251–260 of 290 posts
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Actually by Nokia shareholders, including a big bonus for managing to sell mobile division.
No. Nokia just sold its business to new owner, but new owner killed it.
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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E61
I actually looked recently at trying to buy another E61 in good condition, and how much trouble it would be to kludge up access to my email through it. I figured it would be more productive for email than my current mainstream smartphone setup.
I have to resist the urge to look into this open-sourced Symbian... :)
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…
Was it the case where no globals were allowed, since "executables" (not really) were more remiscent of dll/shared libs/etc.?
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…
> It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++ Was this just a "using different elements of C++" kind of dialect, or was this an "early Win32 when you had to use pretend-C++ (ATL) together with your real C++, bridging the two with C" kind of dialect? I feel like a lot of application frameworks developed in the 90s ended up in the latter style, as C++ was just becoming popular around then, and man…
Here is how it did its version of std::string:
http://n-gage.org/symbian-sdk-doc/6.1/developerlibrary/Commo...
It actually wasn't too bad once it was beaten into you by the compiler and code reviews. Non-embedded C++ devs can count their lucky stars.
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I have two Nokia N9's (running Meego) at home still. I used N9 as my daily driver until about 3 years ago. The failure of that magnificent OS, combined with the failure of the successor (Jolla / Sailfish) still annoys me.
Sailfish is still around and is still getting upgrades every quarter with new features and improvements. Android support is actually pretty good and I use it for my daily driver. It's not a success but it hasn't been a failure IMO.
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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 (fo…
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 didn't get very far with native Symbian development. J2ME was just so much easier, and ran on everything under the Sun (pun intended).
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I could enable GPS and leave the phone on without charging... for THREE WEEKS at a time.
GPS is a completely passive signal, so it's not really surprising that it lasts a long time. You can get similar battery life with IoT SoCs deployed on the field. The difference between then and now is that modern smartphones use sensor fusion, combining cellular, WiFi, and GPS signals to generate a location. The end result is more accurate output, at the expense of battery life.
Modern devices do the sensor fusion on CPU but it's just polling the GPS chip for coordinates as required, which handles all the actual signals processing stuff.
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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…
> I respectfully disagree. Because it's an EPIC pain, and it's absolutely hostile towards "average" users. Are you sure you didn't mean "EPOC" pain? Maybe "EPOC32" pain? ;-) - a Psion owner