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Inside Symbian: the Platform Nokia Secretly Hates
DECS writes "The Symbian OS runs the majority of todays smartphones, and is generally regarded as a solid platform. All is not well behind the scenes however. Here's why Apple ported its own OS X to the ARM architecture for the iPhone, why Motorola left Symbian for Linux, and why Nokia executives secretly regard Symbian with contempt. An inside look from Symbian developers: Readers Write About Symbian, OS X and the iPhone."
...of an EPOC?
While the phone is nice, the software is very slow and quirky. IMAP support is abysmal. I guess you can write slow software in any language.
I thought the subject sounded somewhat exaggerated and more like Apple apologia.
I'm pretty sure Apple ported OS X for the same reason as Microsoft ported Windows CE. It was their OS. They have complete freedom to do as they wish with it. It's a good platform. Why the hell not?
As for porting open source efforts, as Motorola has done, again you're no longer tied to a third party (I say "no longer", but then I don't recall Motorola ever making a Symbian phone...), you have a robust, well known, platform with strong mindshare already, and you have no royalties to pay.
Not exactly a situation where anyone "hates" Symbian, secretly or otherwise, more a situation where certain platforms work out better for certain companies.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The iPhone isn't even a smartphone... aside from the fact that Apple will obviously use its own OS, why the hell would the fact that the iPhone doesn't use Symbian be counted as "evidence" that Symbian is not doing well?
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
Sybian requires only an electric outlet and a love-starved female or homosexual lover.
The summary seems to imply that:
/. is all about right? =)
* The first link explains why Apple ported OS X (obvious IMO)
* The second link explains why motorola moved to Linux (again obvious IMO)
* The third link is some thoughts from Symbian Developers.
So... if I want to find out why it's "The Platform Nokia Secretly Hates" which bloody link should I read? Bleh, bugger it, I think I'll just read none of them and complain about it instead. That's what
(Seriously though... the only bit of the summary that doesn't link to anything is the "Nokia Hate" bit so wtf man?)
Oooohhhh.... SyMbian. My bad.
Everything I say is a lie. Except that... and that... and that, and that, and that, and that... and that.
Don't bother trying to read the article, it's slashdotted.
(yeah, stay away so I can read it...)
The government can't save you.
I'm pretty sure there isn't a development platform anywhere that programmers don't hate.
Remember, all software sucks.
Why would Nokia hate Symbian OS when Nokia owns 47.9% of Symbian?
This is why I think Java ME still has a bright future. You can say whatever you want about Java ME, but it is much easier to develop applications in that than in Symbian C++, and you can find lots of really good IDEs and Emulators.
From the article:
"Some operators are requiring the phones to be locked for any apps not carrying a 'Symbian Signed' certificate. Which means, you have to pay for a certification process where you are checked by Symbian, why you developed the application and why you want to use certain capabilities on the phone, e.g. read and store user data, using the telephony APIs, or the WIFI capabilities etc."
You can't really blame the OS for what some stupid American operators do with it surely?
Other comments like fragmentation (DoComo vs S60 vs UIQ) have merit, but this is rubbish!
Something linking to good old Acorn Computers and RISCOS. Still have a few Acorns knocking around.
I want you to die for reposting this in every new article.
In the end, the only thing that matters is how much fun you had.
... a symbian60 device knows that this is no secret...
The NeXT Cube had a slick, very usable graphical interface (the direct ancestor of Mac OS X) and a productive development environment using Objective-C. Its processor was a 25MHz 68030. There isn't any magic spell that has been cast to make programmers more stupid or make compilers worse over the last twenty years. It sounds like the iPhone has at least five times the processing power of the NeXT Cube. There really shouldn't be a problem running a 'real' operating system on it, nor should it require slaving away tweaking assembler opcodes by hand to get it to run at a reasonable speed.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I must remember to quote that the next time I'm talking to anyone from Qualcomm, Casio/Hitatchi, Kyocera, Do Co Mo or Samsung. If I catch them while they're drinking, I bet I can make them spit coke or sake out of their noses. Globally, Symbian is more or less an irrelevance. It's only a worthwhile platform because it's used on high margin handset. But a numerical majority? Sake out the nose.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The article only describes about half of what symbian is all about...
