Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Inside Symbian: the Platform Nokia Secretly Hates

Posted by Hemos on from the i-love-you-but-i-hate-you dept.

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."

3 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  2. just another pro-Apple site by semiotec · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.