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Nokia's iPhone, No Seriously
Several readers have written to tell us that Engadget has a look at Nokia's visions for the future. "It was presented during Nokia's GoPlay event this morning as a glimpse into the future of Nokia interface design. Oh, and it's due out next year. When pressed during the Q&A about the striking similarity to the little Cupertino device, Anssi Vanjoki — Nokia's Executive VP & General Manager of Multimedia — said, 'If there is something good in the world then we copy with pride.' Well, ok then."
Oh no, not Symbian!
:)
I'm an intern at Nokia Research right now. We all hate Symbian here. Symbian C++ is incredibly bizarre to program for, and this is coming from someone who thinks Haskell is a great language. You can make the phone OS either lock up or reset way too easily. If linux ever makes it into the flagship phones, I think you'll see a lot more innovation out of Nokia, because the developers and researchers will no longer be hobbled.
For example, Dlls are limited to a 1MB heap... unless you declare a new heap, then swap it out with User::SwapHeap. Of course if you call new on one heap and delete on another all hell breaks loose. Why have a hard limit on Dll heap size if you can just code around it?
Don't even get me started on the hacked together perl scripts that constitute the developer's kit (assuming you're a command line + emacs/vi person). Your SDK has to be in the root directory (or subst'd to be such), and your code has to live somewhere on the same drive - ie all projects live under the SDK.
The security model is a nightmare for researchers. You can't make the phone do anything genuinely new without flashing the phone firmware to a dev version, which means nothing you've written can ever be tried out by other people (nobody wants to flash their personal phone to the dev version), which means the idea will never make it out of the lab and dies from lack of exposure.
Bah. Posting anon for obvious reasons
This sounds so great until you realize that he was actually saying it to make fun of Robert Hook's short stature. Newton could be a very petty man in many ways, and he unwillingness to acknowledge Hook (and Leibniz) is the stuff of legend.