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Symbian Won

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Re: Symbian Won

#191

Post by jbverschoor »

secondcoming wrote: post #67
kanox wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a ridiculously shallow dismisal. Android and iOS "won" because the phones were vastly more capable.

Except they weren't. At the time, the US had really crap phones compared to Europe (which itself was behind Japan). The Nokia N95 could do everything . The original iPhone was pretty much laughed at by Nokia insiders because it lacked so many features. It turns out most users didn't care about most of these (MMS, DTV, Bluetooth)

Except that they didn’t have a proper browser.

People tend to forget that you had a desktop quality browser in the first iPhone.

Re: Symbian Won

#192

Post by senko »

TLightful wrote: post #106
shaan7 wrote: 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 ?

Internal politics. Symbian faction was too strong and Maemo was (rightly) seen as something that would cannibalize it if successful.

Meego being a full rewrite and repackage (qt/rpm whereas maemo was gtk/deb), although it had merits, means development needed to restart from scratch.

Nokia also totally mismanaged dev relations. First it built up dev excitement for Maemo, then announced it was going to be abandoned (for Meego) a few months later.

Meego was a combination of Intel's Moblin (purchased from OpenedHand, a big Linux shop back in the day) and Nokia's Maemo.

Shortly after Intel abandoned the project in favor of Tizen, leaving Nokia holding the bag. Nokia went through the motions until the infamous burning platform memo, driving the last nail.

In some ways, N900/N9 is a parallel with Amiga. Great machine, tremendous excitement by a (small) loyal userbase, mismanaged by development, and now a subject of nostalgia and failed attempts to resurrect the dream.

Re: Symbian Won

#193

Post by stiray »

secondcoming wrote: post #60

I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Net…

I loved symbian and the whole "java on phone" never seemed right to me. I would prefer having a linux phone - I dont ask for much - working camera, working calls, mms and sms, gps, bluetooth). I dont care for anything else.

All my hopes are now leaning into Cosmo Communicator( https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-communicator - please take care, I have jumped into this with "I will loose my money" mentality - I still dont trust, they will realize the linux part, but hope dies last), it reminds me of beloved Nokia Communicator and if they realize my conditions (camera, calls, mms, sms - gps already works same as bluetooth ) I will give my foot a very long swing and remove my Android phone (even if heavly modified) from my life.

Re: Symbian Won

#194

Post by kevsim »

secondcoming wrote: post #147
kevsim wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Nokia starting in about 2004. Looking back on my career, one of the single greatest feelings of accomplishment was getting a Hello World application to run on Symbian/S60. I thought I knew C++ going in, but I wasn't prepared for two phase constructors and the 6 files you'd need to draw a simple list view on the screen. Felt amazing once it worked though!

Lol. At least you guys had actual phones to work with. Until we became Nokia all we had was a techview UI shell running on H2, or later, H4 boards that would boot an MMC card. Of course, when we became Nokia we got the flashing stations and access to Phoenix. Only a particular part of the company ever saw phones that were in development and you needed special access to get into that part of the building.

I also went through a dev board phase later on when I was working on Maemo, etc. but they took it easy on me when I was fresh out of school and let me have real production hardware

Re: Symbian Won

#195

Post by foobarian »

app4soft wrote: post #173
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when J2ME support was added, it became easy to develop apps. I used to develop J2ME apps as hobby, I made a game and took it for my first job interview. In that job I had to port a 30,000+ J2ME code app to Android in 2010. The company I worked for was even experimenting with NFC payments in Nokia Symbian phones in 2010!

> But when J2ME support was added, it became easy to develop apps. And adding Python support for S60 (PyS60) was the best gift by Nokia for users as it brings Symbian devices to be "on-the-go handheld devs tool for developing apps without desktop PC".[0] Has you ever know that there is fully functional Blender-like 3D mesh editor & animator app written in Python for S60 (PyS60) directly on Symbian smartphone?[1] [0]…

So if all these things were possible on Symbian so early what in the world happened that they lost the market race so badly. Too much engineering-driven design? Lack of a unifying Jobs-esque force at the top to make hard decisions?

Re: Symbian Won

#196

Post by jbverschoor »

dfox wrote: post #65
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.

It is only tangentially related, but Symbian in fact had even more pervasive multithreading than even BeOS. IIRC "correctly behaving" EPOC/Symbian GUI application was supposed to have at least three threads (UI and application logic in separate threads and additional "housekeeping" thread).

BeOS had a thread for each BWindow. So 5 browser windows is 5 threads for the windows and 1 for the BApplication.

Re: Symbian Won

#197

Post by speeder »

secondcoming wrote: post #60

I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Net…

I am Brazillian, and I think killing Symbian was a huge and stupid mistake.

When Microsoft release that memo that killed Symbian, in Brazil its marketshare was INCREASING, there was a lot of people learning how to code for it, many people saw it as a good future, because with it you could make blazing fast CHEAP phones, iPhones were crazy expensive, and android was a slow buggy mess.

Thing is... iPhones are STILL crazy expensive, and android STILL is a slow buggy mess if you buy a cheap one.

I am yet to find a smartphone I like as much I liked symbian based phones, that are phones first, smart second, and work great for actually phoning people.

Re: Symbian Won

#198

Post by vel0city »

unreal37 wrote: post #37
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.

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...

AT&T offered unlimited internet plans pre-iPhone. I had an unlimited 3G internet plan pre-iPhone. It wasn't intended for PDAs/smartphones at the time but it seemed like they never bothered to check IMEI's for devices they did not sell. I forget the exact price but it was cheaper on the family plan than the unlimited iPhone data plan.

Re: Symbian Won

#199

Post by perennialmind »

brianpursley wrote: post #179
secondcoming wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't edit my comment, but the source code seems to be here: https://github.com/SymbianSource I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning.

> I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning. OK, so I had to look. It's like they saw the two main camps (same line vs next line) and said "let's come up with something everyone will hate": TInt GetROMSize(TInt /*aDeviceNumber*/, TInt /*aAttrib*/, TBool /*aSet*/, TAny* aInOut) { TMemoryInfoV1 info; TPckg infoPckg(info); TInt r=UserSvr::HalFunction(EHalGroupKernel, EKernelHalMemoryInfo, (T…

Wow. I had a CS professor insist on exactly that style. I couldn't stand it at first, but making accommodations was the whole point. Unfortunately it got me thinking about what I would want. Now I'm the weirdo and I rarely get to write it the way I want.

Re: Symbian Won

#200

Post by richardwhiuk »

saagarjha wrote: post #162
jfrunyon wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Errr... the general answer to "can I know the full path of the binary that was used to spawn ?" is "sure, just `readlink /proc/ /exe`".

Yeah, until the program deletes itself from disk on launch.

Or edits that value.
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