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Cellphones are incredibly price sensitive, and a PocketPC license isn't cheap. While Palm is improving, it misses useful features like Java support.

Cellphones are incredibly price sensitive, and a PocketPC license isn't cheap. While Palm is improving, it misses useful features like Java support.

I see this actually the other way around. SymbianOS 6 is way more powerful than PalmOS 4 (and very likely also 5) and this gap will widen even more with SymbianOS 7.

Yeah. Maybe an established UK IT company, familiar with pocketable computer systems, could develop an operating system particularly suited to running on mobile phones and other pocketable devices...

...would have been nice, before giving Nokia full ownership of Symbian. As the article says the licensed software is optimised to run on Symbian, but it is not Symbian. From the Symbian website: "Symbian was established as a private independent company in June 1998 and is owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Matsushita (Panasonic), Motorola, Psion, Siemens and Sony Ericsson. Headquartered in the UK, it has offices in Japan, Sweden, UK and the USA."

I am not familiar with these technologies, but BREW looks to me like the american competitor to the european Symbian OS (also open and targeting C++ and Java, and with ARM based terminals already available). I say that because current Symbian phones include the Sony-Ericsson P800 (coming soon) and the Nokia 7650, although these both have a built in camera. You can download the SDK for each of these phones from each manufacturer site too, but I haven't checked if a compiler is included.

Alex

Nope, it's not just a pretty phone. It's a PDA running on Symbian OS, which is being used in Nokia 9210/9290.

Symbian is more powerful than PalmOS, which is simpler and cheaper.

Sony Ericsson P800

Symbian

Tech people have been drooling over this one for a long time .. forget carrying two devices.

But why not get the real thing instead, with a 32-bit preemptive multitasking OS?.

Handheld devices are where MS are likely to face the biggest problems. Nokia (especially), Ericsson, Motorola use, and invested in, Symbian because they do not want MS to turn them into commodity box makers like the PC manufacturers. Maintaining their margins depends on being able to continue differentiating their devices.

Andreesen is right about the importance of form factors, but they are more imprtant for handheld devices than for desktop devices - hence the huge variety of mobile phone and PDA designs but the success of MS, Apple being limited to niche markets, and the failure of internet appliances etc.

IE will face competition from browsers running on devices other than PCs. Mobile devices and (perhaps) games consoles. These are makets dominated by comapnies that have the resources to take on MS, and who know how dangerous MS is.

Although AOL may have bought Netscape as a bargaining chip to help negotiations with MS, they do have an interset keeping competition alive. If everyone designs to IE to the extent that other browser become unusable (not a problem yet), then they could cut off AOL with impunity. The higher IE's market share become the weaker AOL's position becomes.

So a portable device has to be a phone. It also has to be (across the same cellphone link) a web browser - a web browser complying with normal Web standards, not a WAP device. And it has to be able to run something equivalent to VNC over SSH across the same link.

What does it look like? It needs to be small, to fit comfortably in a pocket. But at the same time to have the largest possible display. Provided the display is touch sensitive, it doesn't need any keyboard, jog-wheel, cursor keys or whatever implemented in hardware - all these can be soft. Handwriting recognition would be good, but isn't critical. It may be a one-piece unit with a flip-over keypad like the Sony/Ericsson P800; it could even be a clamshell like the Nokia 9120; but frankly it doesn't need either.

And the good news is that thanks to those very clever people in Scandinavia, it's all available now.

Why not Symbian, QNX/a> or any of these ? This unhealthy obsession of "one size fits all" that abounds in the Linux world is exactly the sort of thing that people on Slashdot complain about the Microsoft world. You can't shoehorn these things without getting a poorer product as a result.

Wouldn't it be a better open source project if someone did what Linus did when he wanted to build an Open Source Unix and do the same for a proper RTOS ? By viewing Linux as the "only" solution it turns into the old "everything is a nail if you only have a hammer" discussion.

