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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."
They made three: the A1000, the A920 and the A925. They were all horrible. The horribleness of Motorola phones has nothing to do with OS
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.
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