Slashdot Mirror

Modulo the cellphone and camera bit (they used packet radio, though) Psion's PDAs were doing that sort of stuff 10 years ago. I believe (have to admit to not keeping in the loop) that since they sold off their interest in Symbian that's pretty much all that remains of Psion these days.

Symbian phones hardly have crappy security. They are targeted by "virus" authors because they are the only popular open smartphone OS around.

Incidentally, there is basically no way that an open OS can protect against this sort of thing. If the user has the ability to install applications, the user has the ability to install viruses. There are two obvious ways to stop trojans like this spreading over Bluetooth:

1. Disallow the reception of applications over Bluetooth. But then how would users get legitimate applications from their PCs to their phones?

2. Only allow "signed" applications to use Bluetooth. But then small third-party developers would find it difficult to develop and market their software without it getting "signed" (at probable expense). And what about freeware?

In any case, Symbian are changing their security model to try to combat threats like this one, no matter how based on FUD it is.

You use Google, and get this.

Why can't people realize that special-purpose devices work best with special-purpose OSes?

that requires pumping money into research for a product they won't know if it'll do well. it's a lot cheaper to take the easy way out and put an existing program onto your hardware which you know will work, even though it's less efficient or more bug-prone.

it's similar to how many companies use the symbian OS as their cellfone OS, which i personally dislike because of the lag between input and displaying on the screen and the sometimes long load times.

http://www.symbian.com/press-office/2005/pr050214b .html

Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world's leading handset manufacturers. The following Symbian OS licensees have Symbian OS-based mobile phones in production and / or in development: Arima, BenQ, Fujitsu, FOMA, LG, Lenovo, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Nokia, Panasonic, Sendo, Sharp, Siemens, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. In 2004, over 14 million Symbian OS-based mobile phones were sold worldwide and almost 25 million have been sold to date.

Here you go.

Open Source programs for SymbianOS

http://symbianos.org/

Symbian OS software development kits

http://www.symbian.com/developer/sdks.asp

Python for Series 60

http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/0,,034-821,00.html

Development for Symbian devices is open. Just take a look at Frozen Bubble for series 60 phones as an example. As for phones, the best smartphone on the market is UIQ/Symbian (Sony Ericsson P910a) and a variety of other phones use this excellent embedded OS. I personally bought an N-Gage QD simply to play with Symbian.

Check these three names: Symbian, Palm, PocketPC.
These devices will get 3GB harddisks and 500MHz processors soon...

There are apparently about 1.5 million Symbian phones being sold a month in the world (Source: Symbian at the O2 developer conference in London in September). Most of these will have Opera on them.

It's more than a niche.

Minimo doesn't seem to have been adapted to run on Symbian yet so it's missing out on the huge growth of that platform. See http://www.symbian.com/press-office/2004/pr041111. html for the details about shipments.

I spoke to Opera's product manager, Timo Bruns, for the mobile version at the recent Symbian Expo in London.

It's a bit odd, but in this case, the easiest way to confirm they're in the same family is to compare screen resolutions. So far, all Symbian UIQ phones (the p800 and p900 are the other two that are in the same family) have a 208x320 pixel touchscreen.

The A1000 is the follow-on to the A925 and the A920, all of which run the Symbian OS, not Linux... Sorry, I don't have the list of linux phones right this instant...

The A1000 is the follow-on to the A925 and the A920, all of which run the Symbian OS, not Linux... Sorry, I don't have the list of linux phones right this instant...

I'm not sure I got that "bar of soap" idea right, but maybe you're talking about the Motorola A1000?

that would be this

i don't see frontpage posts about it though, perhaps they didnt pay the right people

I might get one, if their firmware's better than Nokia's. I've just found out that the last update to my 7650 fixed some bugs I was having, but broke voicemail notification, so people have been leaving me messages for months and I've not even known the things were there. If I don't get a free update, despite the phone being out of warranty, Nokia can go piss up a rope in the future. (Hey, it was in warranty when they broke this advertised feature with a shoddy, improperly-tested update - damn right they should pay out to fix it!)

Pah. My phone has had GPS for more than a year (with my A920 before it) already.

All of this 'where is my nearest ATM' stuff is old hat. 2G phones needed to use triangulation and the results were sometimes way off, but my phone usually gets it down to about 2 or 3 metres in towns and cities. As for this 'Am I close to my friends' thing, well, that would be cool. I'd use it. With the 'always on' 3G connection and in-phone GPS, it sounds like anybody with the time and Java skills could do it...

