Symbian, the Biggest Mobile OS No One Talks About

blackbearnh writes "The iPhone vs. Android wars are in full swing, but no one talks about the mobile operating system that most of the world uses: Symbian. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that the Symbian developer infrastructure is so different from the Wild West approach that Apple and Google take. Over at O'Reilly Answers, Paul Beusterien, who is the Head of Developer Tools for the Symbian Foundation, talks about why Symbian gets ignored as a platform despite the huge number of handsets it runs on. Quoting: 'Another dimension is the type of developer community. [Historically, Symbian's type of developers] were working for consulting houses or working at phone operator places or specifically doing consulting jobs for enterprise customers who wanted mobile apps. So there's a set of consulting companies around the world that have specialized in creating apps for Symbian devices. It's a different kind of dynamic than where iPhone has really been successful at attracting just the hobbyist, or the one- or two-person company, or the person who just wants to go onto the web and start developing.'"

Comments

They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

But there always seems to be quite the buzz around this product.

Re:They may not talk about it

[gyrogeerloose]

But there always seems to be quite the buzz around this product.

Really? Point us to some of this buzz of which you speak.

The reason that no one talks about Symbian is that no one gives a fuck about it. Might as well ask why no on talks about COBOL.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

WHOOSH

Re:They may not talk about it

[Captain Splendid]

Really? Point us to some of this buzz of which you speak.

How about the FP article you're commenting in?

Just kidding. Slashdot is pants.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Z00L00K]

Both are dead ends.

Why develop serious applications for something that's only supported by a single manufacturer these days.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

iPhone/iOS is supported by a single manufacturer; and the one that behaves like Nazi SS guards at that...

Re:They may not talk about it

[oji-sama]

Both are dead ends.

Why develop serious applications for something that's only supported by a single manufacturer these days.

Right. Go see Symbian Foundation and click devices, then select year 2010 and apply. Which one of them is the single manufacturer that supports this open source platform?

Re:They may not talk about it

[shutdown -p now]

What, iOS can determine the user's ethnicity and refuse services and/or abuse him based on it? How does it do that - facial recognition? Or is the shiny new external antenna a part of that too?

Re:They may not talk about it

[Runaway1956]

Informative. I didn't realize that Symbian was either so widespread, or that so many manufacturers were in on it. Maybe it's time I actually looked at them. I kinda sorta need a phone . . . . maybe.

Re:They may not talk about it

[oji-sama]

If you're interested in developing for it I would probably wait for phones that support QT. I have understood (or misunderstood) that some should be released fairly soon. (Or are there Symbian QT-phones out yet?)

At the moment, I'm using a cheap non touch S40 phone and I'm quite happy with it. (I mean, it's a phone and it works :D Surprisingly this includes tethering through bluetooth and basic email. Not much point in developing anything for it though.) With QT it should be possible to target both Symbian and Meego without too much trouble, which should be a lot more rewarding.

Re:They may not talk about it

[hyartep]

Why develop serious applications for something that's only supported by a single manufacturer these days.

such as iphone/ios?

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Or are there Symbian QT-phones out yet?

Newish symbian phones can install Qt retroactively. Apps using Qt can also request the phone to fetch and install Qt if it'd not already there.

Re:They may not talk about it

[justin12345]

While the sybian is overpriced, it does seem to be the "go to" gadget (I'm not sure I would call it an "operating system") within its class. Personally I don't really see the appeal, but there would seem to be a lot of women that disagree. Though you're right in the observation that none of them probably have much insight on the topic of COBOL.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Bekro]

According to the Symbian Foundation site, Symbian^3 supports QT. And in Symbian^4 it'll become the primary app framework.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia. It's the only one of those that doesn't have a (realistic) plan B. Everyone else on the list can "support" it with their left hand, gradually phasing the shit out while actually concentrating on real OS's.

Re:They may not talk about it

[netsharc]

Interestingly, determining the ethnicity and refusing the service has been done by humans so far. Summary: NY Apple Store refused to sell iPhone 4's to Asians because the geniuses there thought they were tourists who were going to take them home.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Skuld-Chan]

Actually yes - the iPhone believe it or not is not available in huge parts of this world (and even parts of the USA - you still can't use one in huge chunks of the Oregon coast - no AT&T sevice). It does this via carrier lockin - no facial recognition needed.

Re:They may not talk about it

[gilesjuk]

It's legacy, once upon a time it was a good OS. It was used on the PSION handsets when personal organisers were al the rage.

