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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."

53 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. So is this the end... by ettlz · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...of an EPOC?

  2. I own a Nokia E61 by thammoud · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:I own a Nokia E61 by DrSkwid · · Score: 2, Informative

      IMAP on my n80 is good and the only difference I can see from my 6600 is that it even supports SSL connections now.

      I haven't worked out how to add self-signed certs yet so I have to click on equivalent of "accept for this session" each time I connect.

      --
      There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
    2. Re:I own a Nokia E61 by Bowdie · · Score: 3, Informative

      Have you got the left hand side hard button set to that? When you press that button, the phone waits five seconds for you to press * to lock the handset. It's a throw back to the old "MENU *" handset lock all Nokias do.

      Try setting another button to the function, and see if it still takes that time.

      Hope that helps

      --
      yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
    3. Re:I own a Nokia E61 by totally+bogus+dude · · Score: 2, Informative

      For a friend's n93 I exported the certificate as a "DER encoded binary X.509 (.CER)" using the Windows Certificates MMC (it was for our OWA server's certificate; not sure what the OpenSSL equivalent would be), and downloaded it to the phone using the built-in browser. It then asked me if I'd like to install it. I think I also renamed the certificate to have a .der extension, but I don't think that should be necessary - IIS uses the same MIME type for .crt and .der files (application/x-x509-ca-cert).

    4. Re:I own a Nokia E61 by ErpLand · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not 100% sure if/how self-signed certs might differ from this, but we made our own certification authority for internal use using these instructions then it's possible convert the root certificate from X509 to DER format like this:

      openssl x509 -in ROOTCERT.pem -outtype DER -out ROOTCERT.der

      ... and now it can be opened and installed on your Symbian phone.

      It's necessary to specify the trust level of the certificate after install to say for purposes you want to trust the certificate (to authenticate secure web sites, email, application installs, etc.) The method of doing this will vary by phone but IIRC my S60v3 phone prompted me at the moment of install, whereas my 9300 Communicator required setting manually in the security settings in Control Panel.

      If you want to serve DER files from a web server, they should be delivered with mime type application/x-x509-ca-cert.

  3. 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 xoyoyo · · Score: 5, Informative

      (I say "no longer", but then I don't recall Motorola ever making a Symbian phone...)

      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

    2. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by jrumney · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'm pretty sure Apple ported OS X for the same reason as Microsoft ported Windows CE. It was their OS.

      My suspicion about the real reason they are not opening the iPhone up for development, is that they haven't really ported OS X at all. They've got a UI for the phone apps that looks and feels like OS X, but there are no Quartz libraries or any other libraries that third party developers would expect, the apps they have are all hand coded and heavily optimised. The device just doesn't have the power for a generic OS X like interface. Apple haven't released details about the clock speed or the CPU other than what company they are buying it from, but a quick check of the company's website shows that they sell two processors, both running at less than 200MHz. If they haven't made a secret deal for a chip that hasn't been announced yet, expect the iPhone to run at the speed of a PDA from 5 years ago.

    3. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by andreyw · · Score: 2, Informative

      Microsoft didn't "port" CE from anything - it was a from-scratch effort targetting embedded systems.

    4. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by p3d0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I also have a Motorola phone and hate it.

      --
      Patrick Doyle
      I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
    5. 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
    6. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by zsazsa · · Score: 2, Informative

      There are tons of ARM CPU variants out there, and most of them aren't made by ARM Ltd. The XScale family, manufactured by Intel and now owned by Marvell, is ARM and is currently offered in speeds up to 624MHz.

    7. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by UnknowingFool · · Score: 3, Informative

      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?

      The point in the series of articles is why Apple chose to port OS X instead of using Symbian, Linux, etc. After all, Apple doesn't use OS X on the iPod. Developing applications for mobile devices is not easy. Symbian (and Palm) have succeeded so far because their feature set is smaller and easy to maintain. Scaling up on features is harder. Windows and Linux suffer the problem of having too much and it's not easy to trim them down and which version. In fact, Microsoft did not "port" Windows CE. Porting suggests that the OS/program was tweaked to work on a different environmment, hardware, etc. Windows CE is a complete re-write and really only superficially shares the Windows name and look.

