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Symbian Completes Transition To Open Source
Grond writes "Symbian, maker of the the world's most popular mobile operating system, has completed the transition to a completely open platform months ahead of schedule. While the kernel was opened up last year, the entire platform is now open source, primarily under the Eclipse Public License. A FAQ is available with more information about the platform opening."
Adds an anonymous reader, linking to PC Magazine's story on the transition: "By putting Symbian fully in the public domain, the Symbian Foundation is pitting it against Google's Android. Symbian is well known across most of the world, but it's mostly a foreign curiosity in the US, AT&T is the only carrier that currently has a symbian phone in its lineup, the Nokia E71x."
Since Nokia is phone manufacturer itself and main supporter of Symbian, I really hope they open source their drivers for different phones too. Nokia is already moving in that direction with Qt and it doesn't impact their main business as a phone manufacturer. Only problem would be if those drivers use licensed patents from other manufacturers though.
Android being open source is practically useless because you cannot get drivers for any phone. Sure you can see the OS code and tinker around it (if you are able to get overly complex development environment set up), but you are unable to use it on your phone or do pretty much anything with it. It's only good for phone manufacturers.
If Nokia also were to release drivers for their phones, this would be huge victory against Android.
Except they didn't, in any sense of the term, put it in the public domain.
Placing code under an open-source license is not the same as putting it in the "public domain". Code under an open source license still has conditions attached to it (even if minimal ones) while code placed in the public domain has no restrictions placed on it of any sort. Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.
If it's so freakin' open please tell me why I still need to have apps signed on my Nokia 6220 classic and will do for the foreseeable future unless I'm willing to try risky hacks.
I'll raise you an anecdote. I just bought a Nokia E63, new and unlocked with a full US warranty for $189 from Newegg, and it's one of the best phones I've ever owned. You simply go to the application manager menu, and for the option that says "Install only signed apps", select "No". It's that simple. I just installed an unsigned FTP client, so now I don't even need Nokia's atrocious PC Suite for syncing.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
It's even Linux. Hell, it's Debian.
http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/
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Seriously, that company needs to change its name. I can't read that name without thinking of that weird saddle/vibrator thing.
When I bought an N73 I was able to use a collection of tools to remove the simlock and flash the phone with Nokia's stock firmware. The result was massively improved performance and battery life, but I'm not sure if this is still possible.
According to the FAQ you can now get all the source and can (at least theoretically) build the OS and various applications. Groovy.
Setting aside the fact that just building all of the pieces is complicated (see the FAQ), and also setting aside the fact that many phones will refuse to run homemade, un-signed builds, you might run into issues with patents:
Having the source under an open license is just one step on the path to personal control over your phone and freedom to use, share, and modify the software running on it.
coding is life
Nokia has Maemo as well, which is better than Android in so many ways. Try a N900 and you will see. There is no reason for them to go Android,
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
I personally blame the Internet and rule 34.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Nokia will be forced to adopt Android shortly I think (year or two). There's only room for one other player I think, but I'm pretty sure it's Windows Mobile (though force of will) or PalmOS
On my Nokia E71 I have Nokia Maps and Google Maps, I have Gizmo SIP VoIP and Skype, I have virtual assistant call manager software, I have ssh and irc clients, I have msn/icq client, and I can turn it into a wifi hotspot. I can run any application anybody has written for the device. If the choice becomes Android, Windows, or iPhone, then I'm not upgrading until they turn off the last GSM base station.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
A entire OS and IDE for a glorified vibrator seems like overkill if you ask me.
Not if you really think about it.
If we all worked together to develop, test and maintain the best possible vibrator in the world, imagine how many girls we would get. If anything, this is what FOSS community should pick up and work on. Girls would be breaking in from doors and windows just to test our thing, and would be so pleased with the experience they would be coming back all the time.
What we need is WiFi, 3G (for doing it on-the-road), some app that gathers statistics and log data for optimization development and lastly, test subjects.
It seems that Nokia is positively moving towards oss lately. I certainly did not expect Nokia to be first to ship smartphones with a very compatible Linux distribution and root access out of the box.
I worked testing phones for a while, and I've seen first hand the crap that goes into most vendor-specific firmware (not to mention the fact that many of them will write their version once and never update it, despite the fact that Nokia often make significant improvements in the stock firmware's speed and stability over a product's lifetime). As such, completely nuking anything the network has put on there comes pretty high on my list of requirements.
Anyway, rant over, here's a link explaining how to do so on an E71. Basically you just change the device's product code so it identifies as Nokia generic rather than vendor specific. Once that's done Nokia's standard firmware update tools will do the work for you, no potentially dodgy hacks or cracked firmwares needed. Do make sure, however, that the product code you're using is for the generic version of your specific phone (i.e. correct transmission frequencies). Officially it voids the warranty, but it's easily reversible.
If you're going to support the Web, you need Unix.
Uh, what?
The software community already gave Nokia free Unix, they should be building on top of that.
They are. It's called Maemo, and it's on the N900. Unfortunately, not all parts of it are Free and Open.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Except its LOTS more crappy than pc suite. I'd consider it an alpha version. Shows some promise, but they need to finish it.
I just installed on my win 7 x64 machine at work here and I'm probably going to go back to the old pc suite.