But then Nokia got hold of it and sat on it for years, doing very little to improve it. UIQ was stuck on top of it but that was never given back to the symbian foundation.

Re:They may not talk about it

[LaRainette]

Typical american self centered point of view.

Re:They may not talk about it

[LaRainette]

Because Symbian runs of 5 times the number of devices iOS runs on ?

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

I went and looked. Other than some crap Nokia's (glad I finally sold the N86 and E71 on eBay before the market drops out on them) a dead-end SonyEricsson or two (who buys the Vivaz when the Xperia is available with Android?) and some single-country specific iMode phones for Japan, what is there?

Full disclosure: I've worked at Symbian or in Symbian-related startups for years now. Death by committee. Years of my life, gone...

Re:They may not talk about it

[Pax681]

I went and looked. Other than some crap Nokia's (glad I finally sold the N86 and E71 on eBay before the market drops out on them) a dead-end SonyEricsson or two (who buys the Vivaz when the Xperia is available with Android?) and some single-country specific iMode phones for Japan, what is there?

Full disclosure: I've worked at Symbian or in Symbian-related startups for years now. Death by committee. Years of my life, gone...

well there maemo at the moment however it's about to change to meego. while maemo is based on debian , meego is based on fedora.

i have an n900 and it's pretty fucking sweet. sonish it's changing from maemo to meego.. sorta..lol it's have the meego front end with the maemo under the bonnet

the newer high end devices will have full on meego

and before you open your mouth and let your AC belly rumble Nokia SAID UP FRONT that the n900 and maemo were a work in prpgress and were VERY open about that.

regardless it's a sweet device that i love to use and will continue to do so

as for symbian it's still going, is used by a massive amount of handsets and will continue to be used.

remember not everyone is as up on things or even give a shit about high end or fashion devices(yeah a dig at iOS fanboi-ism).... some people just want a phone that simply works and symbian certainly does that. from what i gather the new revisions are not bad at all and do some funky shit.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

UIQ is also among the assets of Symbian foundation. "Over the years" Nokia had much less control over the OS BTW; the issue was mostly inertia of S60 - which had good concepts for a few years.

Symbian generally still has many. Look how many Android Goggle I/O sessions are about power management, asynchronous programming and performance. Thing Symbian has covered for some time now; which will still allow to give smartphones to much larger part of the world. Smartphones which should be quite nice, too, considering Qt and S^4 UI concepts.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

Sort of. It's clear (Apple said so themselves!) that iPhone targets only "premium" people living in "premium" places.

Meanwhile Nokia sells annually an order of magnitude more mobile phones than Apple has ever produced; Nokia contributes greatly to the world having close to 5 billion mobile subsribers by now (for many of them, first practical means of communication) - that's a monumental shift for humanity. Apple isn't interested in contributing to it much (what, with ~1%?), perhaps is even freeriding (we'll see how that dispute ends up)

Re:They may not talk about it

[gyrogeerloose]

Typical american self centered point of view.

Slashdot is a U.S. centric Web site. If that bothers you, use another site.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

Is that way other manufacturers are introducing new devices?

Nokia has the largest, by far, share of mobile phone sales. That stems also from their (yes, their own) manufacturing facilities and distribution channels; such things are what gives them long-term strength, basically independent from the OS used.

It's just that Nokia thinks S40 - Symbian - MeeGo lineup will work best; now, I would be surprised if it won't ultimately work, but even if there was some major failure of higher segments of that strategy - they are not dependent on it. Their real asset is somewhere else.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, just insult people. That's sure to win people to your point of view.

Re:They may not talk about it

[freedom_india]

...while Symbian is more like a UN Blue Helmet force that tries to protect and also sometimes rapes...

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

That would be fine if GP said "The reason that no one talks about Symbian in the US is that no one gives a fuck about it there" (or "here", whatever)

Re:They may not talk about it

[shutdown -p now]

Wow, for once I posted something in defense of Apple's iGadgets, and got a troll mod for the labor. Considering my general stance on non-desktop Apple stuff, the irony is overwhelming.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

Yeah, I guess that's why SE introduced those models just recently, in the process shifting from their own UIQ to latest S60v5/S^1...

Re:They may not talk about it

[dafing]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybian

Re:They may not talk about it

[justin12345]

Indeed, better to just get an iPhone. While it's also overpriced, getting reamed by Apple is actually trendy these days; much simpler too.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sootman]

Sorry, I couldn't get past the Napoleon Dynamite-esque homepage.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Or bring more people from other states.