      Unlike Symbian a ported version of OS X could expand its functionality. Linux is modular like OS X but Linux's problem is with standardization. Each company must maintain their own mobile Linux which makes development harder (Nokia mobile Linux, Sony mobile Linux, LG mobile Linux, etc). Having to maintain their own flavor of Linux is not something that these companies are equipped to do. Thus supporting development is not easy for these companies. Apple needs only to extend their current developers to include a mobile OS X division. Hopefully for Apple, mobile OS X, unlike Windows CE, it's not a new OS but just a new set of APIs.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
    8. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by jrumney · · Score: 2, Informative

      OK, checking my facts, it wasn't Apple that released the info, it was PortalPlayer (now acquired by nVidia), and only rumour linked it to the iPhone (which still wasn't announced at the time). So its possible that its a higher spec chip like an XScale, and Apple have another new product up their sleeves powered by a PortalPlayer processor.

    9. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by daviddennis · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If you watch Steve Jobs' presentation, you will see that when they talk about using MacOS X, the slide behind him mentions several MacOS X technologies, including the very latest.

      Besides, why wouldn't they use MacOS X? If RoughlyDrafted's sources are to be believed, programming under Symbian would be a huge pain, Windows Mobile would look like a defeat and PalmOS is years behind the times.

      I know RoughlyDrafted's author is very pro-Apple, but I don't think he's a liar. After all, simply looking at screenshots confirms that PalmOS is way behind the times, Windows Mobile has inherited Microsoft's ugly gene, and Symbian phones don't look particularly modern, either. So really, if you look at things impartially, or try to, his analysis seems sound.

      I would have liked to see him discuss RIM, since RIM's phone and OS look to me like the best on the American market today other than the iPhone. But I can sympathise somewhat because it seems pretty hard to find information about RIM's OS.

      Just looking at the iPhone confirms that it uses something very similar to the Quartz transparency effects and built-in anti-aliasing in MacOS X. They could build something super complex themselves that emulated these effects, or they could just use MacOS X. Seem to me their decision would be pretty simple. They just waited until phone processors and technologies caught up to the extent that MacOS X could run.

      Remember, MacOS X runs quite well a 400mhz PowerBook and an iPhone has a small fraction of its screen size. So is it likely that a 200mhz processor could give good performance on a phone? I would think it would be. And is it likely that a 10gb install of MacOS X could be cut down to phone size? Sure - alternate language fonts alone take gigabites of that, and drivers and built in applications take the bulk of the rest.

      Remember, Windows Mobile isn't really Windows; it's a descendent of Windows CE, which was meant to be quite different from Windows itself. So the iPhone's adoption of MacOS X could be revolutionary, as the first phone with a no excuses, fully powered OS.

      People who have used the iPhone praise its responsiveness, so that's impressive by any standard.

      D

    10. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by daviddennis · · Score: 2, Informative

      A fair question, so I tracked down the review I read that mentions it:

      http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macword/2007/01/ip honehands/index.php?lsrc=mwrss

      Hope that helps.

      D

    11. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by Dputiger · · Score: 2, Insightful

      My problem with RoughlyDrafted (and its author) isn't that he's pro-Apple, it's that many of his "analyses" are so fundamentally flawed. He clearly has no understanding of even the most basic tools of research methods or statistical analysis--or simply chooses to ignore them. I dislike seeing his contributions on Slashdot, not because I'm against his opinions, but because the methodology he demonstrates as "proof" in his various articles is (and remains) so fundamentally broken.

    12. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by daviddennis · · Score: 2, Insightful

      In the case of Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian, though, I think he has good points.

      However, I would have liked to see a more detailed analysis of Windows Mobile since it looks like it has gained some traction.

      I saw a Windows CE phone a couple of years back that was so abysmal that it's easy for me to think of Windows for Phones as an awful idea.

      But right now Windows Mobile is gaining ground fast and an analysis that talks about relative cellphone market shares has to take that into account and acknowledge Windows Mobile as a serious competitor.

      Aso, he's ignored RIM/Blackberry and its intensely loyal users. With more consumer-friendly phones and more modern design, I would expect RIM to gain market share against both Windows and Palm. I'm curious as to why that has not happened to the extent I would expect. Blackberry is a much loved brand by its main market, after all. A suvrey of IT professionals rated it second in overall quality and reliability among vendors, and the #1 vendor was not a competitor.

      I did a similar analysis to RoughlyDrafted some time ago and came to to a simiilar conclusion. I looked at the iPhone, Treo (Palm and Windows versions), Sidekick IV and Blackberry Pearl.

