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Comment by js8 | Hacker News Reader

I had Nokia E71 (?) with Symbian, worst phone I had, I replaced that with Palm 650 (not sure I got model numbers right).

The Symbian UI was extremely clunky. I am not sure it even had touch screen. They had whole keyboard, but you had to navigate menus with arrow keys. Why not give user the full power of the keyboard, like Emacs or Vim? Why can't I have menu options on hotkeys?

I think people forgot about how bad phone UIs were before Steve Jobs' heavy focus on UI. And I am no fan of touch-based controls, still want a proper keyboard.

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> I think people forgot about how bad phone UIs were before Steve Jobs' heavy focus on UI.

And years later they are still terrible. At least Android looks like an interface designed by people who have never seen GUIs before: GUI elements (warning) obscuring other GUI elements with no possibility to move them.

You think Android is bad... try Phosh

"Hey let's take GTK3 with all it's problems and love for empty space and put that on a phone..."

well considering that phosh has 0.000000000000000001% of the people working on it that android has…

Symbian never had a UI. Phone manufacturers were expected to build their own. There were several; Nokia’s Series 60 would be the one most are familiar with. That sucked a lot. Nokia were terrible at software.

There’s probably a business lesson in there somewhere about how your biggest customer can become synonymous with your actual product, and you get ruined by association.

Nokia actually bought Qt to help them make a modern GUI, and had Qt/QML ported to Symbian S60. I was fortunate enough to develop a few apps on it back in the day and surprisingly - it didn't suck.

QML remains to this day superior framework to native Android UI development. Only Jetpack Compose, and SwiftUI on iOS, are starting to come on par with what Nokia had with Qt/QML over a decade ago.

Nokia actually had all the right pieces (Qt, Maemo/MeeGo, Symbian for feature phones, unparalleled engineering and manufacturing talent) for continuing their world domination, but their management was just laughably bad. It was all lost to in-fighting between teams and an inefficient middle manager heavy corporate culture it seems.

In some way they did. UIQ was a subsidary owned by Symbian that made the UI stack for Sony Ericssons P800, P900 and a few Motorola devices.

What?? The E71 was the best phone i ever had!! I loved that thing until it was "stolen" at dehli airport...

Agree, blew me away as a step up from e61 - I did so much in both phones, loved 'SportsTracker' on them, and using proper turn by turn GPS satnav.

I missed that phone when it died, but Android on the Dell Streak was great step onwards for me.

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