If anyone's interested here's [0] a Mediafire archive of Symbian developer sources of all kinds, from compilers and SDKs to manuals. [0] https://www.mediafire.com/folder/79jhy594xb3uk/Symbian_Devel...
Don't forget to `abld reallyclean`!
Symbian Source Code
41–50 of 199 posts
Re: Symbian Source Code
#42Spent some time at Nokia when I was fresh out of university. The thrill of getting "hello world" on the screen in Symbian/S60 is not something I'll ever forget. Took ages of battling CodeWarrior and I think even a simple app was something like 6 files, but seeing code I wrote running on a phone in 2004 was pretty awesome.
The moved on from CodeWarrior to Carbide, which was based on Eclipse.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#43Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.
Quite a few of those hours were wasted and contributed to Nokia's demise. They should have switched away from Symbian waaay sooner. I think clinging to it is a classic case of the sunken cost fallacy. By ~2005-2006 it was obvious, at least for some of us, developers, that continuing to invest in Symbian is a huge mistake.
By then, Nokia had been working on a Linux based OS for years. (That would become Meego.) But, if I'm not mistaken, at least a thousand people were working on Symbian and Symbian based products. So switching away from it was simply out of question. It would have been too bold a move. (Especially, since Nokia was dominating the market and these products brought in a very nice profit.)
Re: Symbian Source Code
#44I 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 agr…
> 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).
About a decade ago I worked on a project for a South Korean cellphone vendor whose name I'll not cite for somewhat obvious reasons. The build system was similar to what you describe: a poor port of unix tools for windows that required windows xp which was already obsolete in 2011. I asked why don't we use linux since the build was probably more adequate for that environment. The answer was something like "because they spent a lot of money and time to make this port so we can use windows." Korea was mostly a windows-only country at the time. They had to change because of android, but for them it seemed already too little too late.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#45I 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…
Yeah, the fact that we call iphone/android smartphones is kind of triggering. Especially in the early days they represented the dumbest phones imaginable, with the only saving grace having a better app-store to try and make up for it.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#46There's a great (and insanely detailed) book on the rise and fall of Symbian by a guy who was there for most, if not all, of the journey:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkab...
When I say detailed, I mean detailed... David Wood seems to have copies of every email and memo he ever wrote when he was there... and he doesn't hold back when it comes to sharing them.
Required reading for anybody seeking to build a platform business.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#47Wow. I did a quick random sample of their code and it's really clean, which is especially impressive in the bare-metal domain.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#48I 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…
I also had a Nokia N8. The UI was absurdly bad compared to iPhone at the same price.
It's not obvious in Nokia's carefully crafted screenshots, but the N8 UI was very static, slow, and unfriendly to touch actions. It was fundamentally designed around menu navigation on phone keypads. That's not something you can simply fix by making the menu items touchable instead of using arrow keys, yet that's basically what Nokia tried to do.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#49Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.
Nokia earned billions from this code. I bet those hours were paid back many times over.
No, they probably didn't earn billions from that code. Their biggest cash cows were feature phones (non-Symbian) that sold 10-50 times as many as Symbian phones and were developed with many times smaller budgets. While some Symbian phones were pretty good for their area, there were probably at least as many failed projects as successful ones.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#50If anyone's interested here's [0] a Mediafire archive of Symbian developer sources of all kinds, from compilers and SDKs to manuals. [0] https://www.mediafire.com/folder/79jhy594xb3uk/Symbian_Devel...
Thank you, this is gold . I have discovered a couple of nokia phones in my drawer and I was wondering how the hell I could develop on them. Since then I have discovered the whole "cooked ROM" scene, which has of course died in the meantime. I hope that archive will answer my questions. Btw, if anyone knows, is a special piece of hardware needed to flash the firmware of a nokia symbian phone?
Symbian devs had their own flashing stations/cradles but at some point it became possible to flash newer phones over USB. The software tool was called Phoenix and used regularly be leaked.