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Symbian, a post-mortem

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Re: Symbian, a post-mortem

#21

Post by [deleted] »

deathchill wrote: post #15
babesh wrote: post #10

This is just from my limited experience trying to develop mobile software around 2002 (J2ME and investigating Symbian) and developing for Android and iOS nowadays. I developed 3 apps on J2ME at that time and investigated Symbian. The impression I got of Symbian of that time was that it was painful to develop against. J2ME was less painful but very, very limited. Think no animation support, just bitmaps, and I have to…

I am just curious but what changed after the iPhone? It seems like there were a couple of app stores (e.g. GetJar) before the iPhone, but I don't know if they differed before the iPhone or if they were basically a less popular earlier version. Did carriers have to approve apps that went into the store or did they have to approve the store as a whole?

[deleted]

Re: Symbian, a post-mortem

#22

Post by osivertsson »

I pre-ordered a Nokia 5630 XpressMusic (S60) in April 2009 and recieved it late May.

It was awesome! Great camera-recording, WiFi, 3.5mm audio plug, good looking, slim. Maybe not a competitor to the iPhone 3g but I felt it was on par with Android devices at the time, and available at only ~260€ without contract.

This feeling lasted for 5 minutes, then it crashed. And it crashed again. And again. 20-30 times that night as I tried different features, before I just gave up. I started to regret my purchase.

It got better over the following year with updates but it never fully stopped to crash. Often it would crash while playing music, which really sucks for a phone sold to me as THE music smartphone. By June 2010 I had switched to a HTC Desire (which I'm still happy with, now with a custom ROM).

It is interesting to read in this post-mortem that 'Testability' was really hard on Symbian, and that problems or bad choices on how e.g. email polling should work, that must have been caught by engineering, somehow slipped through the cracks into the hands of customers.

If testability had been easy and quality the highest prio at Nokia, then the 5630 could have been the phone I still use, and I would have recommended it to friends back then instead of saying 'Stay clear!'. I might even have considered buying another Nokia phone. Things could have been different.

Re: Symbian, a post-mortem

#23

Post by rbanffy »

cycle wrote: post #18
algolicious wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain what you mean by "to a lesser extent Android"? Android lets apps add widgets to the home screen, replace the home screen, replace the browser, run arbitrary background tasks, and so forth. You can even sideload apps and create your own app store. None of this is possible on iOS.

iOS presents a programming model of MVC where the view can be anything. This is basically the same programming model as on OS X and similar to the programming model for windows if you use MFC. I found iOS libraries to be more traditional OS like and more mature. In contrast, Android forces you into activities, layouts, and intents. Layouts basically don't let you layout out things on a pixel basis unless you use the…

> Layouts basically don't let you layout out things on a pixel basis

It's a natural approach when you have devices with different screen resolutions and sizes. Pixel-based layout works well when all devices have the same screen size, but break horribly when they don't. BTW, I'm curious on how the iPhone 5 runs iOS 4 apps.

Re: Symbian, a post-mortem

#24

Post by rbanffy »

cycle wrote: post #17
deathchill wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just curious but what changed after the iPhone? It seems like there were a couple of app stores (e.g. GetJar) before the iPhone, but I don't know if they differed before the iPhone or if they were basically a less popular earlier version. Did carriers have to approve apps that went into the store or did they have to approve the store as a whole?

The app stores were not built into the phones. You had to navigate to those third party app stores via the web and download them to your phone. But that web navigation was done via your computer rather than your phone itself. The phones were serving a baby form of HTML that had to be routed via through the carrier if memory serves.

Many carriers intercept web traffic and, sometimes, inject headers.

Re: Symbian, a post-mortem

#25

Post by cycle »

rbanffy wrote: post #23
cycle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS presents a programming model of MVC where the view can be anything. This is basically the same programming model as on OS X and similar to the programming model for windows if you use MFC. I found iOS libraries to be more traditional OS like and more mature. In contrast, Android forces you into activities, layouts, and intents. Layouts basically don't let you layout out things on a pixel basis unless you use the…

> Layouts basically don't let you layout out things on a pixel basis It's a natural approach when you have devices with different screen resolutions and sizes. Pixel-based layout works well when all devices have the same screen size, but break horribly when they don't. BTW, I'm curious on how the iPhone 5 runs iOS 4 apps.

Layouts also do not let you place views over each other. So there is also an assumption of a flat, non stacking space.
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