The problem is symbian is clunky. The UI looks old and boring. It is slow, it is written in C++ with complicated interfaces. Not great software for a limited device like a phone.
Its also worth noting that it is not only Symbian, but Nokia's conservative and limited vision on innovation.
It's a real-time OS that has a long history of running on weaker hardware. Consider that most new Symbian phones have an ARM processor clocked at ~400mhz (the fastest have a 600Mhz CPU) and have 128MB of memory. This has a big impact on price, Symbian devices are (much) cheaper than the iPhone/Android devices.
The problems you are complaining about are connected to the UI, which indeed is no match for the UI of the iPhone or even Android. Even so, Symbian will make for a great middle-level and low-level OS. Due to the low hardware requirements Nokia can lower the prices and offer longer battery lives.
Symbian was designed for even weaker devices than I used when I developed for it years ago. As a developer, you're dealing with technology designed for hardware that simply doesn't exist anymore. When you have enough hardware to deliver what people want (like a full web browser) you have enough hardware for a decent OS.
The UI offerings of manufacturers are converging to not being a differentiator. When that point is reached the war will go on how well your software manages the limited resources.
My current smartphone is massively more powerful than my old Symbian smartphone and gets better battery life as well (and is smaller). We've seen massive gains in the power consumption of components inside computers and phones.
> When that point is reached the war will go on how well your software manages the limited resources.
That's never been true. Nokia is losing the smartphone market to a company that ported their desktop OS to a phone! The original Palm OS is no more because it was designed for devices of the day, not for devices of the future. What is considered "limited resources" changes daily and it doesn't matter how well your OS handles them if nobody bothers to write software for it.
Uh, what do you think the whole "embedded" thing is?
What happens is that things get cheap enough that they tend to find new uses.
For example, in the phone world, making more features available to the phones that billions of not so wealthy people in China, India and Africa might aspire to own.
Except the software doesn't get any cheaper. The whole argument is that Symbian is hard to develop for because it's designed for hardware that frankly doesn't exist anymore. The software is more expensive. Android is cheaper for other manufacturers to use than Symbian is for Nokia.
That is simply not true. Nokia still churns out tons of phones that don't even run Symbian, but S40, which is another step down. And they sell like hotcakes, too, even if the profit margins aren't huge. And they'll continue to sell well for the immediate future.
Clearly, Nokia has lost its grip on "the future" and isn't very competitive with things like Android and the iPhone, but to deny that the biggest chunk of the cell phone market exists is a bit absurd.
Now that Symbian is being pushed down in segmentation by Meego, it is getting closer to oblivion, but I'll have to see it before I believe it.
I'm not sure about other countries, but here in India it's exactly the opposite. Though iphone and android are steadily increasing in mindshare.
>Not great software for a limited device like a phone.
Not everyone buys a phone for apps, most people (atleast here) look for better voice clarity/battery life/multimedia capabilities rather than apps.
>Nokia's conservative and limited vision on innovation.
I think "slow" is the correct word here.