/. front page :-) ), and up until now have loved how easy it has been to deploy apps via bluetooth to the phone. Of course this may change with Series 60 v3 and the new "security" garbage...yet another reason to purchase an E61 now before they decide to upgrade all their decent phones to s60v3.
Symbian, after all, provides APIs to natively interact with the OS and many of the phones hardware....this native interface requires applications to be written in C/C++. This type of development is what most people (more specifically, those in the article) complain about. I have never developed a "native" application for symbian. The main reason for this is that the IDE's and environments which nokia provides are not available for OS X.
I can attest though that Symbian (read Nokia series 60) provides an awesome JVM and set of support APIs for accessing messaging, bluetooth, networking and various other system resources. CLDC and MDIP (1.0 and 2.0) provide great libraries for developing apps well and very fast on Symbian. I have developed several Java apps for Symbian (including one which fetches the latest articles from the
It does seem though that the article is a bit biased towards the iPhone. But until i see guaranteed proof that the iPhone will include a JVM and support libs for java development on it...i won't consider it "5 years ahead of everything else." And Apple's apparently lack of support for "hobby" development on the iPhone isnt much of a turn on either. So we'll have to wait and see. I wouldn't say Apple chose their own homebrew stuff over symbian because "symbian is crap" but rather because many of the things which Apple likes to do (Cocoa based guis) simply wouln't run on Symbian.
Isn't that's the number of days before Linux reboots ?
Good thing people turn their phones off everyonce in a while.
I can't believe how lousy those writeups are.
Symbian has grown a fair bit over the years. Its still as easy to use as ever.
I've gone through the certification of apps a couple of times (for personal usage), and its ridiculously easy.
There are 4 distinct variants of Symbian - S60v3 and S60 prior to v3, UIQ and the Japanese DoCoMo releases.
On the more popular S60v3 platform (on new releases) there is a huge array of full blown office apps;- wordprocessing, spreadsheets, extremely workable GPS applications, some stunning games (that easily look as good as, if not better than the DS equivalents).
There is absolutely no way that anyone can justly state that the iPhone is 5 years ahead without having tried to develop on it. S60 has a large number of developers actively working on it, its considerably more mature than any other smartphone OS.
i don't normally get wound up by these things, but this ones just got me fuming. Feck feck feck. Had to get that out. Sorry.
check out the article list:
Origins: Why the iPhone is ARM, and isn't Symbian
The Egregious Incompetence of Palm
More Absurd iPhone Myths: Third Party Software Panic
More Absurd iPhone Myths: iSuppli, Subsidies, and Pricing
The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile
OS X vs. WinCE: How iPhone Differs from Windows Mobile
Apple's OS X: How Does it Fit on the iPhone?
Why OS X is on the iPhone, but not the PC
Apple iPhone vs LG Prada KE850
Phone Wars: iPhone vs TyTN, Treo, Pearl, E62, P990, Q
Smartphones: iPhone and the Big Fat Mobile Industry
Cingular Apple iPhone vs. Verizon Motorola Q
Zune vs. iPhone: Five Phases of Media Coverage
Inside the iPhone: FairPlay DRM and the iTunes Store
Inside the iPhone: Wireless and Sync vs. Palm, WinCE
Inside the iPhone: UI, Stability, and Software
Readers Write About iPhone, 3G Wireless Networks
Inside the iPhone: Third Party Software
Inside the iPhone: Mac OS X, ARM, and iPod OS X
Inside the iPhone: EDGE, EVDO, HSUPA, 3G, and WiFi
Macworld: Ten Myths of the Apple iPhone
Macworld: Scorecard and Secrets of the iPhone
if that doesn't give you the idea...
However, none of this precludes the article itself from being an objective look at the Symbian platform. But it seems the writer fails to rise up to the occasion, and just delivered some hearsay from supposed "developers" and "executives".
So I dug around a bit more, read a few more paragraphs from different articles, while the writing is better than average and more technical than most, it still seems to read like every other fanboy site, this case the fanboy being an Apple fanboy, which means that absolutely every-fucking-thing that Apple/Jobs does is the total awsomeness double plus good. If only the writer(s) could be slightly critical just every now and then to give the articles that sense of non-PR-ness.
