Fond memories of running my day to day (email, diary, expenses, task management) of a Psion 3a with 3xAA batteries and a modem/cable to my Nokia mobile.
Symbian Source Code
61–70 of 199 posts
Re: Symbian Source Code
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't have any data to back this up, but I think they sold hundreds of millions of high end (and expensive for the time) smartphones running Symbian. Remember the N line? The E line? Communicators? All running Symbian, all bestsellers for years.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#63I 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 plat…
Symbian wasn't actually limited to cooperative multitasking. The kernel certainly supported preemptive multitasking, and apps could use multithreading if they wanted to. The POSIX threads API was available too.
However since everything in Symbian was designed first and foremost to minimize power use and memory requirements, the framework actively recommended against use of threads. Instead they asked you to schedule things on the app's main thread which gave the framework more control over when to run your callbacks. This wasn't a terrible idea at all, but the implementation of this system as a C++ multiple inheritance contraption was pretty confusing as I recall.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#64I 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 p…
Is Odin still a thing?
Re: Symbian Source Code
#65I 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…
One of my colleagues in Nokia Research Center actually created and maintained the python port to symbian. He was dealing with some crazy stuff. NRC actually ported quite a bit of oss to Symbian. You could actually run a webserver on the device which you could share to the internet with a reverse proxy. So, you could host your own photos from your device or use it as a webcam. Php, apache, mysql were part of this effort if I remember correctly. Another team in the same lab was responsible for porting Webkit to Symbian. This actually shipped when the iphone was nothing but a rumor. Ajax websites running on a smart phone. In 2005 when Ajax was still a new thing. Amazing stuff.
Of course all of this was labelled as research and wasn't taken too serious by the business units until it was too late. A pity, because a lot of the stuff that NRC produced wasn't bad. There was a thing called friendview that existed before foursquare was a thing where you could share your location on a map with friends. The team that did that also did another app that allowed people to share photos. Instagram was not a thing yet back then. Another team was doing a thing called sports tracker. These were tiny teams doing amazing things. Sports tracker basically was allowed to take their software outside of Nokia and create a company around it. Nokia shipped a lot of stuff like this via Nokia Betalabs. A lot of that stuff came from teams in Nokia Research Center.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 p…
Is Odin still a thing?
I don't know. Last time I re-imaged a Samsung phone, I used Heimdall[1]. It is open source and runs on linux.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#67I 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 ni…
I still belief Elop was a MS trojan horse to somehow get the Nokia phone devision to Microsoft. The whole "burning platform" memo together with hamstringing the N9 which was a great phone (I used one until the battery died some day) and OS (maybe we would not have this IOS/android duopoly if Nokia would have really pushed Meego), it all seemed incredibly unprofessional and more like the actions of someone competitor not what the CEO would do.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't have any data to back this up, but I think they sold hundreds of millions of high end (and expensive for the time) smartphones running Symbian. Remember the N line? The E line? Communicators? All running Symbian, all bestsellers for years.
No, I remember attending parties when 1 or 2 millions of a model had been sold. At the same time Nokia sold over 100 million of feature phones a year.
Edit:
As you write they were expensive. So while Nokia was the undisputd leader in the segment for a couple of years the absolute numbers were not that big. I remember some year the worldwide phone market was 400 million a year. Nokia had over 100 million of them, but smart phones (Symbian) only single digit millions.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#69I 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 ni…
It was capacitive touch. The catch was it was not bonded to the lcd like more modern smart phones are. This meant that it was a 5 minute job by a smart 13 year old to replace the digitizer without needing to replace the lcd.
I loved my N8. Built-in FM transmitter was awesome. And don't get me started on how many times it got dropped and laughed it off. At least 50 times onto concrete and such.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have any data to back this up, but I think they sold hundreds of millions of high end (and expensive for the time) smartphones running Symbian. Remember the N line? The E line? Communicators? All running Symbian, all bestsellers for years.
No, I remember attending parties when 1 or 2 millions of a model had been sold. At the same time Nokia sold over 100 million of feature phones a year. Edit: As you write they were expensive. So while Nokia was the undisputd leader in the segment for a couple of years the absolute numbers were not that big. I remember some year the worldwide phone market was 400 million a year. Nokia had over 100 million of them, but…
One model, N95, sold 10 million units. It was priced at around $500. That's 5 billion revenue from one model alone. I'm sure feature phones sold a lot more, but that's irrelevant.