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Symbian Source Code

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Re: Symbian Source Code

#51

Post by jillesvangurp »

marcodiego wrote: post #37

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…

Originally the N8 was going to run Meego. The N8 should have been a flagship phone running Linux. Instead they chickened out and and went with Symbian instead; pretty late in the development process.

I had an N8. Really nice device. A 13 megapixel camera in 2010? was pretty awesome and the aluminium body plus oled screen were pretty amazing as well. It actually had a screen saver mode that would stay on during the night where they'd only light a few pixels to show a clock.

But it was crippled by the OS; Symbian just wasn't great. And of course it still featured the resistive touch screen instead of a capacitive one (which Apple used).

Meego eventually shipped via the N900 (nice but very awkward form factor) and the only device that could have been great, the N9. Except they launched that years late and with the announcement that whole platform was being cancelled and the phone was for developers only. A misguided UI switch from GTK to QT, which Nokia bought to rescue Symbian did not help either.

Then windows phone started happening and and they unceremoniously killed Symbian. Then they handed the keys to MS. Somewhere in between, Nokia actually shipped a Nokia Android device, which MS promptly killed. Nokia also had another Linux platform (called Meltemi) under development aimed at feature phones. But that whole department got layed off a few months before the MS acquisition. I actually got caught up in that particular round (despite never having worked in that department). In the years after that, tens of thousands of engineers were shown the door. Probably the most bizarre and one of the largest layoff round of highly qualified hardware and software engineers in recent history.

Nokia had a great thing and they ran it straight into the ground. Arrogance and incompetence lead to a lot of bad decision making. The N8 is probably the key moment it went wrong for Nokia. They had all the solutions ready for market and then they chickened out and stuck with Symbian. There was more than a little bit of anger inside the company about that decision. The Symbian camp won and killed the company. Absolutely nothing they tried in the nearly three years that followed worked out.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#52

Post by JohnBooty »

marcodiego wrote: post #37

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…

It's funny how the top two comments on this article are (1) yours, talking about how far ahead of its time this phone was, even compared to modern phones in 2022 and (2) another post from a Nokia engineer talking about how frustratingly limited Symbian was thanks to cooperative multitasking, etc.

Of course, both are simultaneously true.

As you say, this phone was definitely ahead of its time as an open computing platform.

I had no idea that it even had an FM transmitter and support for composite video as well as HDMI. Thank you for sharing that.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#53

Post by zozbot234 »

pm2222 wrote: post #25

This reminds me of those android tv boxes. Their spec is pretty good to run linux. Is there generic way to convert them to say arch/ubuntu linux?

If they can be boot-unlocked and run a custom ROM, you could look into supporting them under postmarketOS. That's the closest we get to a clean Linux install on AOSP-native devices.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#54

Post by rollcat »

marcodiego wrote: post #37

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…

> That's why we should support them or else we will continue walking backwards.

I would love to, but the reality is that unless you're in the Android/iOS duopoly ecosystem, you're increasingly unable to participate in some parts of society. Talking to people, banking, food delivery, parking, public transport...

Re: Symbian Source Code

#55

Post by flaviojuvenal »

pavlov wrote: post #48
marcodiego wrote: post #37

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…

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…

Besides the awful UI, it missed several key third-party apps that Android and iOS had. Also the GMail integration was pretty bad.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#56

Post by abcd_f »

umarniz wrote: post #31

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 m…

Earlier Windows versions shipped with the same wonderful developer experience. My favourite was a bool API function returning 2 under certain circumstances that you’d better be aware of.

And by “earlier” I mean from Win 3.1 and up to W8 era or thereabouts, when the documentation finally started to improve.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#57

Post by dm319 »

marcodiego wrote: post #37

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…

As other's have already mentioned, Symbian traces it routes back to the early Psion Organisers, which ran a pre-emptive multitasking operating system before Windows did, and was thought to be Microsoft's biggest competitor back then [1]. I've used the Psion II, and had a 3a, which you could program in their basic-like OPL language. The 5mx looked like Win95 in a palmtop and was a great pocket computing device with a reasonable keyboard, terminal, email client and internet connectivity. I remember back in 1998 or so looking longingly at the expensive phones that came with a built-in modem (Nokia 6210 and Ericsson R320 from memory), so I could use email and web on the go. Nokia took EPOC and became the lead in the Symbian consortium, using it on spiritual successors of the Psions - the 9300 and 9500, and when the E90 came out with a magnesium case and built in keyboard I had to get one.

That was in 2007, around the time of the first iphone, but was so much more capable. Incredible at that time having all that power in your pocket. I never got lost in foreign cities because I could just get a GPS lock on the train station and find my way back, without using very expensive data in a foreign country. It was a strange thing being able to access the internet anywhere back then. In some ways it was a better time - social media networks hadn't cottoned on to the ability to deliver dopamine from the pockets of world's population, so the device felt powerful, but not like a ball and chain, or distraction-device like my pixel does these days.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/why-is-bill-gates-so-scar...

Re: Symbian Source Code

#58

Post by usr1106 »

atleta wrote: post #39

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 agr…

I would claim that something 50% of the application developers writing code for Nokia (internal or contractors) could not handle strings correctly. It was in theory C++ code, but because compilers were not very good at the time when EPOC32 was developed and memory was pretty limited there were special implementations to work around all the limitations. Programming was not easy, productivity was low, and buggy application code was the norm.

I vaguely remember in the very late days there might have been some simplifications, but the train had gone already at that time.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#59

Post by secondcoming »

gendal wrote: post #46

There'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 se…

Find the post in that article by Dennis May. It explains Nokia. The atmosphere in Symbian/Nokia towards the end was really bad.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#60

Post by [deleted] »

marcodiego wrote: post #37

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…

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