In the article "Phone Wars":
"The iPhone is closer to being a micro-laptop using flash RAM than a conventional smartphone."
This about a unreleased product with only a few grainy photos... then it goes on to bash all other "competitors" and actually just short of _praising_ Apple for not including 3G into the iPhone.
Then in the features the iPhone has 4096 MB of RAM! holy moly. I understand that with handheld devices RAM can sometimes be used for both storage and running programs, like in my trusty Palm E2, but for all other phones, only the RAM is listed and not the storage-use ROM, and yet the iPhone is listed with 4Gb of RAM! I dunno, doesn't sound like even-handed treatment.
I think one of the point the article tries to make is that the "not open phone" argument is irrelevant.
1st, Symbian is not a standard plateform even if it is the most commun OS available on "smart"phones. This is because it is used only as a kernel by phone makers. So saying that you can use the same app on different phone is irrelevant because they have to be custom fitted to every phone model or maker. 2nd, it is not an open platform because phone makers are currently locking it for carrier security (not taking the network down). So goodbye homemade application.
For the bias towards iPhone, RoughtlyDrafted is heavily biased towards all Apple products but in a good way I think : it really tries to find strong argument to justify its love for the fruity corporation.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
What's with the RD links? I'm sorry... I'm a Macbook Pro owner, I love Macs and my wife's next laptop will be a Mac when she burns hers up. But I am not an Apple fanboy quite like Daniel Eran.
I must admit I sometimes enjoy his articles, but his recent series of articles are just his own self-justification for why the iPhone is God! Yes, Steve Jobs has come to Earth to give us all immortality and give us a device of such divine providence that we cannot help but throw all of our alternatives into the eternal flames and give ourselves forever to Apple.
Puh-lease! Sorry, I don't buy it. The iPhone is good, yes. It's fashionable, yes. And it'll sell, yes. But it won't be the "savior of the world" that Apple fanboys would have you believe. And telling them they're wrong only serves to escalate their fervor until they're almost foaming at the mouth.
When I saw the iPhone I wanted one. I liked it, and I thought it would be a nice device. However, the more I learned about it the less I liked, and when I heard that it was to be closed to third-party developers I switched off entirely. The iPhone suddenly became an interesting blip on the radar, but that's all. This is a sad development since I was one of the prime market for the iPhone; tech-savvy Apple-owning middle-class with a decent enough income to actually go out and spend $500-$800 on a decent device that suits my communication and application needs. I've carried a PDA since the Palm Pilot Pro, and was thrilled when decent convergence devices came about. My current device of choice is an aging but reliable Motorola MPX220 that suits most of my needs but lacks in several areas (I like doing hand-written notes on a PDA, so I miss that functionality). This year I am going to buy a new device, but it's now almost certainly not going to be an iPhone.
RoughlyDrafted has been getting a lot of coverage here on Slashdot lately. I am not averse to that, as I said I sometimes find his articles on computing history amusing (if sometimes a little inaccurate and Apple-slanted), but his recent articles just smack of someone trying to convince himself that the iPhone is the greatest thing in the world and he's oblivious to any dissenting opinion. He will only listen to and cover those opinions that match his own or reinforce his argument.
On the subject of this particular article (which I read last night thank you), maybe to a couple of developers in Nokia the Symbian OS sucks... but don't they all? Symbian is an old architecture, that much is true but it DOES work. The problem with Symbian-based devices is rarely the OS but the applications that sit on top of it... that's what you see and work with. To someone who's developed on OSX, Linux or Windows the APIs can seem clunky an unfriendly because the world has improved many things since Symbian was first developed. However, if you use any RTOS or embedded OS from that time period they all have similar flaws due to the limitations of the devices at the time. Every developer I've ever worked with hates the OS they code on for any number of reasons. No platform is perfect. Having worked a little with Symbian I can say I saw the limitations of the OS and its APIs, but for the relatively narrow range of functions it's really asked to perform it's not bad.
I think that anyone who complains about the modern platform they're working in ought to be forced to code for six months in Fortran so they can learn to appreciate how much simpler it is to code to any platform created in the last 20 years!
Please give us your definition of a smartphone that somehow does not allow for the iPhone to be considered one. I've always assumed something like the Wikipedia's definition:
Almost all phones today that sell for more than $50 are smartphones. The iPhone has calendaring, contact lists, a notepad, a web browser, a GPS navigation system, and so on, and so on.
