Nokia had a chance with Meego. But internal politics killed it, and Symbain followed.
Symbian Won
221–230 of 290 posts
Re: Symbian Won
#222I 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 s…
> the whole "java on phone" never seemed right to me
I'm not sure which Java on phone you are referring to, the Android Java or the older J2ME. The older J2ME apps ran well in limited resources, but was also incredibly complicated to develop due to device fragmentation.
Re: Symbian Won
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It was a combination of bad APIs, bad and Windows-only IDE, problems in OpenC, and pressure from client. For the lack of a better word, development in Symbian was "tacky", was like walking on mud, everything took 10x the effort it should. It was a time when Nokia was the only game in town (think N93, N95) and they thought they could get away with mistreating developers forever. Funny how they sabotaged their own effo…
iPhone is Mac-only for development. Some things never change..
Re: Symbian Won
#224I 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 s…
The indiegogo page seems to imply that they're shipping these devices. Have you not received yours? The simulated pictures look nice...
Re: Symbian Won
#225I like the screenshot in this post about the permissions Android apps ask for. At least this matches my experience. Android apps by and large just ask for everything so it's a choice between giving them everything or not being able to use them. Apple OTOH does two major things different: 1. Apple's approach is to ask for individual permissions it needs when it first needs them. I can't overstate how much better this…
Android has prescribed apps to request individual permissions at runtime since Android 6.0 (released in 2015):
https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requestin...
iOS switched to the runtime permission request in iOS 6 (released in 2012), so they switched earlier than Android, but both platforms have had runtime permissions requests for years.
Re: Symbian Won
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO • iPhone's capacitive touch screen vs Nokia's resistive touch with stylus requirement was too much of a friction (pun not intended). 1 year after iPhone's release, Nokia released 5800 marketed as iPhone killer; guess what? it had f'in stylus with resistive screen. • Then when android happened, which was poor man's iPhone; Nokia hugged Windows Phone OS. Which never became a thing as it lacked Google apps (Google k…
Reading around on the Internet a bit I came upon this [1] which indicates Nokia's leadership was less engineering-driven than I thought. [1] https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/who-killed-nokia-nokia...
> Nokia's leadership was
Stephen Elop, Nokia President & CEO since September 2010.[0,1,2,3,4,5]
Since 2011 Symbian & Nokia starts its degradation under Elop 's "leadership".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#CEO_of_Nokia
[1] https://www.europeanceo.com/profile/stephen-elop
[2] https://www.smartcompany.com.au/business-advice/strategy/how...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/08/nokia-ste...
[4] https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/17/8796465/grand-theft-elop
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2018/02/15/elop_and_the_fall_of_...
Re: Symbian Won
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Opera was available for it
Re: Symbian Won
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I respectfully disagree. Because it's an EPIC pain, and it's absolutely hostile towards "average" users. Back in the Android 5 (or so) days, I knew what permissions an app I was going to install on my mother's phone was going to ask to be granted _once_, and be done with it. Nowadays, an app might ask for some kind of new permission "on first use", and users on mobile are developing the same habit as users of desktop…
The problem isn't the sandbox, it's inherently the issue with lack of fine grained permissions and being unable to revoke permissions after installation. Wanna see a real permission model, look at the BB10 Android Player model. After installation, you could revoke permissions and the player would basically act as if the data from that permission was just empty. App asks for contacts, here's an empty contacts list. Ed…
The reason for location permissions is because BT can track your location through Bluetooth beacons. See https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/blue...
This is just Android being transparent. "Bluetooth usage may allow apps to track your location." Which is perfectly true.
There has to be a balance between explaining to the user, e.g. that there are multiple ways their location can be tracked, and permission request overload.
I don't imagine explaining to everyday users the details of the Bluetooth protocol is viable.
Re: Symbian Won
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
The indiegogo page seems to imply that they're shipping these devices. Have you not received yours? The simulated pictures look nice...
I already have it, but it is usefull for me only as linux device (well until they release v22 firmware to mod it). But my main motive for buying it was linux/sailfish.
Re: Symbian Won
#230> 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…
I respectfully disagree. Because it's an EPIC pain, and it's absolutely hostile towards "average" users. Back in the Android 5 (or so) days, I knew what permissions an app I was going to install on my mother's phone was going to ask to be granted _once_, and be done with it. Nowadays, an app might ask for some kind of new permission "on first use", and users on mobile are developing the same habit as users of desktop…
> 'd rather trust my distro's package maintainers to not let developers abuse their users, and have a look at the source if I'm in doubt about the upstream's intentions.
Trusting 3rd parties to decide what you can trust isn't ideal either. It's what Google and (especially) Apple have for mobile apps now. They decide what you can safely install and we're just supposed to trust them. That's clearly not working.
While you have the added benefit of being able to trawl over thousands of lines of code looking for something suspicious, that's not exactly scalable or even possible for the majority of users. In the end, what exactly are you looking for anyway if not signs that an application is making connections or accessing files that it shouldn't. In that respect, it's far better to have the OS just tell users when an application is doing those things (connecting to the internet, reading their personal files, or activating their cameras). The more transparency in what an app is doing the better because the reality is that we cannot trust every app we install. How could we possibly?