Re:They may not talk about it

[SharpFang]

It may not be dead as an OS for phones. It is pretty much dead as a platform being developed for.

How many people develop for VxWorks? ...and it is a very popular OS for cameras.
It's just that it is loaded into the final product and stays there, unchanged, till the product reaches end of life. No apps added, no system modified, new upgrades come out with new hardware.

Re:They may not talk about it

[peppepz]

Sony and Samsung sell high-end Symbian phones. In fact, the most powerful Symbian phones currently on the market are not from Nokia.

Re:They may not talk about it

[mdwh2]

Except for the 50% of the high end market that use it. Not to mention Nokia having by far most market share. Yeah, no one cares about it, obviously it's just like COBOL.

Re:They may not talk about it

[gig]

> It does this via carrier lockin - no facial recognition needed.

Bullshit. iPhone is an open standard phone. There just happens to only be one open standard network is no-infrastructure USA. iPhone runs on over 100 carriers worldwide, including many in countries where it's not even sold, and on multiple carriers in many countries. Look at fucking Canada: iPhone is on 2 carriers. You can buy unlocked iPhones, even in the US, it's just that nobody wants them, because you only have the one open standard carrier who is giving a subsidy. You can buy used iPhones that have been carrier unlocked. I sold my first iPhone to a guy in fucking Italy that's how hard it is to run iPhones wherever you want to run them.

You should blame Verizon and Sprint for building closed, proprietary networks. You should blame T-Mobile for using non-standard frequencies. You should blame yourself for being so anxious to Apple bash that you spewed ignorant bullshit. Apple is under exactly no fucking obligation to make you a bullshit proprietary Verizon phone.

   

Re:They may not talk about it

[mdwh2]

It is pretty much dead as a platform being developed for.

Citation needed?

As TFS says, Iphone just gets all the hype - perhaps because of the attention of it being for hobbyists rather than serious development, or maybe it's just the usual way the media give disproportionate coverage to anything that Apple does (just look at the Ipad).

Honestly, if OS X and Windows were released today, even with the same 10%/90% market shares repsectively, we'd have the media hyping about nothing but OS X, with Windows barely getting a mention at all.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's the Sybian.

Re:They may not talk about it

[jo_ham]

They don't want to "freeride" - they want to pay what every other GSM patent licensee pays, not higher because Nokia wants a large swathe of Apple's patents in return.

The dispute is about the value of Apple's patents, not about Apple not wanting to pay to use Nokia's. Nokia's patents are fixed in value: it's the same amount that every other company on Earth that makes GSM-enabled hardware pays. Apple wants to pay that amount (and is entitled to via the RAND terms that the GSM patents are covered by).

Re:They may not talk about it

[jo_ham]

Welcome to the world of posting anything with a slightly positive take on Apple on slashdot.

It's a club also occupied by people who post positive things about MS, Facebook, Sony and Google (exception: Android subcategory).

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

You know, it doesn't do you any good to just repeat verbatim what Apple claims. They want to pay the same, sure...as any other company in GSMA who did hard R&D, not some UI ideas stuff.

BTW, you missed that not only Nokia is involved... (they just have not only one of the largest contributions; also are a useful front of the case, without a possibility of loosing much due to any temporary turmoil in the US market)

Re:They may not talk about it

[jo_ham]

What has Apple said? I read this on a UK news site, probably the BBC.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

Heh, news sites sometimes do a thing called quotation, you know...

Re:They may not talk about it

[jo_ham]

This was editorial content.

Quotes are very specifically attributed.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

So it wasn't mentioning the position of Apple / one possible way of looking at the issue? Presenting outright the proper interpretation of it?? IC...

Re:They may not talk about it

[moosesocks]

Nokia contributes greatly to the world having close to 5 billion mobile subsribers by now (for many of them, first practical means of communication)

Misleading. Nokia's marketshare accounts for approximately 1.5 billion customers (which, admittedly, is nothing to sneer at).

5 billion mobile telephones have been manufactured to date. Not all of them are currently extant, in use, or manufactured by Nokia.

In any event, this discussion is irrelevant to the story.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

You are wrong. At the end of 2007 there were 3.3 billion mobile subscribers. Two years later it was 4.6 billion subscribers.
Sure, many markets have above 100% penetration; but OTOH in many other places (primarily those which didn't have much of a communication means to speak of previously) people (family, for example) often share one mobile phone. It's frequent enough that lower end ones have multiple "user accounts."