If that isn't a smartphone, then I'd love to hear what phone on the market is one. What exactly can you do with a PDA that you can't do with an iPhone that overrides everything it can do?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
With everything I have read, I would tend to believe they have ported the system. After all the core of MacOS X: Darwin, wouldn't take much more porting effort than Linux to an ARM architecture (assuming there was no hardware support previously). Once the core OS has been ported, it doesn't take much more effort to port the essential frameworks. There are probably a large number of features of OS X that have been left out, but does this make it any less "OS X", than Windows CE is Windows? Maybe they exclusion of the 'Mac' in the "OS X" reference was a reference to the UI design, much in the way Microsoft differentiates Windows CE and Windows XP? (supersition on my part)
I believe keeping the phone a closed platform, at least in the short term, ensures that the phone is stable and people get used to the design philosphy. Heck, if you read the article you will see how some of the other phone companies are very careful of who they let write software for their systems. I have a friend who had a Palm based phone and it would crash once in a while during a conversation. Sure he had installed extra software, but the point is the average user does not make the difference between the phone crashing, or third-party software causing the phone to crash.
Will they insist on controlling the access to third-party developers in the future? Maybe. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if they take the same approach as game console developers, where you have to get certified by them. You might be able to go under the radar and install uncertified stuff, but they won't support it. Though I will hope that they at least allow Java to be installed on the phones.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Oh, wait... Nevermind.
yeah, it wasn't a very objective analysis, and opinions seem to hinge entirely on a few features. I can see memory cleanup on exceptions being a legitimate gripe, but the rest of it seems nit-picky. The standard C++ library is bloated, IMO, and while it contains some nice features, I would probably not stick it in a device where memory and storage are at a premium. I've personally programmed PalmOS, but never Symbian, and had plenty of memory related problems there.
Speculatively speaking, even if Cocoa is running on mobiles, it doesn't mean they also support layering it with C++. Obj-C also has some restrictions when mixed with C++, like all declarations of Objective-C objects needing to be pointers. The main benefit of Objective-C, IMO, is that it is a "true" object oriented language with message passing whereas C++ is not. It is possible to make C++ behave like a true object oriented language by implementing message passing for accessors rather than allowing direct access (e.g. accessing public or protected variables) but that is not forced on you.
The writer couldn't even spell "piece of shit" right, spelling it "peace of shit." Why the shit is at peace is beyond me... Maybe they can switch it to "pease of shit" next, which I recall being an old spelling of peas (like in the nursery rhyme pease porridge hot).
All I want are the decent IMAP (with SSL, of course) and SSH clients...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
As a Symbianophile (and a former Symbian employee) allow to point out some mistakes the author of the TFA has made:
"Nokia's POS/OS. Sources close to Nokia say that Symbian is secretly regarded inside the company--even among high level senior executives--as a "peace-of-shit-OS," explaining that "Finnish people usually have a very coarse language.""
Well from the POV of a SymbianOS developer, it's Nokia that have screwed things up with a very buggy "middleware" S60 layer where (the rumours have it) much of the functionality has been implemented by summer interns and there are some long standing bugs with S60 that make SymbianOS look bad
"And of course UIQ has never been source code nor binary compatible with S60. But still you get the impression from analysts and media that 'Symbian' is one stable OS."
Although they aren't binary compatible, the fact that they both sit on a X-windows-esque Eikon windowing layer means that their Windowing systems are in fact very similar and it's easy to cross-compile for both. Remember that UIQ is for the most part Pen-based whereas S60 is numeric-keypad-based (broadly speaking) and it in fact impressive that these two separate systems can be so easy to port between thanks to them both sitting on SymbianOS for most core tasks.
"Symbian Signed ... makes shareware and hobby programming almost impossible ..."
... I'm sure /. readers understand the necessity for signed s/w on mobiles. Also the point (unquoted) about needed full certifcation is misleading - it just means the user gets are warning dialog like many modern OSs. The situation with J2ME midlets is much the same.