News for Nerds would be detailing what is happening in the RTOS and embedded world, rather than just being "News about Linux" to the detriment of better technologies. I know it sounds like a rant, but people like Wind River really do know what they are doing, this isn't a crappy Microsoft driven arena, this is where people really do know their shit, and the customer will not accept failure as part of the package.

Sony P800

I was actually at Symbian on Wednesday night at their Cambridge office. One of the things that struck me about the new things they are talking about is that application installation will be a lot easier on the newer phones they are working with. This will help with the PDA / cellphone merge, since the behaviour of the phone is no longer "hard-baked" with the release. If nothing else, it may mean that bug-fixes may become available without having to send off your phone.

Some of the new phones look very cool indeed. Japan is a good indicator, as it tends to be about 1.5 years ahead of Britain (and, ooh, a decade or so ahead of the U.S. :)

Henry

it suck's

I cant sync it with my linux box
it uses old mcore like cpu (non arm/mips)
and it looks silly

get a

Nokia 7650

or take alook at how GUI should be done (looks nice like java swing done right)
symbian interface

and see it on a small phone

look for p800 photo's

regards

john jones

it suck's

I cant sync it with my linux box
it uses old mcore like cpu (non arm/mips)
and it looks silly

get a

Nokia 7650

or take alook at how GUI should be done (looks nice like java swing done right)
symbian interface

and see it on a small phone

look for p800 photo's

regards

john jones

The p800 is an exceedingly cool device. I got a chance to play with one last week and it will rock your socks clean off. J2ME and MIDP Java applety things are a main bonus but the whole way it's put thogether, the kick ass UI and the quality Symbian operating system underneath it all is very exciting.

The OS is the same as that in the Nokia 92XX series and their 7650 camera phone.

This is exceedingly exciting.

Symbian OS runs exclusively on ARM processors, and with the backing of _everyone_ in the mobile industry, that's a momentum you can't ignore.

Oh, right. Intel has the XScale (next-gen StrongArm) so AMD has to fight back :/ Here we go again, although this time, they're not binary compatible!

the nokia 7650 is exaclty the kind of phone you're talking about, and it'll be available in the 2nd quarter of 2002 in Europe, Asia Pacific and Africa.

and the Ericsson P800 is the same thing too, but will be available in the 3rd quarter of 2002, but on all of the 5 continents!

So, we're not so behind the Japan... for now.

Oh well, here's one link: you want one

Dirk

NT was their attack on the RISC-nixes, Linux half got in the way there.

XP is to take on Mac OSX

Pocket OS is their attempt to kill Palm

Now they want to take on "Symbian", a beaut little OS for PDA/cellphone crossover devices developed by little old Psion, the maker of the best PDAs in the world (maybe now past tense), & now taken on by Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Matsushita/Panasonic & Sony.

Can't they just be happy with owning the PC desktop?

Now don't get me wrong - I'm all for open source and it would be great if the community could focus more on methods and not just code&features .. but we're not there yet :)

Huh? Symbian is very much alive and kicking, releasing new versions of Epoc (yeah, 6.0, 6.1 etc) when they're ready - and they're used in products like Ericsson R380, Nokia 9210 and the upcoming Nokia 7650 as a few examples.

You _do_ know that Symbian was created from Psion Software, and that Ericsson, Nokia, Psion, Panasonic and Motorola are co-owners, right? (Now add SonyEricsson to that)

Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, and others will be basing some of their new 3G phones off of a psion-derivative, Symbian OS. Hopefully this will result in a consistent API that stands a fighting chance against Windows CE in the cell-phone market.

A "mad rush" ? So Symbian doesn't have most of the major phone manufacturers using it then.

As with Transmeta, Embedded Linux is more hype than reality IMO.

This is built in in debug-mode in the Symbian operating system - if you want. It helps in checking where you've written sloppy code that doesn't handle out-of-memory correctly (about 100% of all code written for desktop-systems actually, but since the Symbian platform is targeting smartphones and communicators it's a lot more important there)

...but it should be possible to imagine a Palm system which actually does some cool multimedia, and with the Metadata part of the filesystem, can make things like document editing/mp3 playing, etc a snap for developers and users.