It was a useful tidbit of info as a counterexample in the response. Or, what, an issue of sort of disregarding vast majority of people pushes you to...disregard what some people say as irrelevant?

Re:They may not talk about it

[jo_ham]

It was collating the information from both sides. It presented Apple's side, and Nokia's side and then made an editorial assessment based on those two sides, and information from other sources.

It's generally how news works.

What it was not, which is what you are trying to paint it as, was a news report from an agency that is nothing more than a press release from Apple.

Re:They may not talk about it

[triffid_98]

The same open standard network that cripples all of their Android phones? At least now it's (supposedly) moving to Verizon later this year so we can have it on a decent network. AT&T is great if you travel overseas, but it's pretty awful where I happen to live.

Bullshit. iPhone is an open standard phone. There just happens to only be one open standard network is no-infrastructure USA. iPhone runs on over 100 carriers worldwide, including many in countries where it's not even sold, and on multiple carriers in many countries. Look at fucking Canada: iPhone is on 2 carriers. You can buy unlocked iPhones, even in the US, it's just that nobody wants them, because you only have the one open standard carrier who is giving a subsidy. You can buy used iPhones that have been carrier unlocked. I sold my first iPhone to a guy in fucking Italy that's how hard it is to run iPhones wherever you want to run them.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

Ahh, you finally got it. Remember I was the one who used the word "perhaps even" & "we'll see how that dispute ends up"; you constructed your first response, which mentioned strictly Apple's side (hence their PR), as an outright explanation of whole situation), don't backpedal on it now...

(I'm pretty much waiting what will happen; both sides of course will say what's best for them - but consider typical scope of UI patents, or that GSMA even allows one of its members to take such action)

Re:They may not talk about it

[Eunuchswear]

I think you'll find that in it's niche market the more powerful hardware platform and ease of use of the Sybian devices is much appreciated. As for reaming, Apple and Steve just aren't up to it.

Re:They may not talk about it

[jo_ham]

And you dismissed that out of hand as Apple PR, when it was a pretty even breakdown of the case at hand - Apple needs to pay GSM fees, Nokia is claiming many Apple patents in return, Apple is claiming that Nokia is undervaluing those patents.

You also threw in some jibe about "all the hard R&D" done by Nokia compared to Apple's fluffy UI and software design which is obviously "really easy" - software and UI design is just kids with crayons I guess.

I do not know which way the suit will go - the reason it has even gone this far (as opposed to the two sides settling) suggests that they need third party help to determine the values of what Apple holds, and just what a fair price for Nokia's patents is.

The way it is often presented on /. is, though, is that Apple is some evil company who won't pay up and poor, poor Nokia is the innocent party. It's much more accurate that it's two 800 pound gorillas fighting over a dinner bill.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

"Dismissed"? What are you talking about? Of course it's Apple PR, what else would it be? (and on the other side - Nokia PR). That's why, again, "perhaps", etc.

Again, you very clearly presented the case from one side. Trying to escape from it now much?

Yes, giving you the radio technology is damn hard. Following on Braun visual design principles and polishing some codebase...not quite the same league.

You really forget GSMA association in all of this, they are the place through which all patents and fees for them would go (and BTW, they include technology relating to GSM in the portolio, not to UIs; remember that funny case when Apple used as defense some "iPod" from the 70's BTW?)

Re:They may not talk about it

[justin12345]

True. iOS 4 really proved that the 3G really didn't have the stones to run Flash or multitask. As dickish as Jobs is being, he wasn't lying when he said his hardware was pathetically underwhelming. The iPhone 4 might change that, it's release was received quite enthusiastically after all.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

Yeah, keep telling yourself that (I'm sure that's also the reason for the number of positive Apple news / announcements). Certainly it's not because perhaps some other people might have slightly clearer outlook... FYI, I do own an iPod and I'm quite happy with it - that mere fact itself isn't enough to whitewash it completely, forget about some things mentioned in the subthread just above; and generally I am a user of Apple products...perhaps not longer than many people on /. (just firmly into 90's), but certainly much longer & much more than almost anybody at my place, where Apple basically doesn't exist (the number of iPods I have ever seen in the wild can be probably counted on the fingers of one hand, in a reasonably prosperous late EU memberstate; that excludes mine of course); but so what?