"Some operators are requiring the phones to be locked for any apps not carrying a 'Symbian Signed' certificate"
The biggest issue all of us in the industry have is the power of the network operators customising and locking users in/out of features - this will occur with any OS (and does already with PocketPC) due to he unfortuant power of the networks who control the industry.
"Crippled C++ support They made their own home-cooked version of exceptions called Leaves"
SymbianOS v9 (S60 v3+, UIQ v3+) can use exceptions (although they are Leaves under the hood) - happy now? The point TFA makes here is very uninformed as Symbian jumps through hoops to make it difficult for apps to leak through the combination of CleanupStack and Leaves
"Limited support for multi-threading That was hardly even a relevant argument in 1993 but it meant that Symbian uses 'active objects' instead of threads in almost all applications."
In fact, the cost of a OS context-switch is still high when every bit of battery power matters - battery technology hasn't changed that much since 1993
"Bad development environment ... need to install Visual Studio 2003 to make it work ..."
Carbide.c++, which is based on Eclipse and CDT, is the only IDE Nokia is supporting from now on and it's great and stable. The author admits "My first installation a few years ago" ... nuff zed.
and there's moreThe writer is very pro-Apple, at at times the writing comes across as a Slashdot post level of writing (though at times it
s very analytical).
But that does not mean the articles can be of no value, despite the slant - the summary of the history of Symbian and Palm and Linux and WinCE is very good, even if motives ascribed to companies are more suspect. But the timelines are right, and the long letter from the Symbian developer is hard to dismiss especially since I have heard similar thoughts from other developers on a J2ME list I have been subscribed to for a few years (though to be clear, I do not currently do any phone application development myself).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Eran is just showing how the "Linux" and "Symbian" OS's, are not the well thought out and modernized monolithic wonderfully easy OS's to program in that seems to be talked about in the press.
iPhone in my mind is just the MacMicro, which is the logical extension of the Mac Mini. The phone function may not be the most important feature for a lot of users, including my wife, and her friends. My wife has 30 years of friends in her 1.5" thick paper address book, and her interior designer friend has about 3000 phone numbers from 35 years in her business. They both panic when they think they have lost their "book". The iPhone, for them, will be the reason to move the paper lists into the 21st century. This seems old hat to a programmer or heavy computer user, but lots of people just don't find it EASY to implement computer based records as an individual.
Apple's iPhone is on the right track, and since it is totally software driven, applications are virtually free to implement actions free of mechanical button constraints.
Apple does have a history of delivering on innovation:
1. Easy to use interfaces
2. Logical consistent icons/dialogs
3. Programming ease delivered to developers
4. Pretty good hardware all things considered, including the bum items (I've owned a lot of them)
5. Hardware that is nearing 8 years old still humming along just fine on OSX.
6. Recognition of what is needed to keep the user experience successful to drive adoption
7. Delivering basically what they said they would on OSX
I think that once iPhone is delivered, we will find that if an individual developer wants to implement his own application, say an HP 15 emulator, that it will be a straightforward process to get it certified and offered to iPhone users.
Apple collectively is not dumb about involving developers, and with the volume of phones in the world, they know they need them for localization & specific industry, hobby & connectivity issues.
I like Apple (& use Windows too), but think Apple is far and away ahead of the game in mobiles, because of the way they set up OSX and its developer tools.
Isn't that amazing! The Cube was a really cool machine, and here we are with more processing power in our pockets.
Stripping down OS X, simply means gutting further down to a BSD core. Like a phone running Linux, what is so strange about it? It would be a huge mistake to create a stop-gap OS simply to get it out the door, when an optimized core is probably already available. The OS that is X should be able to run on just about anything by now...
The iPhone hasn't been released. Yet all the Apple fan boys have s3cr3t intimate inside knowledge of the system. What gives? They step-up to defend how Apple won't really lock out third-parties, but how do they know?
Apple fanboys get more and more sickening the farther from reality they get.
