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It's not necessarily as simple as that

http://www.newlc.com/forum/kern-exec-3-error

I actually spent a load of time debugging an error on Symbian. It was wretched. The bug only happened on an ARM and only if you turned of debug printfs. There was a huge gob of of third party code from various places that I only had a binary of. I could put some debugging information the source code which was above and below that code. There was no JTAG on the board and the place I worked dealt with errors like this by handing them over to contractors and then firing them if they couldn't fix it or blame someone else plausibly. I wrote some code to log integers to a ram buffer and used it to check which third party code was breaking a contract, in this case by not calling a call back.

Eventually I found that out which part and passed it on to the appropriate third party.

The problem with Symbian is that is very easy for bad programmers to produce code with horrible timing problems. Or that performs badly. I knew some code that run on Symbian which was tested and managed to saturate a modem at 115K baud. All seemed ok. When tested in a Lan, it topped out at say 300K baud. As in it was awful. It was based on active objects and someone wasn't calling Complete. But it was hard to see who, because it was all third party binary blobs.

And there's the overhead of bad C++ code. It's quite easy to write code which will perform OK an PC processort in the emulator. In fact the more C++ you know, the more you are likely to geek out and so that.

Run it on Arm and it crawls. And if you at it you find that it spends all its time running contructors and destructors. On a PC the compiler is a bit better and the processor is 100x faster so you don't notice that your class hierarchy is enormously inefficient.

The place I worked out had a bunch of permies who were self described C++ gurus who would spend a lot of time designing for the next generation platform and punt all the bug fixing off onto contractors, so they could hide themselves from the grim reality that the stuff they wrote was a mass of timing issues.

Plus Symbian has cleanup stacks and string descriptors. In many ways it reminded me of Win16, and OS that was full of gunk that might have helped it run on really underpowered systems but is unnecessary now and just makes it hard to program. Essentially it shows the danger of premature optimisation.

Active Objects are the absolutely epitome of Symbian's premature optimisation. The idea is that you can have a load of objects running in one thread and sharing one stack. Back in the old Epoc days this was apparently a big win, though I think even there some geek just politiced to get his favourite hack made into a design pattern.

And of course this means your objects are then cooperatively multitasking, so if one is badly behaved you will have issues. That was the reason for the unscalable network code, if the system had spent the extra few KB for a bunch of stacks it wouldn't have been so hard to make it work. At the point I left I saw a very impressive presentation from one of the permies explaining how he used Ethereal to track TCP acks. But he couldn't say which object was failing to call complete. Essentially the error could be fixed, but not by anyone I n

Symbian sucks basically. For the same reasons that Win16 sucked, i.e. it has a load of legacy baggage from the days where it run on crippled systems. And the focus on C++ tends to encourage posers to build obfuscated class hierarchies that are inefficient.

You may want to read this article: http://www.newlc.com/The-Most-Important-Aspects-of .html

It is a very good summary of the known viruses and prevention mechanisms for Symbian phones.

Having used both Microsoft SmartPhone and Nokia Series 60 phones (7650 and 3650) I can tell you that Microsoft offering is garbage compared to the Nokia ones... UI is more intuitive and usable. Also Bluetooth, MIDP 2.0 and Symbian OS provides (for me) a more attractive and usable environment. Plus the phone is actually a lot more stabler.

The Microsoft SDK is a more usable though than the current Nokia one, but I was able to create a GPS program for my 3650 in three days. It uses Socket's Bluetooth GPS module for location information and downloads a map from Mapblast using GPRS connection - a bit like GpsDrive and one program done for SonyEricsson P800. You cannot do that in SmartPhone (current phones for not have Bluetooth).

So for Series 60 SDK:
Forum Nokia and your Bluetooth examples and community help from:
Berlin Factor
Newlc And one more thing there are more than three million Series 60 phones out there compared to measly 80000 Microsoft SmartPhones :-).

Yeah, I wonder Why there are no screen shots, oh no I don't, I know why, it's because it's going to be pants.

Actually from these screen shots it looks half reasonable, but:

1) I bet it's not that good in reality.
2) Slagging of GBA SP owners by suggesting they are uncool 10 year olds is market suicide (have they not heard of the 'GBA:SP - For Men' campaign all over London?)
3) You take the battery out to change games? *boggle*
4) Looks like a brick, and I can't see it being comfortable.
5) It's been hyped for over 6 months, but they still have no actual in game screen shots on the web site.

..and lastly...

6) They plan to unthroan the Gameboy SP how? With magic pixie dust?

If the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear couldn't do it, this phone doesn't have a chance (the only advantage it has is wireless play and we know that GBA BlueTooth adapters are en route).

Nintendo may have screwed up their last two consoles (N64 - pants, GC - good, not enough games) and the GBA (backlight) but with the GBA:SP they have an excellent system with a huge back catalog of games, and one that is capeable of running quality SNES and Megadrive conversions. I don't even see Sony beating them now (not after how big they've said the screen is going to be).

I wish they would make offical blank ROM carts though, carrying games is a pain and they are soo cool. I'd love to be able to pay and download games via the net (getting hold of popular carts like SF:Turbo and Golden Sun:LA can be a pain as every man and his dog want's to get them it seems).

So much for "inside".

standard response: IT'S A CELLPHONE!

"blah blah blah...on a very small screen."

standard response: IT'S A CELLPHONE!
The screen's 35*41.5mm, so no shit it's a "very small screen".

"The phone should've been longer, or the resolution should've been better, because this "hype" trailer just makes me glad I haven't through twice about buying an N-Gage."

Any longer and it'd be one of those old 80's bagphones, and a better resolution would have no doubt resulted in a even worse battery life than the pitiful current 6 hours game time.

NO one is going to throw their PS2 out for this cellphone, but considering the competition this cellphone/portable game system is AMAZING.

Tell you what: I'll play Red Faction on my N-Gage and you keep playing Pokemon on your GBA and we'll all be happy.