Remember that devices have limited storage capability. The highend market may be OK, in that you'll have room for a microdrive etc. but in the low to middle end of the scale (were talking mobile phones here) the market is a high-volume low-margin one. This is where all the money is, and every penny counts. I doubt Palm or MS will be able to crack it, especially since Symbian has it all sewn up.

I think Palm in particular has missed the boat, even with Be's technology, it is just to far behind.

They're pretty cool devices, they run the Symbian OS (Think Psion), have really decent organiser functions, a web browser, a mail client, a WAP browser, and even a Java virtual machine!

You can even download a telnet application for it. IRC on the train? Sweet.

Nokia 7650 Home Page (with specs, etc.)

Symbian Press Release

The OS of the best PDAs ever, the Psion 5 & later, & the OS of choice for Motorola, Nokia & Ericson, etc, for the future

Check these links here on cellphone/PDA crossover devices

The R380 is btw released as 380e, an updated (much faster) version with USB as well now.

(and of these, the 9210 will appear in the us as 9290)

Links:

Symbian
Ericsson
Nokia

1: Good hardware. Handspring doesn't have it. They've got a 33Mhz 16-bit Motorola Dragonball processor. It can (slowly) serve the most basic mobile data needs (email, instant messaging), play a couple of neat little games, and be a pretty effective organizer, but that's about it. Palm OS devices are stuck at 8 or 16MB's of total capacity, which sure as hell means you won't be storing any large files (movies, MP3s, etc) on it. They need modern hardware, like an ARM-derived platform, to overcome these inherent limitations. (I know, I know, Palm says it's working on it, but that was supposed to materialize how long ago now??)
2: Good software. The Palm OS is an old, creaky 16-bit rag that maxxed-out its potential back in '98. Memory isn't protected, there is no support for multi-tasking, and just getting color on that thing was a chore and a half (you still find it only on the most expensive devices). You need a modern 32-bit OS like Symbian's EPOC (or even Pocket PC 2002) to do these things natively. Along with a modern OS comes support for faster, better hardware (both Symbian EPOC and Pocket PC run on ARM-derived RISC processors), and more storage space (like IBM microdrives).
3: Decent network support.The Treo has network connectivity tacked-on as an afterthought. Again, this is the Palm OS's fault, not Handspring's. Back in the day, the Palm OS just wasn't designed to be doing the job it's doing now. But other mobile operating systems were built around this stuff, and can handle wireless network protocols natively. Microsoft's Smartphone platform (code-named Stinger) is set to be deployed in GSM and CDMA networks all over the world next year, and Nokia's 9210 (running on EPOC) will be in both the European/African/Asian and American GSM markets. It'll be pretty simple to add GPRS/EDGE (and then UMTS) support to the device because that's what it was designed to do.

I applaude Handspring for forging ahead, but they've inhereted a real huge (possibly fatal) liability from Palm with that ancient operating system.

Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted

They use the Symbian Platform (Epoc)

(Ericsson R380 and Nokia 9210 already out)

If you meant GPRS, then no, it's '2.5G'. See the excellent Symbian glossary

Everyone knows that Palm and the Palm-a-like Visior rule the handheld workplace in the States. For those of us who use the more European Symbian products, like the Revo,Series 5, or even older Series 3 which are the keyboardful equivilent of the Palms, and include Web browsing as standard, does anyone know if there is a wireless product in the works?
I know that both Ericsson and Nokia are a big partners - this this is their neck of the woods, - and that the new OS has wireless fuctionality, but I don't know of any solid hardware in development.

--------
Make a man a fire, and he'll be warm for the night,
Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life

Of course, this assumes that the price is right. But the current trend towards PDAs with "open" operating systems (eg. Symbian-based devices) is to provide all of these features and more... for if not an equivalent price to a Palm, a price cheaper than buying 3 of the above devices.