      I felt the Treo looked downright old-fashioned, the Sidekick had a low-resolution display they should have improved a generation ago, and Windows Mobile had a user interface both bland and hard to read. That left the Pearl, which I really liked except for its bizarre keyboard. My conclusion was that many of the companies making phones were highly complacent and deserved a big kick.

      They also had web sites that had so many pictures of spinning phones that I found myself getting seasick, and my computer almost crashed from the ordeal. The super-elegant nad comprehensive presentation of the iPhone interface on Apple's site looked like a safe haven of perfection compared to how awful the competition's sites were.

      Later on, I visited a Cingular store to ask about the iPhone, and a helpful fellow showed me the closest equivalent, the Cingular-branded large screen Windows Mobile touch screen phone. I pulled up my web site on Internet Explorer and you can imagine how pleased I was when it came up, looking pretty good. I was able to log in with the very nice keyboard and play around. But the process of scrolling was awkward. The idea of shrinking the web page to fit the screen and then letting you expand it is truly a work of genius on the part of the iPhone's inventors. The price of $419 makes me think the iPhone is competitively priced - you pay a bit more but you get a lot more in return.

      So if I want a genuinely useful and usable web surfing device that will work whether I'm in WiFi hotspot or not, it seems like the iPhone reigns supreme.

      RoughlyDrafted may be biased, but sometimes its conclusions hold up. I think this is one of those times.

      D

    13. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What went wrong? I used to own an EPOC16 device, and it was a joy to use. It did multitasking and ran a really nice spreadsheet on a 8MHz CPU with 256KB of RAM (some of which was used as a RAM disk for file storage). It came with a simple-to-use development environment, and writing simple applications was trivial. Sure, it only supported a 1-bit display on my device, but it did everything I wanted from a palmtop (throw in a web browser and mail client, and it would still now). How did they get it so wrong when they moved to EPOC32/Symbian.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    14. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by YU+Nicks+NE+Way · · Score: 2, Informative

      Windows CE was and is a completely separate kernel than either the original Windows kernels or the NT-based kernels. 9x was too tied to the x86 architecture, and NT was (and is) just simply too large.

    15. Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com by BasilBrush · · Score: 2

      API is brain-demaged (looks like written by a bunch of C++ newbies)

      Actually you sound like a C++ newbie for saying that. Sure Symbian OS is creaky and awkward now, but at the time it was written (mid 90s) it was cutting edge. An embedded 32 bit multitasking OS. Very rare. An object oriented OS from top to bottom? Unheard of. Leaves were a system for doing exceptions at a time when C++ didn't have exceptions. Descriptors were the most efficient way of dealing with strings and avoiding OOM errors at a time when entire available storage (RAM, OS space and filing system) was 8MB total.

      API wise, you have to differentiate between the OS itself written by Psion and then Symbian, and the higher level APIs written by Nokia. An awful lot of the latter was written by people who didn't properly understand the established conventions.

  4. iPhone not smartphone by CharAznable · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
    1. Re:iPhone not smartphone by dfghjk · · Score: 2, Interesting

      A smartphone runs 3rd party apps. There are plenty of players besides Symbian in the smartphone market but the iPhone will not be one of them.

  5. Plug and play by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    This is all nonsense.

    Sybian requires only an electric outlet and a love-starved female or homosexual lover.

  6. Hmmm... which link should I read??? by bad_fx · · Score: 4, Informative

    The summary seems to imply that:

    * 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 /. is all about right? =)

    (Seriously though... the only bit of the summary that doesn't link to anything is the "Nokia Hate" bit so wtf man?)

    1. Re:Hmmm... which link should I read??? by Threni · · Score: 2, Insightful

      See if you can find a link that explains that Nokia hates a company it's the largest single shareholder of.

    2. Re:Hmmm... which link should I read??? by akaariai · · Score: 2

      Duh. Nokia sercretly hates. If there would be a link, it wouldn't be a secret.

  7. no brainer by Clover_Kicker · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    Remember, all software sucks.

  8. Java ME by Myolp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Java ME by Myolp · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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...

  9. Not enough CPU? by Ed+Avis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Not enough CPU? by jrumney · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The NeXT cube may have had a slick UI for its day, but you'd have to strip a lot of eye-candy from OS X to get back to that.

    2. Re:Not enough CPU? by sacrilicious · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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".

