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Symbian Won

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Symbian Won

#91

Post by hnbear »

When I moved from the UK to the US in early 2006 I lost my Symbian-running 6680 Nokia, because it couldn't be ported over, it was locked to a UK network and they refused to unlock it. I loved Symbian at the time, losing it took me back to the dark ages.

In the UK I'd had my Nokia 6680 with front and rear cameras, unlimited 3G, multi-tasking apps, a proper web browser, the ability to install apps, and even some crap ability to watch TV. It also had a memory card for storing and playing music. I had it connected to my Powerbook (17" powerbook was my best laptop ever), and had 3G usable browsing speeds anywhere, wirelessly through bluetooth, and the phone's 3G. It synced contacts, emails, etc.

Coming to the US I got the latest and greatest - a Razor. It had an OS that felt like going back to the 70s. No 3G. No camera at all. No apps or ability to use them. Contacts on the SIM with no decent data. All it could do well was text or call.

Even the first iPhones were well behind the Symbian/6680 combo I'd had for a while in the UK (no 3G, no apps, no multi-tasking, no front camera), and it wasn't until the iPhone 4 in 2010 that I got the front camera back, which meant I had feature parity with what I'd had in the UK in 2005.

Re: Symbian Won

#92

Post by pjmlp »

kanox wrote: post #30
mola wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They innovated away privacy and security by relying on the human poor ability of impulse control and hardship with delayed gratification. Basically they made everything shiny and addictive. Is that really innovative? Perhaps 'bad' ui is better when you consider higher order consequences as opposed to concentrating only on first order popularity contest? I'm not saying Nokia and symbian were better BTW. Just noting ho…

This is a ridiculously shallow dismisal. Android and iOS "won" because the phones were vastly more capable.

Android won because it is free beer that the OEMs don't have to pay anyone for licenses, save on development costs and can stick to outdated versions as long as they feel like it.

Re: Symbian Won

#93

Post by draw_down »

Somehow I imagine that Nokia had other goals with Symbian than “increase the number of dialogs in mobile applications”. Like, they probably wanted to sell a lot of phones. Just guessing!

Re: Symbian Won

#94

Post by vetinari »

Fnoord wrote: post #36
qwerty456127 wrote: post #26

> With the latest releases of Android and iOS, we’re back to where we started. Both now prompt you the first time an app asks for access. Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. Every OS should do this, desktop OSes included. For the last 2 decades I've been using personal firewalls on Windows to do just this, now I use LittleSnit…

A personal firewall is nothing more or less than a layer-7 firewall which rules you can (somehow) manage as user you are logged in with, with a nice GUI. There is Open Snitch [1] (plus forks/patches) for Linux, if you're after such. [1] https://www.opensnitch.io

Editing the rules as a user with a GUI is the easy part. The more difficult parts are in details:

- how do you recognize which applications the packets belongs to? Even if you would get pid in the rules engine (which you normally don't), how do you name it? /proc/$pid/cmdline can be manipulated at will by the process; then you need to recognize additional parameters when you are using applications that run other code, from bash to virtualbox.

- what happens to the connection while the firewall is waiting for the user input in the UI? Linux apps handle long timeouts badly

- what happens to other connections while the firewall is waiting for the user input in the UI? Right now, unfortunately, whey would have to wait too.

- LittleSnitch does interesting heuristic wrt hostname/ip translation - you can get different (or no) hostname via reverse query than the application asked for. You need to monitor what each application is resolving and what answers it get. If you get same IPs for different hostnames for a single application, all bets are off, only application knows which one it connects to (you can eventually learn with DPI, but for that it might be too late). For applications with their own resolvers using DoH/DoT, tough luck.

The first problem could be solved at the level of sandbox runtimes (i.e. flatpak et al), i.e. when you know, that the application is running in the namespace belonging to specific flatpak package, you would present that as that specific application, they cannot lie about that anymore but the price is, that you can handle only sandboxed apps; for scripting and so on you still have to find how to distinguish specific instances. For all the other problems, you would have to figure them out.

Re: Symbian Won

#95

Post by pjmlp »

secondcoming wrote: post #87
pjmlp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the inside it wasn't that apparent, hence why the first Linux based prototypes did not had any radio support. And as cumbersome as Symbian C++ might have been, Android Studio + NDK + JNI wrappers still make me wish for Carbide + Symbian C++ + PIPS.

Originally we used CodeWarrior internally and then Carbide. Most of the Carbide work was done in Dallas and I remember them having a stressful time dealing with Symbian's weird MMP + abld build system.

Yeah, I know also those nice Perl based scripts with batch files glue somehow being called from CodeWarrior, just referred Carbide, because at the end the experience wasn't that bad, specially by the Belle days.

Google just doesn't get it, note that major GDC 2020 Android talks are mostly related to NDK improvements, 10 years later.

Re: Symbian Won

#97

Post by namdnay »

secondcoming wrote: post #60

I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Net…

Oh god I've got flashbacks of those weird exception stacks you had to manage manually

Re: Symbian Won

#99

Post by TheRealPomax »

This kind of reads like the exact counter-point to the title: Symbian was doing the right thing, but in such a horrible fashion that ios and android were able to capitalise on "we offer less friction" at the expensive of what history has shown we had to pay for that convience. And history equally shoes we collectively quite happily did?

Re: Symbian Won

#100

Post by dangus »

I think the connection this article is trying to make is sort of a stretch.

The way modern iOS and Android handles asking for permissions doesn’t seem all that similar to me.

Symbian was asking about network connectivity because, at the time, mobile phone networks charged for data in ridiculously small increments at high prices.

One of Apple’s biggest innovations was to convince Cingular to sell an unlimited data plan at a price acceptable to the general consumer and not just for businesses.

If I recall correctly, there was a good period of time where BlackBerry service plans cost more than the iPhone by 10 or 20 dollars per month, and yet a BlackBerry really didn’t have a fast/usable enough web browser to even consume as much data.

The iPhone was so popular that it was bringing Cingular’s network to its knees, especially during sports events and things like that.

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