161–170 of 199 posts
Compared to iOS and Android development, Symbian was extremely hard, and iOS was much easy even with a whole new language (Objective-C, not the shiny Swift) to learn.
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...
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Fair enough! I defer to your superior wisdom. So, four years earlier, not five. :-) I have seen comments from people who worked at Accenture in the last days of Symbian, about the difficulty of putting together the build system today. Apparently bits need a specific MS C++ compiler that only runs on WinXP. I think it would be wonderful to see this resurrected and ported to the RasPi or something. Symbian was capable…
> One of the things that crippled Symbian in the market was the range of UIs, all incompatible I disagree. All of them were used on different devices, with S60 being the most popular and used on most phones, just regular market differentiation.
For example: https://www.theregister.com/2011/01/12/symbian_history_part_...
(From my employers, but not by me and before I worked there.)
This whole series is well worth a read.
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Worth mentioning the N-Gage, which got a Wordle port recently, powered by SDL2: https://hackaday.com/2022/04/08/wordle-comes-to-the-nokia-n-... I remember the N-Gage being lambasted when it came out, but recently I realized that those same people also lambasted the iPod, and maybe I can't trust those people's judgment about tech. You know, the Slashdot crowd. Maybe it was a good system that was just poorly positioned…
The original N-Gage made a few astoundingly bad industrial design decisions that came up in literally every review. * They put the phone microphone and speaker on the side of the device, which meant holding the top of the gadget to your head if you wanted to use it as a phone without a headset -- this was both awkward physically and looked phenomenally stupid. * You had to remove the battery to get to the game cartri…
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Fair enough! I defer to your superior wisdom. So, four years earlier, not five. :-) I have seen comments from people who worked at Accenture in the last days of Symbian, about the difficulty of putting together the build system today. Apparently bits need a specific MS C++ compiler that only runs on WinXP. I think it would be wonderful to see this resurrected and ported to the RasPi or something. Symbian was capable…
I loved UIQ3. My M600i is still my second-favourite smartphone, only overtaken by the Nokia N9 running Maemo/Meego
All of them were good. I'm not arguing about the pros and cons of any particular UI.
The problem was that there were about half a dozen different Symbian UIs, and the devices were totally incompatible. You couldn't run an app from one UI on another device with the same OS version but a different UI.
Apps even had to be developed with different toolchains. Some GUI toolkits were entirely proprietary, some used Qt, some used Java. Apps weren't even portable between UIs!
That was disastrous.
Under the skin, Symbian was quite remarkably good in some ways. For instance it was the only phone OS where the main CPU could also run the GSM comms stack: its realtime support and multitasking made this viable. Every other smartphone dedicates a separate, loosely-couple CPU with its own OS to running the comms.
Symbian devices with say a 16MHz ARM and 8MB of RAM were entirely usable. That is unachievable with any UNIX-based smartphone OS.
No, it doesn't matter any more in efficiency terms, when a $5 computer has a gig of RAM and 4 cores. (I am thinking of the Raspberry Pi Zero W here, for clarity.)
But think of attack surfaces. Think of size of stack to be ported to a new platform. Think of the amount of code to learn before making changes. Think of amount of code to verify. Think of the rebuild time. Think of team sizes. Think of there being any chance that a small team can study and learn the entire codebase.
This is meaningfully impossible with any modern xNix-based OS. It's too vast. It would take a lifetime to study the whole source tree.
Whereas Symbian was built by a tiny team in a few years, in a then-new state-of-the-art language, and it scaled from a single-CPU machine with 1 core in the double-digit MHz and a few megabytes of RAM, and a decade later, it was still competitive against machines with multiple gigahertz-class cores and hardware 3D processors running a truecolour GUI, using a desktop OS sized in the gigabytes developed by teams of hundreds of thousands of coders.
That is a remarkable achievement.
It's remarkable not that it died, but that it lasted so long and held up so well.
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…
Do you think there is anything useful for modern day programmer in the codebase? Any value on this code for anyone, anymore? Or do we have better alternatives and rewrites for everything that can be found in this repo?
There are only a handful of C++ OSes out there.
• EPOC32/Symbian.
• BeOS (now lost somewhere inside of Access) and Haiku, its FOSS recreation.
• Genode (still in prototype stage, really)
• Serenity OS (not yet self-hosting, & barely able to run on bare metal.)
Symbian is by far the most successful, long-lived, best-selling C++ there has ever been.
By 21st century standards, it is tiny, simple, low-resource, fast, and stable. It is SMP-aware and multimedia-friendly, yet realtime-capable.
Symbian, in a way, is what many next-gen OS projects have been aspiring to be for decades.
It also uses standard filesystems, ran on a wide variety of industry-standard hardware, and was built using fairly standard PC tooling: Windows, C++ etc.
If there is nothing to be learned from this, we may as well all give up and go home, because computing is over.
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…
My MC218 still works, pretty crazy. I had the IR modem for it too but lost it somewhere.
I miss the form factor though. Typing this text on a virtual keyboard feels like something is amiss. A real keyboard IMHO just can't be replaced by an on screen keyboard.
Am I the only person who saw this post and figured that it was the source code for a Sybian machine and rolled my eyes, thinking, "How sophisticated could it be, really?"
But then again, remember the somewhat deserved reputation for awareness of that other product line in the software/techie world...
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/06/30/also-known-as-...
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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…
What's more, even if somebody did understand this, any concerns would have fallen on deaf ears as Nokia also had a culture of corporate arrogance. It saw itself as too big & successful to fail. They could make whatever mistakes, but it was alright because they could always revisit and make better decisions later. I don't think they fully realized how wrong they were even years after the Android/iOS duopoly had already solidified - considering how immense amounts of money they kept spending (under M$) in trying to bootstrap the Windows Phone ecosystem that was always destined to fail.
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…