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."

Comments

Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com

[AKAImBatman]

Not exactly a situation where anyone "hates" Symbian, secretly or otherwise, more a situation where certain platforms work out better for certain companies.

Except that the companies who use Symbian do *hate* Symbian. I don't have any clue why the article states that Symbian has an "undeserved reputation". Its faults have been well known for quite a while now.

The only reason why it was chosen is that the alternatives at the time were Symbian and WinCE. (Contrary to the article's statement that Linux was a viable option.) WinCE was a more powerful OS, but it demanded hardware to match that power. Symbian was not quite as powerful, but at least it ran on highly constrained devices. So it's no surprise that the phone makers tried to keep their prices down by going with Symbian.

For a company like Apple, it does make sense to use their own OS as they have the necessary support staff and experience on hand. For a company like Nokia, however, they just don't see the software as important enough. Which is too bad. They make great phones, but consistently fall flat with poor (read: buggy) software implementations.

no brainer

[Clover_Kicker]

I'm pretty sure there isn't a development platform anywhere that programmers don't hate.

Remember, all software sucks.

Not enough CPU?

[Ed Avis]

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.

Re:Not enough CPU?

[sacrilicious]

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.

No one's saying programmers are more stupid or compilers are worse. But operating systems and graphics layers have become much more demanding. Witness the fact that computers are STILL often "too slow" at the same routine tasks they were 10 years ago, despite running 100 times faster. That's WITH a heavy-duty specialized GPU doing most of the graphics.

Apple is of course free to write a completely stripped down, optimized mini-OS for their phone, and such a thing might run very well on their chip. But the question at hand in this thread is whether such an effort would qualify as "OSX".

just another pro-Apple site

[semiotec]

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.

Why not?

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

Article Corrections

[enjo13]

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.

Re:Then what is?

[Mr2001]

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. That is not a common definition of "smartphone". Go to any cell phone store and ask to see the smartphones; they'll show you to the Blackberries and Treos.

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? You can install new software on it to meet your current and future needs, without having to pay the manufacturer for an expensive development license, or waiting for an "approved" developer to write, test, and sell the app you need. If you can't download an app from the internet and install it on your phone, it's not a smartphone.

Re:Java ME

[Myolp]

I have IM-clients for both MSN and Google Talk in J2ME. The GMail-client from Google is a J2ME app. I have used tons of games (some bad, some very good), all written in J2ME. I have a really cool J2ME app that interacts with a national map service (eniro.se). I have telnet/SSH client written in J2ME. Yeah, J2ME is ridiculous and completely useless...