Re:They may not talk about it

[jo_ham]

Just try it for a few days, see what happens.

You'll end up with a combination of troll/flamebait and informative/insightful depending on the content.

Only on slashdot can a post that equates a software company with Nazi SS guards get "insightful" and a post calling out that classless trolling as "troll" itself.

So, it's ok to say that Apple acts like SS guards, in fact, it's insightful discourse apparently! However, it's not ok to disagree with that assessment - that's just trolling! How droll.

Repeat for pretty much every Apple story that gets posted here. It really has turned into "here;s your daily dose of Apple to flame at, regardless of topic"

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

At least try to consider in what part it might be observer bias...

Re:They may not talk about it

[jo_ham]

How is observer bias represented by *receiving actual moderation*? You either get the moderation or you don't. I don't imagine getting moderated.

I also very rarely swear or go for ad hominem attacks. I discuss the points as raised. I rarely, if ever (I can't say never because I'm sure someone will dig up a post from 1999 or something) resort to what is commonly referred to as actual trolling. My post about the open formats apple uses received a couple of troll mods and a redundant mod, despite being about the 4th post on the story. There was no flaming, no argument, just "here are the formats Apple uses" (in a story about interoperability). Still, that is trolling to some people, based on the moderation I received, although it was drowned out by informative mods, sometimes it is not the case).

I have seen this happening to all sorts of genuinely normal discourse on topics that raise the spectre of troll moderation - Apple, Google, facebook, privacy issues, climate change, Microsoft, DRM, Sony, just to name a few.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

Looking at some subject through rose-colored glasses influences what is perceived as "reasonable"/etc. point and its moderation...

Re:They may not talk about it

[jo_ham]

That doesn't change that fact that reasonable, non-flaming discourse like a reply to "Apple does xxxx" with a reply that says "No, in fact [citation provided], Apple does yyyy" earns you troll moderation or a flamebait mod purely because it is positive of Apple.

Replace "Apple" with Google, MS, Sony, Toyota, climate change, Al Gore, Sarah Palin, Obama, McCain, Bush...

It covers a wide range, but is accentuated by "hot" topics - right now that is Apple, and it has become particularly bad since the first speculation of the iPhone (1st gen) surfaced, and has been getting worse.

Re:They may not talk about it

[sznupi]

Again, it's "reasonable, non-flaming" as far as you are concerned; just linking to something doesn't free that something from such potential.

(or are you under impression that /. moderation is perfect and hiccups won't happen? No, sorry...but BTW, people also tend to remember "unfair" cases much more vividly)

Re:They may not talk about it

[LaRainette]

It's not because slashdot.org is hosted in the USA and that its content is mainly focused on US news that its users have to be narrowminded and self centered, nor does it imply that the global smartphone market is equiovalent to the US smartphone market.

May I remind you the title of this thread ? "Symbian the biggest Mobile OS no one talks about"

the subject is exactly what I'm talking about : most americans feel like SYmbian doesn't exist but it runs 40% of the smartphones in the world.
This thread is about saying "Hello the world outside the USA exist and it way bigger".

But I understand this must be scary to find out you're so little.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Eunuchswear]

wooosh!

check spelling.

very few sybian machines can run flash.

Re:They may not talk about it

[justin12345]

You're the one that didn't get the joke.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Or because some Symbian users are already happy getting a $250 unlocked Nokia 5800 touchscreen handset that can do 2-way video conferencing, tethering, multitasking, user-replaced batteries, memory upgrades, transfer of music without a proprietary desktop application from any OS, freedom of carrier choice, voice-prompted GPS with interactive maps (included, free for life, no monthly fees), and no need to buy an expensive data plan (as long as you're OK running your apps offline until you are in range of a Starbucks or home) because it supports WiFi and your carrier can't lock it out or require a data plan to use it. Since it's unlocked.

The phone already has pretty much everything Apple's been promising for years, plus a huge and well-established base of applications that no central censorship board controls for you, so there's no big "WOW! THE NEW SYMBIAN PHONE WILL SUPPORT (insert feature that all other phones have had for years)!!!! THAT'S INNOVATION!!!" story coming out every 15 minutes about it on Slashdot. We've already got what Steve keeps saying is coming soon. We've already got what Steve says iFruiters can never have. We've had it for a couple of years now. And we're frankly more than a little tired of hearing how Apple is introducing it to market for the first time in the iPhone.

