkspr.mobi

101–110 of 290 posts

Re: Symbian Won

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget that it was the release of the iPhone that caused AT&T and others to offer "unlimited internet". $60 for unlimited internet in 2007. That was a revolution. Before that, yes, you could run up a massive phone bill. [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/06/26AT-T-and-Apple-Anno...

> $60 for unlimited internet in 2007. That was a revolution. You mean their fake unlimited plan that resulted in a $60 million fine? That revolution? [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/5/20949850/att-fine-unlimit...

Yeah, it throttled, but it didn’t randomly send you bills for $1000’s (except maybe if you were near a roaming area).

Re: Symbian Won

#102
People didn't like Symbian and PalmOS when shinier alternatives came out but, these two OSes did a lot fundamental things correctly and efficiently.

The iOS lockscreen is a modernized version of the Today app from PalmOS. Current iOS homescreen is a slightly modified version of PalmOS homescreen to be precise.

PalmOS and Symbian are the pioneers of mobile OSes and they were pretty good at that.

Re: Symbian Won

#104
post #88

> 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 LittleSnit…

>if only iptables would allow to filter by the executable path and other process parameters The problem going down that route is that implementing this opens a huge can of worms. That stuff is easy to spoof, you have to account for thousands of edge cases. It's not for nothing that the answer to "can I know the full path of the binary that was used to spawn ?" is generally "it depends" or "it's complicated". And let'…

I think it's a great idea mosts apps will not want to spoof the firewall. So while it may not be secure, it would be very helpful for user controlled privacy.

Re: Symbian Won

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget that it was the release of the iPhone that caused AT&T and others to offer "unlimited internet". $60 for unlimited internet in 2007. That was a revolution. Before that, yes, you could run up a massive phone bill. [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/06/26AT-T-and-Apple-Anno...

> $60 for unlimited internet in 2007. That was a revolution. You mean their fake unlimited plan that resulted in a $60 million fine? That revolution? [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/5/20949850/att-fine-unlimit...

I remember paying metered data that cost around 0.005 cent per kb around 2006 (forgot the actual number but I'm pretty sure it's around that much). Having "unlimited" data is indeed revolutionary.

Re: Symbian Won

#107
post #29
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From the linked blog, an example of how to copy a 4-letter string from a constant string into a new heap-allocated string:

  HBufC* heapbasedFred=HBufC::NewL(4);
  TPtr fredPtr(heapbasedFred->Des());
  _LIT(KFred, “fred”);
  fredPtr.Copy(KFred);
I had forgot it was this bad.

It's kind of weird that Symbian calls these descriptors, but the actual types and macros don't use that word at all — they are HBufC, TPtr and _LIT.

Re: Symbian Won

#108
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.

I'm currently reading The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek, and he talks about exactly that: is your game finite or infinite? If infinite (like any business), there is no "winning" in that kind of "game" because there are so many standards by which one could say he beats the competition (win): is it market share, cashflow, valuation, innovation?...

Symbian was probably right about how it was handling of security, but it "lost" by disappearing from the game.

Re: Symbian Won

#109
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy did it justice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO4iNau8AWM

That's the third option I wish we had ... How on earth did this not take off ?

> How on earth did this not take off ?

Monies. Microsoft's offer to Nokia was way too lucrative.

Re: Symbian Won

#110
post #39
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 still use mine. Got a suspicious cheap battery + charger several years ago when the usb broke again. Shipped from china it took 2 months by boat, and the other battery is now extended enough that you can't close the back lid, but dammit, great phone.

Why are you still using the N900? Its kernel, browser and SSL libraries haven't been upgraded in years and years now. If you connect to a network, you are just asking to be pwned.

I kept my N900 for years longer than most people because it has a quality DAC and, as long as I kept it in airplane mode, it was a good music player for the classical and jazz I listen to on high-quality headphones when traveling. But eventually I realized that the N900 could be totally replaced by simply adding a Bluetooth DAC to the Android smartphone I already have (and I'm glad I did that, because the BTR3-FiiO Bluetooth amp I got sounds even better than the N900).

I recently got a Pinephone, but it’s hard to enthuse about it. So much of the cool things you could go with the N900 – Emacs and the whole OS it brings along, writing your own scripts in the terminal – were due to its hardware keyboard. A modern smartphone that lacks a hardware keyboard is just a pain to hack.

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