The formation and early years of Symbian: Dark Star (2010)
theregister.com
theregister.com
But Symbian’s fatal flaw was that it was too early to everything.
The software design was based on mid-1990s assumptions of what smartphones might need to do and what resources they’d have available. Everything started from a constrained embedded mindset. Meanwhile Apple built their mobile OS by scaling down their desktop OS which had originally been a high-end workstation OS. The phone guys couldn’t understand that was even possible.
The Symbian business model was similarly captive to the past. Open source wasn’t a serious thing when Nokia, Ericsson and Psion set up the Symbian corporation originally in the 1990s. So everything was a complicated licensing game. Worse, the vendors tried to outdo each other by creating incompatible but similar implementations of fundamental UX, so there wasn’t even a single Symbian for developers to target. This practically doomed it as an apps platform at a critical time.
Did you try to develop for Symbian? It's a very painful memory of mine.
It seemed to be highly optimised for a very memory constrained environment. Granted the phones it ran on were very memory constrained, but ... shudder. Worse, in a few years it memory would not be so much of an issue and all those optimisations would turn into shackles.
In the end I did though, but only after Qt and later Android became the main mobile dev platforms. Such a night and day developer experience compared to native Symbian development.
I believe they used the GNU compiler before that.
It’s really a squandered opportunity.
It’s hard to remember how primitive the US wireless ecosystem was (expensive, slow, metered, no data support) prior to the release of the iphone. Texting was considered exciting and novel in 2000!
Meanwhile my PHS Keitai and Nokia GPS covered me elsewhere with messaging, data, images and clean handoff and such unimaginable on my crappy Motorola AMPS phone (I was on the road a lot back then)
More than just potential. Nokia was a hugely successful mobile phone manufacturer. They still occupy the top two most sold handsets ever, beating even Apple.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_...
Like a lot of things in IT, technology and trends move on and it’s not easy for old empires to adapt and stay relevant.
The problem was always too much money (especially on the Nokia side) and not enough user focus. In the Nokia case that meant Series 60, which was where Nokia indulged their most extreme design oddities, while the non Symbian based Series 40 was actually severely good. (North American S40 devices were excessively modified by local operators though, so you would have no idea these things were actually usable if that is all you ever experienced).
If anyone made a decent Symbian device (and supposedly someone in Japan did, of course) I never saw it.
The funny thing is Android launched in an even worse state, but they managed to iterate on it far more effectively.
Active Objects were PITA, but I also admired their efficiency. It was a nice way how to get pseudo-threads on a single core processor. Symbian in general was very efficient with resources. You were able to run fairly complicated algorithms on not-even-200 MHz processor of E52.
From my point of view, there were three major problems with Symbian.
First of all, the dialect of C++ was too distant from normal C++, thus the learning curve for a normal C++ programmer used to standard libraries was enormously steep. Even the GCC that was supplied within the toolchain was always already obsolete, way behind the current GCC version.
Second, the debugging tools were a nightmare. Even on an emulator, you often had to fish for running processes in Windows Task Manager and kill some instances of DE.exe, because otherwise, after the first crash of your app, the debugger would no longer work. On-device debugging was even worse. I think I only saw it working twice, in several years. After some frustration, you just stopped trying to get that damn thing working. And a bad installation of the Nokia USB driver could destabilize your Windows. Compared to that, on-device debugging on Android is just marvellous.
Third, backward compatibility and UI compatibility just wasn't. Nokia constantly churned out new devices by the boatload and all of those had different APIs, screen dimensions, hardware etc. It seemed that their intent was to negate the "write once, run anywhere" Java principle, you had to adjust your apps constantly and at a great expense, otherwise the UX would be horrible, and the Nokia smartphones weren't exactly cheap. Emulators helped maybe with half of that, the rest had to be done on a real device. For a software house, that meant pointless spending on devices that would be obsolete in a year or two, because you couldn't predict in advance which one would be successful and which one would flop.
In all, Symbian would have been fine if someone actually turned it into a developer- and user-friendly operating system. Nokia wasn't really able to do that, even though the foundation base of the OS was pretty solid.
Do you think that would be fixable nowadays? The OS is FOSS now.
Could as much of the weird/obsolete/proprietary stuff as possible be ripped and replaced with current, modern, standardised FOSS stuff, while keeping the tiny elegant OS? Given that backwards compatibility isn't an issue any more, as the existing apps are old and proprietary and irrelevant now?
I heard devs ranting, but Symbian was very popular, well liked and ahead of anything on the market until it got (almost deservedly) destroyed by Nokia's hubris, Apple and Android.
100% this.
Remember there are 1000x to 10000x as many users as developers. (Extremely conservative estimate.) If users love it that's worth some developer discomfort IMHO.