Sure, the 5800 is not a particularly sexy phone, I'll give Apple credit for building a status symbol, but people who value function over form don't post news stories every 10 minutes about how cool and sexy function is. The silent majority just use our phones. We want features, so we pick the least expensive phones that have the features we want. That's almost never going to be an iPhone.

We don't need to natter on about our phones incessantly because they just work, and they already have the features we see everyone wetting themselves about because Steve promised they would be here "someday soon" in the next release of God's Own Phone.

Imagine how boring the headlines would be:

"After several years, Symbian continues to support two-way video conferencing."
"Symbian celebrates 15 years of supporting tethering."
"Symbian announced that it still can multitask third-party applications, just like it always has."
"Symbian user finds application not approved by Symbian, installs it."
"User upgrades memory on phone from 8gb to 128gb with a simple chip swap, story at 11!".

Re:They may not talk about it

[gyrogeerloose]

You are still missing the point. Slashdot is a U.S. centric site where the discussions have a U.S. centric point of view. In the U.S., nobody cares about Symbian. It doesn't matter if it runs 40% of the smart phones in the world (and, BTW, that number really only applies if you use a very very liberal definition of "smart phone"), people still don't care about it. Symbian is a dead-end OS pretty much relegated to commodity feature phones now; why should anyone outside the Symbian development business talk about it?

Re:They may not talk about it

[LaRainette]

Blah blah blah... see you in 5 years to talk about that...

Re:They may not talk about it

[gyrogeerloose]

Blah blah blah...

Wow, snappy comeback.

There's a reason that Nokia opened up Symbian, you know--a last-ditch effort to prevent it from becoming irrelevant. It does not appear to have worked. I'm not a huge fan of Android but even with it all it's limitations it's likely to take the place of Symbian within the five years you mention.

Sounds to me like you've got an investment in Symbian either in money or time. You wouldn't be from Finland by any chance, would you? Maybe you should ease off drinking that pine tar-flavored schnapps. That stuff can't be good for you.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

That does not make the point of view less typical.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Eunuchswear]

What joke?

Re:They may not talk about it

[justin12345]

Ok, the original AC poster was making a joke about "buzz" by intentionally confusing Symbian with Sybian. This whooshed over the head of gyrogeerloose but at least a few mods got it. I added to the AC's joke with the "not exactly an operating system" and "no insight on COBAL", since the Sybian is mostly used by adult actresses, who's duties don't usually involve coding. Then another AC (that got modded down to Troll) made a quip about anal use, implying I was a homosexual.

I decided to roll with the punches and since the thread is actual about the mobile operating system Symbian, which competes with Apple's iOS I took a snipe at Apple (the reamed bit). You then made a snarky remark about Steve Jobs not being up to it, which made me assume that you were getting what was being batted about. Then I responded with several double-entandras (sp?): "stones", "dickish", "hardware that's pathetically underwhelming", and "release".

Sorry for the confusion, I thought we were on the same page. Things like subtle humor get lost over the net sometimes.

Re:They may not talk about it

[LWATCDR]

Wow you work for Nokia's PR department. I didn't know that Nokia was such a global force for good in the world!
Nokia makes money by selling lots of cheap cell phones. Nothing wrong with that lots of companies make cheap cell phones and sell them all over the world.
Apple is only making two models of phone and both are full on smart phones. They are top of the line and frankly have helped the smart phone market in the US to no end. They have created a max price point. If your phone costs more than an iPhone it isn't going to fly.
There is nothing wrong with this strategy. Volvo doesn't make super cheap cars and market them in every nation. Think of Apple as the Volvo of smart phones.

Re:They may not talk about it

[Eunuchswear]

oh, that joke.

thanks for the explanaition.

are you german?

Re:They may not talk about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not as if they are Brett Favre

Re:They may not talk about it

[the_womble]

The link merely says that the majority of visitors are American and that is not seen as a problem.

That is no reason to be insular, given that most of what is discussed here is global.

Re:They may not talk about it

[LaRainette]

None and I never even owned a Symbian smartphone, although I got to use several for a long time, since my father and some friends have one.

I own a Blackberry and to show how much Not a fanboy I am I will tell you this : in 5 years blackberry will be dead that's for sure.

Symbian offers every feature Android offers, plus all the features iOS offers that Android doesn't and then all the features BB OS offers.

Tell me exactly what can you do on iOS, Android, or WebOS or whatever that you can't do on Symbian?
And please don't say jailbreak.

