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Comment by munctional | Hacker News Reader

The US market, while high in visibility, is largely irrelevant in the global scope. Nokia has a massive install base.

Massive install base, yet no hype. There's more hype for Nokia's Linux phone than for any random Symbian smartphone. I coded for Symbian many years ago -- it's a dead end. The OS literally has no future. Open sourcing it is just part of the death spiral.

At least this might give some of the dedicated developers, whomever are left, a chance to actually fix some of the more annoying bugs.

I have the N900. It replaced my E71. The Skype integration is amazing. :-)

I agree that Symbian is a dead end. I have two books on Symbian development, and Symbian's bizarre form of C++ and their relatively complex code signing system drove me away from the platform.

With the N900 as a vanguard, I'm excited to see just how far Nokia can take its open, Linux-based smartphones.

With Symbian being open sourced, what are the chances of getting a virtual Symbian device going on the N900?

Pretty low unless someone is willing to put a lot of money into it. The problem with Symbian is gazillion bizarre corner cases and exceptional situations -- this makes it hard to develop for, and also makes making a proper emulator very work-intensive.

This may have been even crazier, so there may be hope yet...

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/31/mac-os-x-10-3-installed-o...

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