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Of Psion and Symbian

abortretry.fail

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Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#31

Post by pjmlp »

distances wrote: post #19
kmac_ wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

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 Apple and Google.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#32

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#33

Post by lproven »

eduction wrote: post #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 Acor…

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 Canadians though they'd invented email on the move.) No mention of Charles Davies, employee #1.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/06/25/charles_davies/

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270209...

No mention of Psion Xchange running on other 68000 OSes as well as QDOS, and on MS-DOS. Little mention of the award-winning Psion games and some of the superstar developers.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#34

Post by lproven »

bestham wrote: post #5

I often think about this article[1] from the Register that claim that the Paion MX5 was the last computer built by one team hardware and software. [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/26/psion_special/

Yes, that's a favourite of mine, too, and was before I worked there.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#35

Post by johnea »

A great story from the dawn of the idea to the realization of the Nokia SymbianOS phones.

The subsequent M$ purchase of that Nokia phone division was one of the biggest damages done by Microsoft to the computing world.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#36

Post by hawski »

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 it would be probably a quite expensive device that only a few want.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#37

Post by hagbard_c »

I developed a program for the Organiser II which interfaced with a light sensor on the expansion port to record "shadow profiles" of tree crowns which were used to generate tree health statistics for use in forestry. You told the program what species you were going to profile, then walked at a regular pace in a straight line from one side of the crown shadow to the other and it would record a profile to storage, calculate its deviation from the average for that species and use that to produce a health score. Repeat this for a given number of trees per hectare and it gave an indication of the health for that section. All this was based on a theory (which I had my doubts about) of one of my professors and who better to implement it than the one computer nerd who happened to be studying forestry at that university? I don't think the scores were all that useful and remote sensing was starting to take off anyway but it did give me a chance to work with this device. At the same university we used everything from PDP-11's, VAXen plus all matter of other DEC hardware - DEC Rainbows instead of clones, etc - plus a host of HP stuff. Add the Acorn Archimedes a few years later, the Amiga I got for next to nothing 'because it did not work' (a single small electrolytic capacitor had blown its guts, I had one lying around so a few minutes later I had a working Amiga for the price of a good meal. I also rebuilt a CGA (digital TTL input) colour monitor I had lying around by designing and including an analogue RGB input, somewhat to my own amazement it worked just fine) and pretty soon I was doing mostly tech stuff.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#38

Post by BlueTemplar »

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…

You mean something like the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra ?

https://ewritable.com/tablets/onyx-boox-tab-ultra/review/

Not sure about the battery life : since it's one of the higher powered e-ink tablets, it can probably only last a few days ?

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#39

Post by twoodfin »

pavlov wrote: post #6

For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme. Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson). The othe…

Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on.

From what I learned in Losing the Signal, a great history of RIM/Blackberry, their engineering leadership had the same obsession. They were convinced the iPhone would crash any network it was on. To be fair, Cingular/AT&T had plenty of teething troubles, but the product was so compelling and popular, the market for bandwidth adjusted.

Re: Of Psion and Symbian

#40

Post by justsomehnguy »

pjmlp wrote: post #31
distances wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 with all the Symbian shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone market? Money was in Apple and Android.

>> Should I remind you what Elop's memo was a month later, in February 2011?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038979

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