      --
      - First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
    3. Re:Not enough CPU? by AJWM · · Score: 4, Funny

      There isn't any magic spell that has been cast to make programmers more stupid or make compilers worse over the last twenty years.

      Really? Then how do you explain Windows?

      --
      -- Alastair
    4. Re:Not enough CPU? by daviddennis · · Score: 2, Informative

      A 200mhz ARM is bound to be more powerful than a 33mhz 68030.

      Also, the tiny screen means a lot fewer pixels to fling around at any given time. A 480x320 screen has 1.5 million pixels. An PowerBook G4 has 1152x768, which is 884,736 pixels. It can run MacOS X just fine.

      This means that a 400mhz PowerBook had about 5x (actually almost 6x) the pixels of an iPhone.

      So if you think of it that way, it seems to me like there should be very little problem with running MacOS X on a 200mhz processor with a phone sized screen.

      D

  10. Only half true by bennini · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The article only describes about half of what symbian is all about...
    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 /. 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.

    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.

  11. What a lousy bunch of badly written negative artic by clonmult · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  12. 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.

    1. Re:just another pro-Apple site by nasch · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I hadn't seen this site before, and certainly won't read it again. Here are some revealing tidbits, any emphasis and parenthetical comments mine, starting with the title.
      • The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile
      • Microsoft avoided the term PDA, which was by then associated with the functional and sophisticated Newton from 1993. (Maybe I'm wrong, but I remember the term being associated with Palm Pilots)
      • Meanwhile, the Handheld PC form factor had discovered there was little demand for bulky micro-laptops with scant battery life and minimal functionality.
      • Fortunately for Palm, Pocket PCs were ultra thick battery hogs that made Palm's basic offerings look amazing in comparison. Further, even the most Microsoft-bound IT shops had turned up their noses at Handheld PCs
      • After the death of Handheld PC, and finding stagnant sales for Pocket PCs, Microsoft aimed WinCE in a series of new, increasingly desperate directions:
      • [Windows Mobile 5 Smartphones] can, however, pretend to edit Excel documents on their tiny screens with a quarter the resolution of a typical DOS PC from the 80s.
      • Even after Apple improved its ink recognition software, the Newton was derided by Microsoft fans for its "legendarily unreliable handwriting input system." (Wasn't it derided by the market?)
      • when WinCE appeared it delivered the typical embarrassment of a clumsy Microsoft product launch
      • It's no wonder Microsoft is losing so much money down the rat hole of WinCE

      In short... could you be more biased?

  13. Re:"the majority of todays smartphones" by rcs1000 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Rogerborg, normally I appreciate your posts. But this time, I'm afraid you're just plain wrong.

    * Qualcomm no longer makes handsets.
    * Casio is a very minor player worldwide.
    * DoCoMo is not a handset maker, it is the Japanese version of Verizon.
    * Hitachi: do they still make mobile phones?
    * Samsung *is* the third largest mobile phone maker in the world.

    Of all the world's smartphones, 95% run on one of three platforms: Symbian (Nokia, Sony Ericsson), Blackberry (RIM) and Windows Mobile (HTC, Samsung). Samsung, with the BlackJack, is a small player. Trust me, the world's best selling smartphones are in the Nokia N- and E- series. After Nokia, HTC is almost certainly the second best selling smartphone maker.

    *Globally* Symbian is not an irrelevance.

    --
    --- My dad's political betting
  14. Why not? by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Why not? by AaronLawrence · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Perhaps you're thinking of the XBox, which uses a stripped-down Win2K kernal.

      But Windows CE is a brand new kernal, optimised for embedded. Read wikipedia or any number of other articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CE "Windows CE is a distinctly different kernel, rather than a "trimmed down" version of desktop Windows."

      They have ported across some of the traditional windows stuff on top of it, but the kernal and probably GUI are new.

      --
      For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
  15. Secretly? Nah... by QuasiEvil · · Score: 4, Funny

    Symbian: the Platform Nokia Secretly Hates I'm pretty sure anybody who has ever had to work with that godforsaken OS (myself included) hates it openly...
  16. Misconceptions in TFA by mstrom · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 more ... but I don't have that much time Motti
    1. Re:Misconceptions in TFA by w3woody · · Score: 3, Informative

      With respect to "crippled C++ support" and a bad development environment--SymbianOS 9 and Carbide.c++ are relatively new. For a commercial software developer SymbianOS 9's support for exceptions is worthless if you still need to target earlier versions of SymbianOS, and converting a build process from Metrowerks Codewarrior or Visual C++ is a royal pain in the ass--which is why Symbian still sells Metrowerks Codewarrior, last I checked (about two months ago).

