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...
Thanks. I wish I knew about these back to high school days 2001. Instead, I learnt J2ME and.... weill still a Java dev until today :p
For what it's worth, I took a mobile software dev course in University, and it targeted mainly Symbian. I learned that I definitely do not want to do that. It was a painful experience.
I ended up doing mobile development anyway, but not until Qt was a viable option for Symbian.
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 o…
This was true in the US. I don’t know about Europe. But it wasn’t true anywhere else. Even in the US it was dominated by Motorola (and BB) as a result. Motorola didn’t have much success outside of Razr in the rest of the world and Nokia and Sony didn’t have much success in the US. So it was really a tale of two worlds. I really liked the Sonys and Nokias of the era. Symbian didn’t screw up the UI and it certainly was…
It was not true in Europe either. You could of course use any device, and in many countries bundling a device with a phone contract was even expressly forbidden. Carriers had no control at all.
Insert the usual disclaimer that Europe has a lot of countries with different legislation, but the carrier stranglehold was a US specific problem.
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…
He was appointed by a Nokia board looking to sell the business to MS. He was a patsy. Most of the bad decision making happened before Elop. And they appointed him to finish the job. The fault lies with the Nokia management and the board, including their former CEO, Jorma Ollila.
I vaguely recall Symbian being adopted/developed(?) by Nokia. It's incredible how early Symbian was, but what's most remarkable is that it wasn't even Nokia's only shot at a smartphone OS, they also had Maemo.
It's a shame Nokia is now throwing away everything they know about Symbian. The new nokia OS is shockingly crap. Some functions straight out don't work and other functions such as T9 text are awful. It's a shame when you realise that their old Symbian phones work perfectly well and there was no need to change it.
Nokia hasn't been making phones for a long time. They license the name for HMD Global and the modern devices have nothing to do with Nokia itself.
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.
Ah true, I forgot about that. The N8 was one of the first devices where they fixed that.
It is odd to see people talking about how Symbian was so early on, in the smartphone era. It's considerably more mature than that. :-) (For the avoidance of doubt: this is a good thing .) Symbian was a rebrand of the Psion 5 and 5MX OS, which was called EPOC32. It also ran on some other hardware, including the Ericsson MC218, Oregon Scientific Osaris, and Geofox One. The first EPOC32 device was the Psion 5 in 1997: h…
The first Symbian based Nokia device was the 9210.
I helped integrate the fax functionality - was amazing to see the first faxes sent and received :)
For anyone wanting to play Nokia N-Gage games (S60? I forget), there is already a lengthy walkthrough and setup of how to emulate the games on Windows that is available on The Internet Archive; complete with a torrent/zip of all the games on the system.
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.
Yes, 10 millions for the N95 sound possible to me. But that was after 10 years of development with many 1000 developers. Revenue is not earnings. The orginal claim was that they earned billions.
Just before the iPhone, I think Nokia were shipping about 70 million Symbian phones a 1/4 and had about 50% of the market profit. Then, it didn’t