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