Earlier quoted context omitted.
Symbian Belle, the last iteration was just great. I only moved to Android when forced to.
And this whole notion of "Symbian Won" reminds me how "Windows Phone Won" too. Just look at the latest iOS 14 widgets which is inspired by WP tiles.
Symbian Won
261–270 of 290 posts
Re: Symbian Won
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was responsible for porting a fairly large C++ app to Symbian (this was like 15 years ago, so memory is hazy). The big problems were that exceptions were weird and non-standard, and you couldn't throw them from constructors, so anything using RAII had to be rewritten.
RAII can be used without constructors and without exceptions. The acronym is misleading.
Yes, but if you have a large existing codebase that throws exceptions from constructors you can't just use it unchanged.
Re: Symbian Won
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are there any phones that allow you to customize this? I recall Android having a Developer Options setting for GPS + WiFi or just GPS for Location Accuracy. But IIRC, this didn't make a substantial impact to battery life. Maybe because I'm not a passive phone user.
Re: Symbian Won
#264Earlier 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…
> 1 year after iPhone's release, Nokia released 5800 marketed as iPhone killer; guess what? I guess beside its resistive screen, Nokia 5800 has much more power than iPhone 3G: - J2ME apps; - Python for S60 apps (+ Pys60 IDE); - Qt4 apps; - Voice input; - Built-in voice recorder; - Video recording; - Frontal camera for video calls; - 3.2 Megapixel camera with zoom & flash; - 35 hours of work in music player mode; - Ch…
That's true of several mobile hardware/SW of that time, I mentioned capacitive screen to show typical consumer preference.
Btw, you can also add native 3G video calling via front camera to that list, my Nokia N70 did that years earlier in India. Not many westerners seem to know about this feature in my earlier discussions.
Re: Symbian Won
#265I 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…
The Symbian source code was only briefly public and open source, it got closed and unpublished again fairly quickly.
Re: Symbian Won
#266I 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…
PinePhone and Librem 5 are better options for Linux phones:
https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
Also, F(x)tec are making a keyboard based mobile device along the lines of Cosmo and N900.
Re: Symbian Won
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> The end result is more accurate output, at the expense of battery life.
Do you have sources? GPS is passive, yes, but the signal is very weak and several orders of magnitude below the noise threshold. Keeping receiver circuits enabled for a long time costs battery power as well. WiFi information can be obtained entirely passively as well, as AP's transmit their info regularly.
I think the difference rather comes from lots of bloaty background services on Android.
Re: Symbian Won
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
they do, the default file picker for iOS has a 'pick file' native command that then pops a system picker and then returns just the selected file but many companies would rather have full access to enable their own experience. In messaging apps, it is seeing the photos in a small view. Instagram has a full screen browser to enable their own chosen UX. Edit: I just saw a really neat alternative view in iOS 14 whereas t…
Wow! It's so rare that I might have never seen it, or completely forgot about it. However, now that you mention it, I think I remember it from my early days on iOS. Actually the problem is most of apps don't give you the choice between [slick UX + loose control over your data] or [ok UX + perfect control of your data]. If I download Instagram and refuse to access my local storage, I guess I won't be able to share a p…
> If I download Instagram and refuse to access my local storage, I guess I won't be able to share a picture from my phone, right?
Not from within the app, but if you go into the Photos app and share a photo from there, you can choose to share to Instagram, and Instagram will get only that one photo.
Re: Symbian Won
#269Symbian (and Java ME was awful as well) was not developer friendly at all till towards the very end. By then it was too late. You never had a choice to get rid of the annoying untrusted app pop up, and getting code-signing was a nightmare. Apple was in contrast incredibly developer friendly when they started their store and then Android one-upped them (only 25 usd to join!).
I worked in the mobile phone industry 00s. Besides terrible Series 60 UI, Symbian also had non-POSIX (micro?) kernel. For example, file system was a service and handles like a log file handle were not transferable across threads. It made porting apps a pain. Developer tools existed, but were shit and usual failure mode was app crashing without a reason. Symbian had shitty developer experience because internally they…
> Note that there were non-Symbian mobile phones as well e.g. Ericsson
There were also multiple variants of Symbian - S60 was the Nokia UI, but Ericsson and Motorola had Symbian UIQ, in Japan they had MOAP-Symbian
Re: Symbian Won
#270> Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. But that's cool with users. It's not annoying, it's more or less a one time thing, maybe a hint more if the app is a bit more unusual. The Symbian notifications? That's a "I hate you, user". Especially the secure connection. Why would it ever ask that? On the other hand, some of those warn…
>>> Especially the secure connection. Why would it ever ask that? For whatever reason, old Internet Explorers (9? 10? not sure..) do that too...
IIRC latest IE11 on Windows Server 2019 still asking such stupid things by default.