Many news outlets, including ourselves, reported that a trojanised version of Mosquitos game for Symbian Series 60 smartphones was circulating online and across P2P networks. Cracked versions of the game secretly sends SMS messages to premium rate numbers, according to reports on various online forums.

Illegal copies of the game display the following message on start-up: This version has been cracked by SODDOM BIN LOADER No rights reserved. Pirate copies are illegal and offenders will have lotz of phun!!!

Yesterday Symbian put out a statement which contributed to the impression that malign code was inserted into 'cracked' versions of the game by members of the computer underground. However it turns out that the hidden SMS functionality, along with a message written in the best vernacular VXer speak, was put in the game from the beginning by the original games publisher Ojom.

In an advisory, AV firm F-Secure explains: This functionality was intended to be a copy-protecting technique - it didn't work as planned and the whole functionality backfired.

The premium rate contracts for the phone numbers have been terminated, so although old versions of the game still send hidden SMS messages, it only costs the nominal fee of sending the message itself. Current versions of this game no longer have this hidden functionality, but 'cracked' versions of Mosquitos still float in P2P network - and they still send these messages, it adds.

So what appeared to be a Trojan is actually a rather sneaky and somewhat ineffective copy-protection technique. Proof that even if something looks like a duck, talks like a duck and walks like a duck it isn't necessarily Anas platyrhynchos.

Although the Mosquitos saga turns out to be an urban myth, the recent discovery of the first malware capable of infecting smartphones shatters the comforting belief the mobile phones are safe from viral infection. The threat is very low at present but shouldn't be completely discounted. ®

See the Symbian website. Symbian OS is an open platform, well for now anyway.

This is my original attempt to post this story, it got rejected, but now that someone else brought it up, I will post my version. Primarily because there are some cool links in it that should be seen:

Yesterday InfoWorld reported a new first for viruses. Believed to be the work of international group 29a, Cabir is the first worm to infect mobile phones! Cabir is a proof of concept worm infecting Symbian mobile phone operating system by Symbian Ltd, used by Nokia. Cabir does not include a malicious payload.

Symbian OS tool chain on GNU/Linux

P800 Ogg Vorbis Player
Agile Messenger IM client

Okay, so it's not many, but they are out there, and if you really want free apps, download the SDK:

http://www.symbian.com/developer/

Royalty - cellphone manufacturers must pay royalty for each cellphone running either Palm, Symbian or CE

Though I don't know how much royalty they charge, because it's a purely business secret

It's not that big of a secret. The average revenue per handset for symbian is $6.70.

I don't care who you are, you are going to have a difficult time readying and deploying a full OS faster and less expensively than licensing one. It makes sense that Nokia uses Symbian instead of continuing to roll their own.

Siemens, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, et al (see former ownershop smybian) are all ambitious mobile phone companies. They would be completely dependant on Nokia if they exclusively chose Symbian a.k.a. Nokia Series 60/70.

Instead they'll expand their technological portfolio.

Current situation: nearly no M$ smartphones (except some models from motorola), mostly symbian dominated market.

Possible future situation: M$ *and* Symbian phones from Siemens, Samsung, ...

Conclusion: M$ is the lucky winner.

Damn.

A little clarification on this.

Many N-Gage games will work on other Symbian Series 60 smartphones (such as the 7650, 3650, 6600, Siemens SX1, Sendo X), no big surprise really, as the N-Gage is a member of the series 60 family of devices.

There's an interesting article on MAME and other games on Symbian devices on Mobitopia

Hmmm... I'm a bit dubious about the site you linked to Sybian.com, although that would give a whole new meaning to an embedded operating system. I think (am hoping) you must have been meaning Symbian.com. Of course sybian they might have helped developed the vibrate features...

And also here - Japanese mobile operator to develop user interface and service delivery technologies for 3G handsets using Symbian OS

The Symbian OS is nice, I've played with one of the Symbian based FOMA phones, and it's very cool indeed.

• Symbian does provide a standard C library that you can use when porting applications.
• Symbian does support global variables. The limitation is that you can't have a global variable in a library. Although this can be a problem when porting code, there are usually a number of workarounds (such as wrapping the code in a class, where the globals become member variables) that work well with a small amount of effort.
• Symbian does provide on-target debugging

• Symbian does provide a standard C library that you can use when porting applications.
• Symbian does support global variables. The limitation is that you can't have a global variable in a library. Although this can be a problem when porting code, there are usually a number of workarounds (such as wrapping the code in a class, where the globals become member variables) that work well with a small amount of effort.
• Symbian does provide on-target debugging

Conversely why did they use a broken antique OS for the Clie when they already had a share in the Symbian consortium? Horses for courses I guess.