To be blunt, if all you use your PDA for is as an addressbook, you should have a paper addressbook. But if you actually use it as a Personal Digital Assistant, the more CPU power you can get, the better.

--

Symbian makes an operating system, and has sofar released Epoc ER5, Quartz and Crystal versions. (See Nokia 9210 for a phone using the Crystal version). Symbian does not make devices ...

There's your smartphone and PDA future. Epoc is truly a wonderful operating system for these kind of devices, and it's wonderful to program for. Yeah, I've done it for a few years now.

Symbian Devnet - start downloading the SDKs. They are possible to run on Linux also with a little help from Wine.

There's your smartphone and PDA future. Epoc is truly a wonderful operating system for these kind of devices, and it's wonderful to program for. Yeah, I've done it for a few years now.

Symbian Devnet - start downloading the SDKs. They are possible to run on Linux also with a little help from Wine.

There's your smartphone and PDA future. Epoc is truly a wonderful operating system for these kind of devices, and it's wonderful to program for. Yeah, I've done it for a few years now.

Symbian Devnet - start downloading the SDKs. They are possible to run on Linux also with a little help from Wine.

Symbian - the future of cellphones. Great operating system (Epoc) and are of course J2ME (and full Java) compatible. Symbian's owned by Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Panasonic and Psion so the fears I see in some replies here about incompatible platforms is just dead wrong.

Take a look at that owner list for Symbian again and do the math as to how many of the cellphones sold in the world are from them.

Free Symbian platform development kits can be downloaded from Symbian Devnet - and yes, there are sites that explain how to get them running on Linux with a little help from Wine ;)

And now it looks like Geos is being used in embedded solutions like the Nokia 9xxx phone.

Nokia 9110 is using GEOS, but the latest 9210 is using Symbian.

Just FYI.
&nbsp_
/. / &nbsp&nbsp |\/| |\/| |\/| / Run, Bill!

Re-badged Psion Revos. Best handheld device on the market - Runs the Symbian Platform, aren't much bigger than a Palm V and has a good keyboard.

...It ships on multiple platforms (BeOS, Win32, Linux... even Epoc ?)

EPOC is the nice operating system from Symbian which runs on Psion PDAs, the Ericsson R380, the Diamond Mako, the Nokia 9210 and a whole load of other stuff...

It's quite nice having a browser as good as IE 5 on your palmtop :-). If you've got an EPOC PDA, install the Opera 5 beta now! :-)

A hand to the ALITech folks for picking up a good line of hardware and running with it.

After hemming and hawing and drooling over Jim's Obsidian 30 for about six months, I picked up an Amethyst 20U before trekking down under. OK, so I wiped the default RH install and slathered a real distro (Debian Potato/testing) on it.

The box has been a champ. With docking station, it's virtually a second desktop. Sans, it's a thin, light, powerhouse. Battery life is good (close on the 3:20 advertised), screen rocks, keyboard feel is great (packed a Happy Hacker keyboard, hardly used it). Onboard networking is very nice to have. Still need to try out the FIR, and I've had trouble getting PCMCIA up and running, but that's after wiping what TuxTops had given me. Power management works, though it helps to go to standby from console. Had to throw together a presentation -- plug video out to the pojector, hit the <FN><CRT/LCD> switch, and voila. Coulda saved myself a lot of worrying on that one... ;-)

One nit -- the screen tends to rub against the touchpad and mouse keys in the closed position, I've found it helps to keep a sheet of letter-sized paper inside the case when closed for travelling. Otherwise, very happy.

Yes, the pricing is comperable to (or slightly better than) Compaq and Dell boxes, and better than IBM. Yes, there are cheaper boxes out there, but they tend to do less or have less coverage. And, yes, if you're familiar with Linux, it's a perfectly acceptable portable OS. My alternative bet would likely be something based on Symbian for instant-on and ready-to-fly systems. Windows? A joke.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?