It keeps offering ovi maps 3.0 for my phone, which is NOT compatible with it (6110 navigator). If I go to the "maps" section it says there has been an internal error, and helpfully suggests I restart ovi suite, and if that doesn't work I should try and restart my PC. WTF?.
There is no "sync" log to see what contacts/calendar entries were updated after a sync.
And yesterday it started crashing about 30 seconds after my phone connected (via bluetooth). Every time.
I unplugged my bluetooth dongle, started it, disabled all the sync stuff and plugged my phone in. ovi suite connected to the phone, then blew up again.
And then it offered me an update to ovi suite, would I like to install it? I said yes please, and it failed with an "unknown internal error" halfway through. Tried it like 5 times, same error. In desperation I started ovi suite with "run as administrator" and what do ya know, it updated. And now it won't crash when I connect my phone.
What Progress!
But I'm still in shock that their new flagship desktop application for working with your phone, probably designed to compete with itunes (not that thats really a worthy target, but I digress...) DOES NOT RUN PROPERLY WITH UAC ENABLED.
k'mon nokia, you released this app since 7 came out. and its not properly compatible with 7, or vista.
PC Suite used to be the biggest flakiest turd on my PC 5 years ago, and since that time most of the bugs have been ironed out. Why chuck all this out and go back to the drawing board??
I don't know how many millions of phones out there run S60...
About 330 Million worldwide, according to Symbian - out of those, at least 100M were sold in the last 18 months so are likely to still be in use.
...and lastly, test subjects.
And there's the problem right there.
So by that logic, the iPhone OS is pushing Android out of the market?
The massive series of apps and developer support that's growing around Android will probably push Maemo out of the market.
Yes. Because there are no apps for Debian.
S40 is not based on Symbian.
"getting killed by Apple" It's amazing how much Apple fanboys love to speak in hyperbole.
I am biased as I work "with it" every day.
It's written in C++ and the syscalls are asynchronous by default (very very nice when you're doing lots of comms). It has a microkernel and an extremely comprehensive api. It's even written in C++. The kernel is actually quite nice.
So *actually* Linux is a dinosaur by comparison if you consider modern-ness to be of any importance.
I don't but and I like linux a lot but Symbian is an operating system that deserves respect and it's dumb to believe that everything has to be done "one true way". The user-level programming experience is not nice due to the great efforts made to fit it onto early phone hardware (since it has been out there long before 600Mhz ARM chips arrived that could shift the weight of Linux or OSX).
But all of that's changing and as a result of pretty gargantuan efforts that few pundits have any appreciation of that this rough diamond is being cut and will dazzle.
This is all just my personal opinion.
I'm not sure there's much evidence that Nokia are losing any ground? For last quarter of 2009, their sales were up 22%, their profits almost doubled, and their market share increased to 39%; in the "smartphone" market, their share increased from 35% to 40% .
The "big names" you mention are still niche players in the phone market (except perhaps RIM; admittedly they should also worrying about Android, not because of Google phones directly, but because the rest of the phone manufacturers such as Motorola may switch to Android; but Apple are a non-issue here).
You make no sense: Doesn't the existence a really good and satisfying vibrator somewhat reduce the frequency of actual humans getting laid?
My current N97 has 128Mb of RAM and 30+Gb of storage on board.
It browses web pages fine, plays music, videos, sends video emails and calls, has gps and maps and it lasts up to 3 days on a battery charge.
The maemo N900 has 256Mb of RAM, 600MHz CPU. As fast and powerful and as handy with Linux on board as it is, do you think the battery life is going to last 3 days?
If you want an embedded platform where the costs and specific performance criteria are important, e.g. making profit selling hardware, the OS requirements can make a huge difference to the bottom line. Developers... Well battery life is only important to their wives and storage comes in terabytes.
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Except for the fact that the n900 uses a resistive screen, as where the Droid uses a capacitave screen.
Which basically means that N900 screen is more precise, and can be operated with gloves on, or with a stylus (think handwriting input), while Droid cannot.
Oh, but Droid can do multitouch! Except... no stock applications support it, anyway.
D'oh.
It actually comes with a stylus, which is very useful for high precision stuff (e.g. clicking on links in the browser if you can't be bothered zooming in). It also has the advantage of not leaving your screen covered in fingerprints. It's also ideal for handwriting recognition, although the N900 doesn't have that (yet).
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
You are vastly underestimating Nokia and Maemo. As another poster has already mentioned, once Nokia moves past their current Symbian (cash cow) vs. Maemo (new kid) stage and puts their full weight behind Maemo, Maemo will become a dominant player in the smartphone market. I have no doubt of this.
Believing that Nokia will not succeed is a very limited US-centric view. True, they are just not as strong a player in the US as in the rest of the world. But, remember that Nokia still has the most market share worldwide, far, far more than Android/Google or Apple today. While certainly the "A" teams are growing, they have a long way to go to even begin to compete with the installed base of Nokia. And consider that innovation from Nokia is starting to pick up steam again, especially in the smartphone market outside the US.
Symbian will be replaced by Maemo in the high end smartphone market. I've owned many Symbian based phones over the years and generally they have worked well, although sometimes the UI has been a little slow. I don't dislike Symbian, but I believe it's nearing the end of it's useful life when considering the possibilities of Linux-based Maemo.