I work for a company that develops games on the JavaME platform. While I am not a programmer, I can tell you that many of our programmers would love to develop native Symbian applications. They say it's much more easier and that they can do in 10 lines of code the same thing that Java does in 10. Of course, what they really hate is the fact that even though java code is cross-platform, they still have to adjust the same application for each device (different device specifications, of course) However, as a tester, I hate Symbian. It is SLOW. Just turn on a Nokia N93 (the most performant processor on the consumer market, at least until some months ago) and see how much it takes just to start up the system. Then enter the main menu for the first time and be ready to wait again. Do you want to remove some of the installed applications? Just wait for the OS to scan the phone for them (as if it doesn't know what is already installed). Then remove. Then wait again until Symbian scans again. Symbian usability is a joke. Ever tried to connect a device through a GPRS connection? There are THREE places in the seemingly infinite tree of menus you have to go. Why can't they just place all the internet settings in one location? Do we need this complexity in our mobile devices? Do we have to turn the mobile phone in a PC? If this is the only way, we should do it better, at least. And don't, please, don't remind me of Windows CE. Try the 'cool' Sony Ericsson P990, you'll know what I'm talking about.
Sig
I'm pretty sure Apple ported OS X for the same reason as Microsoft ported Windows CE.
Since WinCE is not in any way a "port" of Windows, that statement doesn't really mean anything. Heck, WinCE is not even what many smartphones use - they use Windows Mobile (which is based on WinCE but offers the common Windows-looking GUI which WinCE does not include).
That's one of the points the article was making, WinCE and Symbian are not full OS'es scaled down, but custom built OS'es meant to run on small devices. The level of computing power has finally reached the point where this is no longer nessecary, yet the phone market moves on bound by this constraint in development. Developing a Windows Mobile app is not going to be the same as developing a Windows app. The release of Vista means little to Windows Mobile users. OS X on the iPhone offers the advantage of being able to use things like CoreImage, and CoreAnimation along with all the standard GUI calls. It means that OS updates can be migrated to the phone in short order.
Obviously the GUI programming will be a little different because of the touch screen but it means Apple gets to use all the developer tools (including optimization tools) they have today, which should make for rapid development of applications on the phone.
One area the article doesn't explore very well I think are Linux based smart phones, since that is a real OS and API scaled down for a smaller device, but something which would be quite happier in more powerful hardware as well without as many development limitations as other platforms. It does have a more fractured UI approach from different people though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can access gmail from the iPhone, right?
I can make use of GCal.
Those are third party apps.
It will be able to install and run some custom applications just as the iPhone runs games today. Those games are not always written by Apple.
How again is it not a smartphone?
Now here's the kicker - Symbian platforms are moving to signed app model, where third party app makers have to buy a Verisgn certificate to run on the SYmbian platform, at a cost of hundreds of dollars per year. Sure, that's SO MUCH more open.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder if Apple would be willing to license the core? It is interesting that they seem to have now jumped ahead of mobile Linux in the interface department. Allowing others to utilize the base with a custom OS would help with getting applications. I certainly hope that they make a larger screen version for vertical markets. Allowing other companies to create products which Apple will not, or should not, isn't going to hurt their markket share.
I would love nothing more than to have a Fujitsu slate Tablet running OS X, and something like a UMPC for commercial/medical markets...
"I wish there was a doctor somewhere who'd give you some time off work simply when you mention the word Symbian"
"Lots of job opportunities for Symbian devs these days... the previous ones having jumped out a window"
(thanks to manko@#suomiscene for these two gems)
I think the term featurephone might apply, but really it's just a purty phone, but no Treo or 6800. Different market.
Yet Rim took a hit to the stock price when the iPhone was announced. Perhaps a whole lot of people know something you'll not admit.
Not to mention you post safely AC, which shows just how confident of your predictions you really are! Always safe to predict the future when no-one knows later if you are wrong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of course, all those early adopters (geek toy buyers) who bought the N770 and N800 internet tablets from Nokia are helping them test their linux-based OS.
I know I am in the company of truly like-minded geeks when this comment not only exists, but is modded +5 Funny.
Sony ha
If you want an objective look at any technology, stay away from this site.
Symbian's main "competitors" are OSes that most people have never heard of (e.g. OSE). These provide the OS for low end phones which sell in far greater numbers than any smartphone.
They are internal products at Nokia and Sony Ericsson and as such those parts of Nokia and Sony have something to fear from Symbian - that they might be lose "market share". For it's incredible feature set, Symbian is very lean and getting leaner in terms of the cost it adds to a device (the cost of the hardware needed to support it). So it's not as if all of Nokia or SE love Symbian - it's a threat to some.