Symbian is a goner

[MBCook]

Isn't Nokia moving to MeeGo for their premier phones? Even the guy who runs a big Symbian fan site has given up.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[s0litaire]

Think most makers (Including Nokia) will still be using Symbian on their Mid to low end mobiles for years to come.
If they would just drop the disaster that is the S60 GUI (Well I think it is) and build a decent GUI for Symbian it might stick around longer..

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Anonymous Coward]

Think most makers (Including Nokia) will still be using Symbian

Nokia is pretty much the only major maker that uses Symbian today.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[AuMatar]

They're moving to QT.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[CarpetShark]

Isn't Nokia moving to MeeGo for their premier phones?

Yes, Symbian is Nokia's (old, obsolete) OS for the mass-market phones that people buy when they just want a phone. That puts it out of the smartphone market, which is why "no one talks about it" when they're talking about Android and iOS. The article's attempt to equate Symbian with these is a bit disingenuous.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Luckyo]

SymbianS60v3 and S60v5 (also known as Symbian^1) still powers pretty much all nokia's touch screen phones, which alone sell more then android and iphone combined.
Symbian^2 is fairly popular in Japan, due to its extremely low system requirements (same as ^1 really), and some specialized features.
Symbian^3 which is being developed for n8 seems to be the natural evolution of Symbian^1, i.e. mid range smart phone OS.

The problem is that unlike android and iphone, these phones are very competitively priced, and sacrifice "bling" features for actual function, such as better features, lower price and business-directed application support. As a result, there's many fewer people with "loose money" who are willing to sink a few euros/dollars/etc into some funny looking application on a weekly basis. They also tend to look much less pretty, focusing on function, and have slower hardware, meaning less responsive UI, which is advertised as a major feature on IOS and android.

This is really noticeable even on OVI store. Almost no games, but a shitload of various business-oriented and rather expensive applications ranging from call recorders to improved ms exchange handling to translation software. This stuff just doesn't sell to the young adult croud. Add to that the fact that much of smartphone hype is US-driven, and Symbian being big pretty much everywhere in the world but the US, you get the perfect storm scenario where little players on the market completely outshine the real behemoth in marketing and publicity.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[squiggleslash]

Nokia's "smartphones" (I hate that term, ever since Jobs redefined it to mean "Locked down phone that only runs software approved by the manufacturer" - Nokia has produced smartphones using the original definition, a phone that includes an open architecture pocketable computer, since the Nokia 9000) have run Symbian or its direct predecessors since the Nokia 9290. The OS has its roots in an OS developed originally for the Psion PDAs. The surprise, in many ways, is that it's used for bare bones phones, as its somewhat overengineered for such tasks.

I can't say I particularly like the environment, but to argue that it's unsuited, or unused, for smartphones is to demonstrate a certain amount of ignorance of the history of the OS. Arguably it's on a par with iOS in terms of capabilities, if not slightly more powerful, but lacking the standardized and high quality user interface of the latter. The lack of a requirement for apps to be managed code puts it slightly behind Android.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[hyartep]

nokia has three systems:

* s40 - closed system used for "feature phones"

* symbian - smartphones for the masses - smartphone, with apps+more but being phone is one of the primary functions

* meego - mobile computers (something like "iphone functionality") - everything you can imagine - in your pocket (phone as well, but it's not primary functionality).

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

which alone sell more then android and iphone combined.

Yup, for all the apple and linux flamewars ticking over and back on slashdot, its a bit of a surprise that most members missed the leviathan slowly cruising under their noses.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Hognoxious]

QT is not an OS, you flid. Your comment makes as much sense as saying that they're switching from Linux to Gnome.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[maaleron]

Focus sunshine. GP was complaining that Nokia needs to update their GUI and the move to QT makes complete sense.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Neither of you are entirely right.

QT isn't an OS, so saying that they are "switching to QT" is indeed wrong; but saying "Symbian" has, traditionally, implied much more about the UI, widget set, and preferred programming languages than saying "Linux" has. S60, UIQ, and MOAP are all closely tied to Symbian, and all pretty different from QT, though they cover much of the same ground, so the QT switch means that a lot of the guts of those are headed for the cutting room floor.

Symbian/QT is about as similar to prior Symbian+UI/PIM layer iterations as Android is to a traditional Linux setup(possibly less so, actually, because virtually everything but the native X support is still there behind the scenes with Android, you just can't see it without some poking).

Re:Symbian is a goner

[travisco_nabisco]

And good bye to Linux.