But yes, programming for Symbian was quite a steep learning curve. 'Train wreck' might be a bit extreme though, there was method behind the madness.
Basically a total failure of vision regarding how to make the most of the hardware for the benefit of the user.
But that was never going to last. Once CPU's developed sufficient horsepower and there was enough RAM, the fully fledged OS's underneath Android and iPhone meant they could easily transition to what are now. I doubt Symbian ever could have done that.
I don’t disagree with you, but the problem here wasn’t just the software not taking full advantage of the hardware. It was a more fundamental disconnect between hardware and software design. At Nokia, there was practically no innovation where these two were advanced together. Everything was incremental on one side or the other.
My personal favourite was my E90 Communicator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E90_Communicator
In terms of hardware form factor was the best smartphone I have ever owed.
What was good about it:
– Metal case, metal hinge, rock-solid clamshell design
– But small enough to use closed as a candybar phone with T9 text input;
– Good 1-handed and two-handed operation;
– Able to view A4 width PDFs at readable size on internal screen;
– Fast accurate thumb typing on internal QWERTY keyboard;
– Data port plus charging port plus headphone socket.
It wasn't perfect. The external numeric keypad needed better spacing, like a 6310i keypad. The internal QWERTY one the same. It needed USB instead of a Nokia port, and a standard-sized headphone jack. It needed an internal touchscreen. It needed more RAM and speed and battery.
But the gestalt, the whole, was better than any Apple minimalist thing.
Second favourite:
Nokia 7710.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710
My first true smartphone.
What was good about it:
– Landscape touchscreen smartphone, with a design that made that the primary orientation, although perfectly usable one-handed in landscape;
– Usable physical buttons for up/down/left/right/select in one hand, call/cancel/hangup in the other hand. So, usable in gloves or without access to stylus and fingertips, with tactile feedback, with both hands. Meaning also ideal for gamers;
– Removable battery;
– Last device with the Psion EIKON UI.
Third favourite:
Sony Ericsson P910
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P910
Very much oriented to touchscreen operation like an iPhone or something.
What was good about it:
– Familiar and accessible to non-techies;
– With a handy physical T9 keypad, covering part of the screen;
– Flipped down to reveal a bigger screen and tiny QWERTY keyboard. Not much use but clever.
The whole Apple and Android thing did not catch Nokia by surprise. It was well aware what was happening. The problem wasn't awareness but a generally dismissive attitude of what was happening outside of Nokia. All this was discussed at length internally.
If you look at the history of Symbian, you can see that it overlaps with the history of Linux. Linux emerged as a hobby project in the early nineties. By 1998 there were some companies building embedded products with it. 1999 saw the likes of IBM pumping billions in Linux and things were really taking off. By the time the first Symbian devices hit the market, there had been a few attempts at Linux on mobile already. Around the time Nokia got serious about shipping S60 in volume (around 2005/2006 with a broader range of devices), Google bought Android and started working on getting that to market. Rumors about Apple doing something in this space were also getting pretty substantial around that time.
The critical mistake that Nokia made was dismissing Linux early on in favor of Symbian, a technically obsolete, 32 bit OS that would struggle catching up right until the end. Not all of Nokia of course. Just the senior management. Nokia did actually launch a linux based internet tablet in 2005 (the N770). The only thing stopping a phone project based on that was management. They pushed back on that until 2010. By which time they were loosing the phone market to Apple and Google in a big way. They lost about five-six years chasing their tails trying to push Symbian + S60 as the competitive phone OS it never was. By 2011, windows phone was a thing. by 2013 MS took over the phone division and they pulled the plug on the whole business unit in 2014.
Between 1998 and 2005, mobile Linux started happening and Symbian was struggling to compete. Nokia had no touch screen UI for it. Well, it did (S90) but they killed that only to resurrect a new touch screen capable platform on top of S60 a few years later in response to the iphone, which launched in 2007 followed by Android a year later. Ironically Android was depending on a lot of Linux contributions by Nokia. Nokia was actually one of the top contributors. And Google made full use of that. Early Android booted on the N800 before there were any Nexus phones to play with. That's how similar the kernels were between Android and Maemo/Meego.
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/11/23/symbian_history...
(This works for all Reg URLs: insert `Print/` into the URL after the base domain. It is case-sensitive.)
I sincerely hope he really matured and it is not just putting out a civilized facade nowadays.
Notably, the charitable foundation. It is well established now and has whitewashed his reputation but note:
1. It only spends enough of the profits on Gates' and Warren Buffet's wealth that they don't pay tax on what's left.
2. Its owners refuse to even try ethical investment, which would do more good than the B&MGF itself's spending.
Citation for both:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jan-07-na-gates...
3. Once he was well out of it & MS, his wife upped and left him, and it was then revealed he's a serial creep, with decades of squalid behaviour around MS staff.