Symbian Source Code

Symbian was the era that trains you to never be afraid of debugging the hardest problems and understand how big of a blessing documentation is.

A few examples of my childhood experiences making a game for Symbian:

1) Debugging that one problem which would cause the whole OS to crash

The crash log didn't help cause it wouldn't flush the logs to disk in time. My under developed concepts of multi-threading didn't help much either not that I know much more today 10 years later.

2) Overriding OS memory safety to read accelerometer data from memory in phones that didn't have APIs for it

The patience and creative thinking you learn tackling with such high levels of uncertainty and painful problems is incredible.

I am not aware of how engineers learn engineering (I am self taught) but this kind of patience and endurance does shape a lot of my engineering skills today.

Before the iPhone, mobile device companies were held ransom by wireless carriers. Carriers dictated everything about the phones, down the Verizon demanding Bluetooth file transfer was disabled to force people to use data minutes to send pictures.

This is one of the things that I think modern techies have forgotten. No matter what you think of Apple, they were the only ones with enough market power to force carriers out of that position (Apple having been newly minted at the king of digital music) . It’s why the iPhone was exclusive to AT&T — because Verizon was the market leader and AT&T had to make the deal to get the iPhone. And Jobs wouldn’t make the deal with any carrier that insisted on adding crapware to the phone.

I've played some with those and it's not pretty. It's all the pain you get with commercial SBCs except: even less support, much lower quality hardware, and terrible thermal solutions (ventilation holes under the case with no feet and tiny/non-existent heatsinks).

In the end what killed my interest in them is that the cheapest you can get those is like 30 USD and for that price you can also get X86 thin clients that are just better in every single way.

Still, if you want to get your feet wet I suggest you start with RK3318. Those boards are much harder to brick than AmLogic and are the only ones with at least some support from Armbian: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17597-csc-armbian-for-rk3318...

I have to cite Nokia N8 [1]. It had USB otg, mini hdmi, FM receiver, FM transmitter, MicroSD memory card, TV out and Nokia later released a TV receiver adapter for it.

A friend of mine had one. He said he spent a few days in the countryside watching films he copied to an SD card on an old tube TV with it. He also told me how he could play MP3 files and listen it on the old FM radio that was available in the house he was in. It was also possible for him, once in a city a few kilometers away, to answer e-mails and read news using WiFi. You could just plug the mini HDMI to a modern TV, plug a keyboard on it and use a Bluetooth mouse to get a fully functional computer where you could even write and run python programs. All this at a time when basically nobody even talked about "convergence".

We've been walking backwards since then. These days the only devices able to give similar power are the still unpolished linuxphones. That's why we should support them or else we will continue walking backwards.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N8

I used to work for Nokia Research during the mid 2000's. I remember how hard it was to get the source code for this back then as internal employees... One of my colleagues was working on a research prototype that needed tighter integration with the system than what you could achieve with a deployed app. So he needed the source code and the build environment for the OS.

And for that he needed quite a few people to agree and he had to sign an NDA (again, as an employee, not a subcontractor!). Then, of course the whole thing was pretty hard to make work on his machine.

Later on I did some work with the (public) SDK as well. The build system was based on the GNU toolchain. More precisely, a windows port of the GNU toolchain, so it would only work on windows. But even on windows it had a lot of warts (because these tools were build for unix in the first place, so e.g. drive letters and back slashes were problematic). As far as I can remember, a lot of the build tools were written in perl. There was some script to generate makefiles for your project and even that, as far as I can remember had a front end script. (I remember something called MAKMAKE.BAT, but I may be wrong.)

The whole thing was a pretty frustrating experience. And we haven't talked about the libraries, the OS (cooperative multi tasking, everything is a callback) or memory management ('descriptors' that made trivial string operations a pain). No wonder it couldn't keep up with android and ios. Now, to be fair, the OS was based on a core and concepts created in the mid 1990s to allow software development on devices with 64k of memory or something. But even with several megabytes of RAM (so the early 2000s), that programming model was obviously way too constraining.