Memory Stick Duos are about half the length of regular memory sticks, so it's a packaging consideration (as it was on the P800).

All About Symbian is a good starting point for everything in the Symbian World. That's the SonyEricsson P800 and P900, Nokia's 3650, 7650, 6600 and 9210, Motorola A920, Siemens SX1, Samsung SGH-D700, Sendo X etc.

Symbian's own site has some good background on the OS and developing for it too.

Mobitopia has plenty of news and analysis of mobile and wireless tech and a *big* list of links to other mobile sites.

Symbian is an OS. Sybian is something... different.

It is amazing to see how many Slashdot readers are more familiar with the second one... Sigh!

The Sendo X has the same functionality as the Nokia 6600 and is smaller and prettier. There's a load of cool new Symbian phones coming out now.

is that it should easy enough to program to it.

Borland has announced a version of C++ Builder for the Symbian OS, so I should feel right at home. Now, anyone have ideas for a killer app?

Oh, wait. I don't have time for that kind of crap.

You're talking about Symbian OS (specifically, the UIQ version).

Runs in my P800, and it works just like that. Actually, during the development one of the key phrases for the usability people was "UIQ is like paper".

So, and what exactly stops me from using sms on a phone without built in mp3 player, the capability to watch movies and the possibility to edit word/excel documents? The beauty of sms is its simplicity.

What failure? Please elaborate on what you think is a failure.

For starters: They weren't able to lure any major cellphone manufacturer in. Big suprise: They didn't want to be OEM manufacturers for a Microsoft branded phone. So they turned to the network providers and where able to cut a deal with Orange. A couple month later deals with Swisscom as well as T-Mobile to release a Microsoft powered phone fell appart, due to bad bugs, which they weren't able to resolve. You can read some of Orange SPV reviews for yourself. In general there seem to be a few zealots, which consider this to be a good phone, despite all it's limitations. In essence:

Battery life is barely sufficient to last a day

Bugs crash the phone on occasion

After which it requires 40 seconds+ to boot and connect

You can't dial your synchronised Outlook contacts directly (this might, or might not be fixed, alas it doesn't thing high praise on the much touted integration)

There are very, very reasonable security concerns

...

I wouldn't exactly call this a roaring success for the Microsoft Smartphone platform.

Add to that the absolute miniscule marketshare in comparision to Symbian.

This might change of course, if Microsoft pours billions and billions of $ into this market, but there's certainly no guarantee (especially since the telecom industry fears nothing more then deviating from standards and Microsoft has a rotten track record in this respect).

So, yeah: Given all those reasons I'd call Microsofts Smartphone Platform a spectacular failure to date.

Sendo haven't gone under; they've signed up with Nokia and Symbian to produce a Series 60 phone.

These limitations (and I know that not all Palm-style machines have them all, but it's a common impression) don't apply to all palmtops. Mine has a keyboard you can touch-type on; I've used it to write articles for publication, large applications, etc. It has a 640x240 screen that's plenty wide enough to read books, web pages, spreadsheets, etc. Its OS (EPOC, the forerunner of Symbian OS currently powering many mobile phones) is exceptionally stable -- apart from hardware failure, I don't think it's crashed once. Although I have a powerful desktop machine, I only connect to it for backups; everything I use my Psion for stays there, and I've never felt the need to sync with anything else. I have lots of powerful applications at my fingertips: office apps that can exchange files with Word and Excel, route planning/GPS, capable web browsers, a Doom engine and many other games, you name it.

People are often amazed by the things I've got to hand: the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Brewer's, Webster's, the Jargon File, and loads of similar reference works; three different Bible translations; MBs of fiction and other books; the core data from the IMDB, etc. Most of the time it's my only email client, and also my only Off-Line Reader for the CIX BBS, holding well over 100,000 messages -- both connecting via my mobile phone as well as land lines. It has Java, Perl, Python, and also a powerful built-in language called OPL (recently open-sourced); and it's possible to do full-scale development on it (I know coz I'm co-author of the OLR mentioned before). It uses standard TrueType &c fonts, displays PDFs, connects with FTP and telnet, plays back MP3s, and loads more. In short, it's a fully-fledged, powerful computer in its own right.

