Symbian Signs on Samsung

mmol_6453 writes "In a move that beat Orange's showing off the first Microsoft-based smartphone by a day, Symbian has signed on Samsung. Quoth the article: 'Symbian now licenses its smartphone software to all five top mobile makers, and its OS has beaten both Palm and Microsoft in the European handheld device market'"

Comments

Re:Frist Post

[Anonymous Coward]

$h1t, I guess I made sceond post instead. Damn Hinduists!

I disagree

[El Pollo Loco]

I had a samsung phone. Never again will I buy samsung. The SCH-850 was a piece of crap. After a few weeks of using it, it would die. Not the battery, or screen. That would all work fine. It would show full signal strength, but would never connect to the network. I could not call, nor be called. I exchanged 3 times, all 4 phones did the same thing. I bought an LD-150, and the UI sux, but I can still call.

Symbian EPOC

[vlad_petric]

... is by far the best OS for mobile devices, in terms of stability (I've had a Psion device for more than 2 years now; the OS *never* crashed and trust me, I've tried many things on it), functionality, and even memory consumption (the filesystem/application memory automatic balance is great).

I wish I could say that Sharp Zaurus running embedix Linux is a good match, but in fact it isn't. Not only it crashed on me once, and required cold reboot, but the boundaries of the filesystem and memory are also fixed; this means that if you want more application memory (to play Freeciv for instance) you have to create a swap file (!?!).

The Raven

Bluetooth -- Software development

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of cool stuff coming out for Symbian these day(I know, it's all in theory and testing). Symbian makes things jive just a little bit better. People are now using symbian in respect to bluetooth (switchme). Its something that definitely makes sense and will hopefully get bluetooth off the ground. Hopfully more developers will work to make the killer app.

Re:Another monopoly in the making?

[vlad_petric]

C'mon, you can't put an equal sign between Microsoft and Symbian, for two main reasons:

EPOC is a great, stable OS. No Microsoft OS has ever come close to the quality/stability of EPOC

bussiness ethics

Please understand, dear marxist slashdotters, that it is not illegal to be a monopoly. What is illegal is to abuse your monopoly, like Microsoft did (e.g. through product bundling)

The Raven

The battle is only beginning...

[mcjulio]

In a space that Microsoft doesn't own, it's going to come down to 3rd party apps and overall product value, combined with whoever's the best phone. Being a pda/phone combo is nice and all, but if your phone sucks, no one will use it long enough to get enjoyment out of the fact that it can do wireless http browsing and IMAP4.

Battery life will also be a big issue, I think, although I don't know how big. The HTC Canary does fairly well in standby mode, since it shuts off its power-sucking color screen. Not sure about the Symbian OEMs - I've only played with the Microsoft product.

You obviously have not used one of these phones

[siberian]

We had one in for dev purposes for this event and it is seriously awesome. Pop a chip in it and its good to go in the US.

We do a lot of wireless development and this is the best I have seen by far. The screen is incredible, the form factor comfortable and the functionality is good. The UI is slightly unintuitive at times but since its CE based its fairly easy to extend and develop for. Pop a ram card in and your good to go.

Re:Yea bloatware...

[Troed]

*cough*

Poor resource management?

Please tell me which other multimedia capable handheld/smartphone operating systems which even come close to the excellence of the CleanupStack::Push/Pop .. (as one example).

Yes, I've also developed on Symbian.

Re:This artcile is utter fantasy!

[Corporate Troll]

I live in Europe, and you are not completely wrong, but a bit misinformed. Most PDA's here clearly are Palms, but Symbian devices(mostly Psion's) come in second. Pocket PC's (thus WinCE) are rarely seen here, actually, I've only seen them in the shops. I have seen exactly *one* MS based phone (on a Sony cellphone, I think)
Yes, I know, just anecdotial evidence.

About the merits of the system itself: the Symbian OS really *is* good, much more flexible than the Palm versions (and the multitasking is real, unlike the Palm which only does task-switching). Want a nice extra application like a PDF viewer? Most likely it exists, and it is probably even OpenSource.
The only reason that Palm's are so popular is because it fits "the needs of most people". Not mine, I want more sophistication and hence I got myself a Psion Revo+. WinCE devices? Have yet to seen one in use by someone.

A bit misleading..

[jyristys]

Samsung is NOT just licensing the raw Symbian OS, they are actually getting Nokia's Series60 platform (the same one Siemens licensed a while ago) which is based on Symbian OS but includes many improvements and fixes, not to mention a far superior Java/MIDP implementation. Series60 includes also the whole UI, SOS just comes with a very crude reference implementation.
Samsung just has to license the SOS separately because of complicated contracts between Nokia and Symbian.

Re:"smarterphone"?

[Ch_Omega]

"As it supports both J2ME and it's own C++ based API's it can support anything you write for it, I'd be very supprised if both Go and Chess don't exisit for J2ME, and I know EPOC has Chess, which would not be hard to port over to Symbian 7."

Actually, Series 60 is Symbian 6.1, not Symbian 7.

...And yes, there are lots of both Symbian software, and j2me aplications out there. :)