The iPhone is an interesting example of what you can do with expensive hardware, and it may sell very well and make Apple a handsome profit but as it is their expected volumes look very small indeed so I can't see how they will make themselves the standard smartphone platform.
I think that many people don't "get" the scale of the phone market in comparison to PCs. There are a lot more people with phones in the world than with computers.
------
This posting contains only my own personal opinions etc.
This is all just my personal opinion.
I am the lead technical architect for Quickoffice (http://www.quickoffice.com). You might say we have developed a few Symbian applications in our day;)
Symbian certainly has its quirks, but this article is based on a lot of information that is no longer correct or even relevant.
1) The article states that no objects are deallocated on a 'leave'. This was true prior to 9.1. You had to manually push objects on a cleanup stack which would deallocate objects during a leave. However, with 9.1 the underlying leave mechanism is a standard C++ throw, meaning that the stack is unwound and all objects are properly deallocated (just like any other platform). The only limitation is that Symbian (for compatibility reasons I'm sure) chose to keep the throw hidden behind the User::Leave interface meaning that only integer exception codes can be thrown. You CAN actually throw an exception object with a normal 'throw SomeObj()' statement, but if it is uncaught the application panics.
Functionally this means that Symbian supports 'real' exception semantics, although it is limited in its support for full blown exception objects. It's 3/4 of what we want, and with some careful planning (managing the list of error codes) it provides fairly robust exception handling system.
2) String handling: Descriptors are a horrible convention. However, there is nothing stopping anyone from implementing their own more standard dynamic string class. That's what we did. A conversion operator allows us to automatically convert to/from descriptors with very little trouble (TPtrC is a wonderful thing). From our applications perspective strings are very much the dynamic strings we know and love on other platforms, with the Symbian descriptor bits abstracted away.
3) Threads: The EKA2 Kernel has great threading support. Their use may be 'discouraged', but that is far different from not having them available. We utilize threads when they make sense and have had no issues. Writing a multi-threaded application on Symbian is really no different than any other platform I've worked on.
4) The development environment is most definitely a problem. I've never had any issues getting the SDK's installed and running (although I have managed to corrupt SDK's on a few occasions;->). The command line build system is functional. The IDE's on the other hand, have been quite bad. Carbide 1.1 is an absolute mess, Codewarrior (the default development environment for years) is quirky, and working within Visual Studio is a largely manual process. From what I've heard about the new version of Carbide (1.2), this situation is going to be getting MUCH better in the near future (ahead of the iPhone release).
Symbian has really come a long ways in the last couple of years. We've done a lot of work to make it a more standard environment for our development efforts. Outside of direct UI work, a engineer at Quickoffice has to have very little direct Symbian knowledge. All of the standard C++ mechanisms are available (with the exception of exception objects). About 70% of our code is directly compilable on other platforms with no modification (the rest deals directly with Symbian API's).
There is even STL support available (I beleive Penrellian has a port up and running, we utilize stlport), which makes Symbian a fairly standard platform. It definitely has it warts. Many of the API's are undertested and rather poorly thought out. The documentation is often non-existent and the differences in emulation and device can be infuriating (sometimes it even breaks between two different devices). It is a evolving and ever improving situation, however. I hardly think that Apple has a 5 year lead over anyone.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
Why should it surprise anyone that a Apple fanboi site like Slashdot is posting articles from another pro-Apple sites? Just look at how many iPhone articles there have been in the past few weeks: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=&query=iphone&au thor=&sort=1&op=stories
One more iPhone article and we should start a boycott of Slashdot.
Actually the server is running Linux. It's just that the hardware GoDaddy throws at the site isn't up to the task.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/
My Ericsson 600i is running Symbian. Segfaults, even reports signal 11, approx 2 times a day.
This happens when i answer calls.
A genuine piece of crap.
I use QuickOffice on a UIQ 3 interface - any chance of making an OpenOffice version? As ODF is now a standard it would be quite cool to have it supported..
Insert
It's a platform for vibrating devices - and if you use it, you get screwed. I should get one for my wife...
A smartphone OS is one for which you can get an SDK. That includes Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. That doesn't include the iPhone.
The iPhone runs OS X. What people (like you) seem to fail to understand, is that all developers already have an SDK - it's called the OS X development kit that ships with every Mac.