I mention all this not to show off (well, maybe just a bit :) but to show that there's much more to pocket computers than most people think. (Lots of folks, especially in the USA, have never heard of Psions, which is a shame. Although they're no longer made, second-hand ones are highly sought-after.) And yet most people still think of a palmtop as something just for looking at a few agenda entries, checking a few addresses, and playing a few games.

If that's all you think a PDA is good for, then no wonder people think you can squeeze it all onto a phone! But for those of us who really use our palmtops, this seems a waste, a travesty of what mobile computing could be.

OTOH, maybe things aren't so depressing. It's possible that once all those simple PDA functions have been transferred to phones, that there will be room for some market differentiation, and that more powerful palmtops might become more popular. When Psion pulled out of the consumer market, their message was effectively "everyone wants Palms; too few people want something more powerful". Maybe if all of those light users move onto something even smaller (in every respect), there will be enough of us left for it to be worth making powerful pocket computers again.

Well, I can hope...

These limitations (and I know that not all Palm-style machines have them all, but it's a common impression) don't apply to all palmtops. Mine has a keyboard you can touch-type on; I've used it to write articles for publication, large applications, etc. It has a 640x240 screen that's plenty wide enough to read books, web pages, spreadsheets, etc. Its OS (EPOC, the forerunner of Symbian OS currently powering many mobile phones) is exceptionally stable -- apart from hardware failure, I don't think it's crashed once. Although I have a powerful desktop machine, I only connect to it for backups; everything I use my Psion for stays there, and I've never felt the need to sync with anything else. I have lots of powerful applications at my fingertips: office apps that can exchange files with Word and Excel, route planning/GPS, capable web browsers, a Doom engine and many other games, you name it.

People are often amazed by the things I've got to hand: the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Brewer's, Webster's, the Jargon File, and loads of similar reference works; three different Bible translations; MBs of fiction and other books; the core data from the IMDB, etc. Most of the time it's my only email client, and also my only Off-Line Reader for the CIX BBS, holding well over 100,000 messages -- both connecting via my mobile phone as well as land lines. It has Java, Perl, Python, and also a powerful built-in language called OPL (recently open-sourced); and it's possible to do full-scale development on it (I know coz I'm co-author of the OLR mentioned before). It uses standard TrueType &c fonts, displays PDFs, connects with FTP and telnet, plays back MP3s, and loads more. In short, it's a fully-fledged, powerful computer in its own right.

I mention all this not to show off (well, maybe just a bit :) but to show that there's much more to pocket computers than most people think. (Lots of folks, especially in the USA, have never heard of Psions, which is a shame. Although they're no longer made, second-hand ones are highly sought-after.) And yet most people still think of a palmtop as something just for looking at a few agenda entries, checking a few addresses, and playing a few games.

If that's all you think a PDA is good for, then no wonder people think you can squeeze it all onto a phone! But for those of us who really use our palmtops, this seems a waste, a travesty of what mobile computing could be.

OTOH, maybe things aren't so depressing. It's possible that once all those simple PDA functions have been transferred to phones, that there will be room for some market differentiation, and that more powerful palmtops might become more popular. When Psion pulled out of the consumer market, their message was effectively "everyone wants Palms; too few people want something more powerful". Maybe if all of those light users move onto something even smaller (in every respect), there will be enough of us left for it to be worth making powerful pocket computers again.

Well, I can hope...

System V is the basis for all operating systems outside of Redmond

Huh? What rock has this guy been living under?

OS/360, VM/CMS, MVS, Z/OS, OS/400, OS/2(...)

We could make a game out of this...

NetWare
The OS for any computer built before MS incorporated (C64, Apple II, etc.).
Multics
Amoeba (ok, it isn't much more than a research project...)
PalmOS
Symbian/EPOC

Anymore? C'Mon, I know there's gotta be a huge list!

The embedded market uses Linux

Linux is a great alternative for embedded. But SymbianOS is what
Microsoft is really going after here. Symbian is being adopted by most big cell phone manufacturers, and
the source comes with the license.

I among one of the handheld developers don't understand why should we spend time on something strictly controlled by a proprietary vendor, while we have so many other platforms to work with, and with much bigger market share?

1998

• Symbian established as a private independent company in June 1998, owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion

(Emphasis mine. See Symbian Company History.)

link

Motorola, of course, is one of Symbian's owners.

I think what Motorola is doing is smart - like the article said, by using Linux/Java they're controlling their own destiny a bit more. The part that I don't understand is that Motorola is part owner of Symbian. It seems to me that they would want to promote that platform instead of going off in a different direction entirely.

