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Of Psion and Symbian

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Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#51

Post by pjmlp »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #40
pjmlp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was that right after the Symbian developer community decided to embrace Qt, the Burning Platform memo came out, telling them to dump C++, learn C# and target Windows Phone 7, with either Silverligh or XNA. In a community that was largety anti-Microsoft, joking how bad Windows CE and Pocket PC used to be, versus Symbian handsets. The majority of the Symbian community felt betrayed and went elsewhere, to Ap…

It's always amuses me how people blame Elop, completely ignoring everything what was done before him. >> No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph. >> In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother…

There is a difference from random people around the Internet, and people that were actually Nokia employees at the time.

And yes, the board as well had its own share to blame, including hiring Elop in first place, with a big bonus payment clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobile business unit, which naturally he ended up doing as well, and created a huge scandal in Finland's press at the time.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#52

Post by justsomehnguy »

pjmlp wrote: post #51
justsomehnguy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always amuses me how people blame Elop, completely ignoring everything what was done before him. >> No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph. >> In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother…

There is a difference from random people around the Internet, and people that were actually Nokia employees at the time. And yes, the board as well had its own share to blame, including hiring Elop in first place, with a big bonus payment clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobile business unit, which naturally he ended up doing as well, and created a huge scandal in Finland's press at the time.

> people that were actually Nokia employees at the time.

>> I was on the Networks unit

By the time the board hired Elop Nokia-tanic was already with a giant hull breach.

Sure, you can claim what your personal experience of an unrelated unit in Nokia gives you a proper visibility to the circumstances, but what Nokia actually did before the memo is telling what were happening there way better than your experience.

And... HP-UX? In 2010? Sigh.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#53

Post by pjmlp »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #52
pjmlp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference from random people around the Internet, and people that were actually Nokia employees at the time. And yes, the board as well had its own share to blame, including hiring Elop in first place, with a big bonus payment clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobile business unit, which naturally he ended up doing as well, and created a huge scandal in Finland's press at the time.

> people that were actually Nokia employees at the time. >> I was on the Networks unit By the time the board hired Elop Nokia-tanic was already with a giant hull breach. Sure, you can claim what your personal experience of an unrelated unit in Nokia gives you a proper visibility to the circumstances, but what Nokia actually did before the memo is telling what were happening there way better than your experience. And.…

See, by 2010, we were already focusing on Red-Hat Linux....

You have no idea of what visibility I actually had, how Networks worked with Mobile, which buildings we shared, common lunch talks, nor I am going to disclose most of the NDA stuff.

So think whatever you want out of it.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#54

Post by inglor_cz »

Someone wrote: post #25
inglor_cz wrote: post #7

I 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)

It seems that every single Symbian development team that I knew developed their own wrapper around the insane Bufs.

What a loss of productivity, to do the same thing again and again.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#55

Post by nick_m »

Symbian Developers - quick question, if anyone here remembers. I think I saw something in their API docs a long time ago, that had some sort of pointer compression thing for linked lists, which look interesting at the time. It wasn't XOR linked lists, it was something else IIRC. Please can anyone shed some light on this?

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#56

Post by lproven »

BirAdam wrote: post #44
lproven wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that struck me, as well. I think he does a lot of cribbing from Wikipedia and does not acknowledge it. Online a few people have pointed out big holes in this story. Small ones, like the Organizer IIXP did not have a backlight: no Organizer model had a backlight, nor did the MC or the Series 3 or 3A. No mention of the Odin or Crystal phones. https://www.oocities.org/epoc_32/odin No mention of the RIM lawsuit (the…

Author here. I don’t use Wikipedia at all. Generally, I read old magazines, books, and occasionally old websites in the Wayback machine when I can’t find other stuff. I then write. I don’t make citations as my work is meant to be neither authoritative nor academic. I research and write for my own enjoyment. As for Davies, I didn’t bring him up because I didn’t have a ton of material on him. For Xchange, I again didn’…

Thanks for replying!

May I suggest publishing some kind of contact info? I have gone far out of my way to try to contact you with corrections before, including doing WHOIS requests on your domains, emailing `abuse@` as a common catch-all address, and so on, with no success.

Citations are one thing, but "more info..." links are good.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#57

Post by fch42 »

pjmlp wrote: post #32
inglor_cz wrote: post #7

I 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…

Bringing in Qt, and PIPS (P.I.P.S. Is POSIX on Symbian OS), in a Eclipse based IDE (Carbide), helped make the development experience much better, but then came Elop and ruined everything, with management's board help.

PIPS made it very clear that the way-forward was a unixish kernel/base system - as Apple did, as Android did, and in fact, years before either, as Nokia did with Maemo/Meego.

It was pure facade to say "continue with Symbian because PIPS + Qt". There were a lot of strange quirks in PIPS because the underlaying system/kernel wasn't unixish. And there were a lot of things all unixish systems as of 2008 already did well (multi-CPU, large memory) which Symbian really struggled with. Some of the "small-system optimisation" in Symbian (the single global service message port / queuing system) made it very hard to parallelize/scale out.

Nokia somehow was so uncomfortable with the idea of an opensource "base" that they rather bet on / sold out to Microsoft. But then, this is water down the river, and we will never know whether "alternatives" to the bet they made would have had better returns.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#58

Post by rajaravivarma_r »

I loved Symbian, because it was hackable. It had mShell and PyS60 that gave direct access to everything the system had. I remember backing up text messages and contacts using mShell.

I accessed a heart rate monitor via BT using PyS60. Both were pretty straight forward.

With Android, termux comes close.

I had a colleague who worked in Nokia, on a TCS contract. He explained how the team was devasted upon hearing the news that Meego would be abandoned and Windows OS would be used.

I was hoping for Meego/Maemo before 13 years, then Sailfish and then Ubuntu touch. I don't know if there is any hope of mobile Linux (not Android) anymore.

The problem is majorily a limiting hardware, than the software itself. We had a Sailfish mobile in India, but the hardware was very disappointing that evev if you could live with the limited software ecosystem, the hardware was not really useful.

I see the same trend with PinePhone and Librem.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#59

Post by hawski »

e-_pusher wrote: post #45
hawski wrote: post #36

Sometimes I would like to have a small laptop with black and white screen or maybe 8 bit color that would have extreme (measured in days) or almost unlimited battery power (solar cell?). Something that would have a C compiler for happy hacking, though I would like to have a Linux kernel on it. I am not sure about connectivity though. We made huge efficiency and battery chemistry gains, but software is lacking. Though…

Check out this Android tablet, which would support running gcc through Termux I think. https://daylightcomputer.com/

Very nice concept, but I'm afraid this device running on a MediaTek SoC will never run a main line Linux so I expect to see 2-3 years of support.

I would prefer for the device to be inherently hackable and that requires running on a main line kernel.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#60

Post by isr »

macdice wrote: post #49
isr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel your pain. I'm in the same boat as you (backed the astro slide - didn't get one). I used the original Planet Computers device with psion-like keyboard, the Gemini, as my daily driver for a few years. The keyboard was no gimmick - it really felt like a quasi mini-laptop. A brilliant device, even considering the weak cpu (as compared to similarly priced phones) Such a shame ... (btw, had a psion 2, psion 3, psio…

Surprisingly, they are still taking orders: https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/astro-slide I suppose this means that they still have a firm intention to produce eventually, hopefully even with an updated chipset given that the original parts are lost ("ODM is effectively unwilling to release remaining produced stock and the pre-purchased chipsets"!) Obviously you know all that, fellow backer, but just in case any…

Great, so that means someone will hack an astro slide into a time machine. Ok, I'm game
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