There will be some specific libraries for iPhone UI extensions, those that need them (like the iPod SDK companies have used to create games) will be given access. Those are indeed third parties, it's just that it's more limited in terms of who can develop.
Closer to home, I am pretty sure (though it's not confirmed) that users will be able to move Dashcode creations to the iPhone. If that is true, techncally every single Leopard user will have an iPhone SDK.
Here's a mental exercise to show how rediculous your stance is. Let's say Apple releases the SDK for one and all six months after the release of the iPhone. How is it that a phone I purchased "suddenly" becomes a smartphone with no update from Apple or other action on my part?
The Phone has an SDK and an OS and can run complex apps - therefore it is a smartphone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Newsflash to the author of the article: operating in a memory and CPU constrained environment requires sacrificies.
Things like exceptions have heavy runtime requirements (by comparison Windows CE only got them partially in V3).
Of course, if you're prepared to require a hefty CPU and lots of RAM, which is possible though costly now, then you can just run a full-size monolithic OS like OSX. But that's not comparable to all the tiny underpowered devices Symbian (or CE) can run on.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Of course, the real reason for Symbian's existence as a mobile phone OS is that the original consortium members (Nokia etc.) were petrified of Microsoft moving into the phone business and making a commodity out of the hardware in the same way they have done in the PC world. Nokia didn't want to become a DELL.
The whole Symbian effort (post-Psion) was a defense against Microsoft. The technical qualities of the OS were secondary.
This was bound to come undone once the incumbent phone manufacturers had nullified the Microsoft threat.
Symbian has always been hanging by a political thread.
Motorola, rightly or wrongly, decided some time ago that Microsoft were no longer a problem, and went Linux.
Apple's decision to stay away from Symbian indicates that they aren't scared of Microsoft in the phone arena.
Only time will tell if the Microsoft defense is being dismantled prematurely.
Meanwhile, at Redmond, they are probably smiling at all this.
While I don't have as much experience with Linux, the biggest problem I can see is the same as with Symbian: while the kernel operating system itself is Linux, different phone vendors may feel free to build their own user interface layer."
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good point! actually i just thought that a radical shift could take place here.
if one where to make a good OS for a mobile phone one could extend this OS to a
laptop or desktop...
now everybody is trying to fit the desktop computer into a mobile phone.
but with the world being 95% windows dominated, but with so many mobile
phone MAKERS (with some also making computers), maybe standardization on a GUI on top
of a FREE OPEN SOURCE (linux) kernel could be the future threat to MS
"side glance" to SONY CELL and linux for that matter
Don't know much about OSX versus OSX on the iPhone, but using WinCE versus "Big" Windows isn't a good example. Windows CE is a completely different OS than Windows, but was designed to have the Win32 API set, so that apps could be re-compiled/ported to the platform with minimal difficulty.
"I thought they were the dominant species..."
Based on Symbian, there are different platforms. Based on version 7 and 8, the most spread platforms are UIQ, S60 and S80. On version 9 there is S60v3, UIQ3. So there are five current, totally different and incompatible platforms.
And have you heard of feature packs? S60 has FP1, FP2 and FP3 as I know. And what about the fact, that there are differences in each release of a given platform? I have seen phones with the S60 platform (the same feature pack) that behave differently - given code works on one of them and does not work on the other.
It turns out that each company has its own variant of symbian... no, that each company has its MANY variants of symbian it uses in the different devices it makes.
As for the certification. Someone mentioned that the user shall not be allowed to install third-party apps, because they may crash the phone and the user will accuse the phone maker for this. That is correct, but I guess it will change soon, as the users begin to preceive their phones as a computing device (like the PC). Most people is accusing Intel or Microsoft for example if their third-party app crashes on the PC. And even if they do, Microsoft and Intel still do allow running third party apps on their products without certifications.
Symbian wears the heavy burden of the architecture, designed when the devices were very constrained. It is trying to be modern but you cant compete a ferrari with a bike, no matter how you upgrade the bike.
Yes, Symbian dominates the market and will do so for 2-3 years ahead, but that does not mean it is a good platform. Not always the best product makes it into the market. There are big players that support it and thay decide who will dominate and who will fall in oblivion.