      So while these are good trends, in a way it's too little, too late: until SymbianOS 9 captures enough of the market that we no longer have to deal with earlier versions of Symbian, we can't use exceptions. And converting our build process to Carbide, while it may make life easier, is one of those apparent high-cost zero-reward projects to management which is highly unlikely to be given a high priority by management.

      But for new development--you're right. And if you're doing new development, it's far easier to get rolling on Microsoft Windows CE--whose market penetration is gaining on Symbian.

      As someone who recently moved to a project which is targeting WinCE (PocketPC and SmartPhone) and Symbian (UIQ and S60), and which is considering targeting various Linux phones, I have to largely agree with the analysis in the original article about Symbian. What the author doesn't point out, however, is that there are similarly egregious design decisions in WinCE and Linux cell phones which make them also somewhat problematic platforms.

      For WinCE:
      Extremely heavy weight applications. If you decide to use .NET for development or you decide to use a framework such as MFC or even ATL, you can easily wind up with a 1 or 2 megabyte application footprint. For a small mobile device, this may not matter in five years--but right now, that's bloody huge. Dot NET seems to be the favored environment right now, but that requires shipping the .NET engine which takes a fairly large footprint.

      Windows API doesn't map well to SmartPhone use. Generally most applications are, from a WinCE perspective, "full screen" applications. The WinCE layer appears to have full support for creating framed dialogs and windows--yet on a device that is 220x180 pixels in size, do you really need or want a 32-pixel title bar?

      Where this makes things really awkward is when dealing with switching applications using the 'back key' or when relaunching the currently running instance of your application. See, while the user sees just his little LCD display, what is going on under the hood is a multitude of windows layered in Z-order with the current display being the topmost window. While this doesn't generally matter, it is possible (and is a common bug, fixed by using something like .NET or MFC if you're willing to ship a fat binary) to create a circumstance where the current focus belongs to a different window than the frontmost one--leaving the user with the impression that the phone has locked up. It hasn't; you just can't see the window where your keystrokes are going.

      WinCE Smartphone "smart keys" menu ill-designed. Like all other pieces of Windows, the smart keys bar at the bottom of the screen live in its own, separate window. It's not handled like the Apple menu bar at the top of the screen on System 7: a drawing region that is not a window, which obeys its own rules. Instead, the smart keys bar is its own window, with its own z-ordering, created by a new shell call which, if not managed correctly, breaks the illusion of simply being a label associated with the buttons.

      Inconsistency in UI decisions between PocketPC and SmartPhone. One of my personal gripes: the UI on SmartPhone for most applications include a "cancel" button as one of the choices for dismissing dialogs--but on PocketPC, generally you only have an "OK", implied when you close the dialog by clicking in the upper-right 'close' box. It's a minor thing, but if you're writing code that targets both platforms,

  17. Eran = Fanboy BUT... by BoRegardless · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  18. Power by simpl3x · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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...

  19. Article Corrections by enjo13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
    1. Re:Article Corrections by RandomBrit · · Score: 2

      This is pretty accurate, nice post

  20. Re:iPhone does run third party apps by marsu_k · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    The cost is something like 300$ per year, which is feasible for a developer/company with any significant sales. However, you can get your freeware/open source app signed for free. And there are no restrictions on J2ME apps. So yes, it is much more open.

  21. Re:Then what is? by Mr2001 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    --
    Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
  22. Re:Symbian - not for me by Ilgaz · · Score: 2, Informative

    1) Symbian devices got very nice J2ME support, only problem is with games since Game developers won't code for minority smart phones with high screen resolutions and there is already C programs/rivals on that platform right?

    2) P990 is running Symbian UIQ I believe

    3) Your coders are smart, there are 2 billion devices running sort of J2ME and J2ME 2.0 gives them everything, even 3d support with some JSR extensions. There are only 100 million devices running Symbian.

    I agree to UI point of view but there is a possibility that third party enhancers/shells exist and can be installed. The problem for iPhone is, it is not a smart phone. I am telling it as a Quad G5 Apple owner, a fairly expensive machine. I want third party apps and some serious "hacks" if I buy a phone for $600.