I had the 3c and the Revo. The Revo was initially a revelation. I paired it with an infrared modem connected to a Nokia that enabled me to surf the internet and get driving directions on the move 7 years before the iPhone. Alas working with the iMac was a pain and the Revo would randomly lose memory due to a power system design flaw. At that stage I ditched Revo and Psion for a HP WinCE device. More of a downgrade. I purchased the Gemini PDA when it came out. It was marvellous but expensive and fragile. I now have a DIamond Mako and a 5mx that I play with occasionally. In hindsight the best Psion was the 3c. It was affordable, robust and just worked. It got stolen on a bus in Chile in '97. Otherwise I bet I would still be using it.
Of Psion and Symbian
21–30 of 62 posts
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were…
That's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in the last years. Especially QML for the UI parts was well ahead of the competition, giving declarative and hardware accelerated UIs with great dev convenience.
At managerial level, only half of Nokia was onboard with Qt. The other half wanted to chuck everything and just adopt something developed elsewhere; I reckon most of these folks simply resented the size the company had reached, and wanted to streamline. The latter half won the political battle and brought Elop in to do the dirty work.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#23> He was aware of both CPU and Sinclair Research, and he called them up.
This is one of those sentences that make abortretry.fail articles feel slapped together from other sources without attribution. Who is “CPU” in this sentence?
Context and a little digging reveals it is likely a reference to another early British company in the PC space, Cambridge Processor Unit Ltd. , described in the History section of the Acorn computer Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers
This random reference to a random company never goes anywhere is never properly explained in the first place. It gives the feel of something that has been quickly adapted by the author without much thought or understanding.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#24I had the 3c and the Revo. The Revo was initially a revelation. I paired it with an infrared modem connected to a Nokia that enabled me to surf the internet and get driving directions on the move 7 years before the iPhone. Alas working with the iMac was a pain and the Revo would randomly lose memory due to a power system design flaw. At that stage I ditched Revo and Psion for a HP WinCE device. More of a downgrade. I…
Your experience sounds eerily similar to mine, especially the hacky workarounds to preempt smartphones (I peaked when getting online by Bluetoothing a Clio to a Sony Ericsson). Your comment about the robustness of the 3c reminded me about when mine fell out of a pocket when I was cycling and a car drove over it. It emerged unscathed.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#25I wrote a lot of code for Symbian devices once. The system was extremely efficient on low-powered machines (by which I mean both a slow CPU and a weak battery). As far as wringing maximum performance from hardware-that-be, I have never worked with a better system. The learning curve of the API was insane, though (and the system dragged a lot of ancient pre-32-bit PSION/EPOC remnants within itself). So was the heterog…
> I wrote a lot of code for Symbian devices once.
I sympathize with you. The learning curve of the API indeed was insane. For example, here’s a description of its at least 8 different string classes (the intro mentions 7, but doesn’t mention RBuf) that you had to know about: https://www.developer.com/mobile/mastering-symbian-os-descri... (and that’s way better documentation than I remember seeing at the time)
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were…
Windows is being replaced by Apple? Or doing the replacing?
Native Windows was replaced by the web and Electron-style wrappers long ago.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#27Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were…
I was in Espoo HQ, the week after the burning platform memo, which killed most developer love that was worked on during the previous years building up to Qt and PIPS. Everyone I talked to wasn't that happy with management.
Meanwhile marketing made sure everything looked fine on the outside, still recruiting app developers to the platform they were planning on abandoning.
Wasted 2 years on that bitter, bitter lesson followed by prolonged depression.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#29I learned how to program on that PSION II! My dad brought one back from the UK (must've been '93 or maybe '94) and I got hooked. I still have BASIC (or I guess OPL) scribbles from when I was like 7 years old in a notepad. Nostalgia overload :)
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in Espoo HQ, the week after the burning platform memo, which killed most developer love that was worked on during the previous years building up to Qt and PIPS. Everyone I talked to wasn't that happy with management.
Meanwhile marketing made sure everything looked fine on the outside, still recruiting app developers to the platform they were planning on abandoning. Wasted 2 years on that bitter, bitter lesson followed by prolonged depression.
Sorry about that, I was on the Networks unit, still I could follow most of the Mobile stuff from inside.
After the Metrowerks based, tooling, there were two attempts with Eclipse, the first wasn't that great and I no longer remember the name, the second one was Carbide.
Which is when then eventually acquired Qt, introduced PIPS to ease the pain, and started to make Symbian C++ dialect more friendlier, and closer to common programming without those strange two phase constructors, handles, and special suffix names on member functions.
So the community was starting to see the light of transition that was several years in the making, and out of the sudden, that "we are going Windows Phone 7" on a company that was UNIX first for several years.
When I joined, all network software was originally targeting HP-UX, for example.
So there wasn't much Microsoft love on the corridors.