But if you just ignore that for a sec, I think choosing Linux is the right thing to do from a power/scalability perspective. Symbian, for example, was designed from the ground up to run on mobile devices. But since these devices are now becoming more and more powerful (like a circa 1995 laptop) you're going to need an OS that can take advantage of that power in an open way and I'll vote Linux any day (like all the rest of you, I'm sure).

Think about this: Motorola (and Nokia) are both going to sell around 400 million smart phones in 2003. Even if a very small percentage of these phones initially use Linux, it will still mean millions of Linux "installs". Motorola could soon be the #1 Linux computing platform.

If you check out Motorola's home page, you'll also see that they've launched a reference platform for OEMs called i.Smart to base their mobile phones on also. According to this article on InfoSync.no, this will allow OEMs to create smart phones in as little as 90 days with support for Symbian, eLinux, Windows CE or PalmOS. This is pretty cool, but what is disappointing is the complete lack of WCDMA/CDMA2000 (i.e. 3G) support in either the A760 or the i.Smart reference design. They need to just pay Qualcomm some ransom money and get on board the CDMA train, IMHO.

I've got lots more thoughts about this. From what I've seen so far, I can't tell if Motorola is going to follow Sharp's example and make the Java Apps peers with the native apps using Personal Java, or whether they'll restrict the functionality and use J2ME, which keeps Java apps in a tightly controlled sandbox. That could really make a difference in the number of apps available and usability also.

Anyways, cool news to see.

-Russ

Symbian

its not tied to a single phone. the phone operating system is symbian . quite powerful and used by a quite a few other phones and the psion PDAs.

Let's discuss your points one by one...

I agree with your comments about turning your phone into a remote. But in future, hopefully more and more devices will be controllable via Bluetooth, which a large number of phones do support.

Handset manufacturers don't make phones which could act as walkie-talkies because it would be a loss of revenue for the network operators.

Some phones do have USB docking stations.

Some phones can be programmed in C++.

Well, beside the fact that Symbian is not Linux, there are companies out there that support it.

Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, Sagem, Alcatel, Symbian.
The list could go on. Many, many of the big players in the mobile phone market (phones, network technology, software) are located in. Europe. Europe is a huge market. Not only Italy or Finnland, but also the other big and small countries (DE, FR, GB, ES) have a penetration beyond 60%. There are approximately twice as many mobile phones in Europe as in the US.

And the younger generation wants to do more than just phone someone. SMS, Games, even the number of ringtones or display colors is a very important factor for many customers here.
I believe that while EMS (enhanced message service) was useless like WAP, MMS (multimedia message service) will be used widely. Many people (especially nerds) laugh about these uses but you shouldn't underestimate how much they are accepted by other people. Mobile Multimedia Instant Messaging willl later (with the help of GPRS and UMTS) bring the Internet into the mobile world:
EVERNET. It's not just a marketing hype! If the price is ok (and even if it isn't -> SMS), the (European) customers will use it, because it changes their life so much. For all these features you need software, capable delivering these "services":
You should take a closer look on the Symbian OS v7. It's a well engineered OS with a bright future. One day, at some places in Europe, it might be used more frequently than MS Windows.

We will see who will win this war. One could even call it a war between continents... but this would perhaps be too flamebait. My guess: At the end everyone will find their niche!

Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, Sagem, Alcatel, Symbian.
The list could go on. Many, many of the big players in the mobile phone market (phones, network technology, software) are located in. Europe. Europe is a huge market. Not only Italy or Finnland, but also the other big and small countries (DE, FR, GB, ES) have a penetration beyond 60%. There are approximately twice as many mobile phones in Europe as in the US.

And the younger generation wants to do more than just phone someone. SMS, Games, even the number of ringtones or display colors is a very important factor for many customers here.
I believe that while EMS (enhanced message service) was useless like WAP, MMS (multimedia message service) will be used widely. Many people (especially nerds) laugh about these uses but you shouldn't underestimate how much they are accepted by other people. Mobile Multimedia Instant Messaging willl later (with the help of GPRS and UMTS) bring the Internet into the mobile world:
EVERNET. It's not just a marketing hype! If the price is ok (and even if it isn't -> SMS), the (European) customers will use it, because it changes their life so much. For all these features you need software, capable delivering these "services":
You should take a closer look on the Symbian OS v7. It's a well engineered OS with a bright future. One day, at some places in Europe, it might be used more frequently than MS Windows.

We will see who will win this war. One could even call it a war between continents... but this would perhaps be too flamebait. My guess: At the end everyone will find their niche!