HELLO Gnome!!

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Skuld-Chan]

All the games used to be on ngage - and that failed miserably. You certainly have a revisionist bit of history there - they aren't competitively priced. My N97 was a 600 dollar phone - cost more than any iPhone or Android, and I think I speak from experience that while it could do everything that the iPhone and Android phones can do (I have a Nexus One now) but much more slowly and was much less reliable.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[JanneM]

"Symbian^2 is fairly popular in Japan, "

Oh? Which phones? I wasn't aware that there was a single Symbian phone on sale in Japan; all the manufacturers seem to do their own in-house systems. If any of them actually use Symbian they're certainly not mentioning it publicly.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Four. There's still quite a lot of devices with S30.

And I'd say phone is also the primary function for the last category you mention; at least you can expect it to work... ;)

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOAP
http://blog.symbian.org/2010/06/01/ntt-docomo-releases-s2-devices/

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Luckyo]

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/11613_First_Symbian2_phones_ship_in_.php

Among first links on google. Really, this is slashdot, you can at least try google search before posting a question with obvious answer.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Plus it's actually, hm, more than RIM and iPhone combined (since those two are the next biggest ones apparently, now); and quite close to larger than the next 3 (including Android), combined.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Graymalkin]

Most FOMA and Au phones in Japan run Symbian on the backend. They're not running Nokia's S60 environment but their own custom environments ad defined by DoCoMo and KDDI. There's also a handful of UIQ phones which are a Symbian base system with the UIQ environment on top. The Symbian parts of the phone are like the Linux base OS or DOS, they run the hardware and basic functionality of the phone with some other environment sitting on top.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

And then there's 5230, less than $150 without contract.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

There is one large category of apps with manahed code, fif you really want it, though - j2me ;)

Perhaps even the UI will get nice (again - it was decently nice initially, bringing with it the menu-driven style from S40; but it outgrew that style), S^4 concepts don't look half bad...

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Luckyo]

Even better, there's a slightly over 200 euro version of 5230 that comes with "nokia comes with music"-service, which is essentially "download all songs you want for a year to your phone" kind of a music download avenue.

Young kids love this one, as do their parents. For former it makes a nice social instrument often making those without NCWM phone outcasts (oh you can't get the music we like?), and latter can be sure that their offspring's music taste won't run up the bill.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[abhi_beckert]

SymbianS60v3 and S60v5 (also known as Symbian^1) still powers pretty much all nokia's touch screen phones, which alone sell more then android and iphone combined.

I call bullshit. Where is your source to back up that claim? It's well known that nokia is the highest volume selling phone in the world... But as far as I understood, the vast majority of their sales are low-margin non-touch screen phones. I would expect Nokia to be selling only a handful of touch screen phones, certainly not more than iPhone/Android combined.

But whichever way you slice it, Nokia is a small company compared to Apple and Google. From wolfram alpha:

Nokia: $32 billion
Apple: $225 billion
Google: $139 billion

Like it or not, those $$$ reflect the actual amount of work being done on a given project. iOS and Android have already leapt ahead of Symbian and the gap is only going to get wider. In the tech industry Apple and google are both well known for spending an absolute fortune on research. Look at WebKit — only a few years ago it was a shitty little open source alternative to mozilla — barely able to render even popular websites properly. Then apple put some cash into it, followed by google a few years later, and suddenly WebKit is leading the rendering engine industry in terms of technological superiority and looks like it's going to become the defacto standard rendering engine in the next few years — Apple, KDE, Nokia, Google, RIM, Palm... they're all using WebKit now, and more to come.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[squiggleslash]

Well, J2ME isn't really a native interface, it's something that integrates awkwardly into Symbian and isn't what you'd want to use if you want to develop a first class Symbian app.

Nokia's kind of missed the boat with a lot of this. It's so used to the notion of developing technologies that can be locked down and crippled by its "customers" (the carriers) that it's completely failed to recognize the damage such acts have done to its own products. And as such it never saw the problem with the app model it uses, as with the exception of phones that have a clear separation of the phone hardware from the "computer" (such as in the 9xxxx series), only "approved" apps will ever run anyway. Unlike Apple, Nokia doesn't have some overarching philosophy that requires the locking down, it's just let decades of whoring itself to the mobile networks ensure it ends up with some very bad technology decisions.

I've finally had a real chance to play with "real" Android in the last few days (a T-Mobile myTouch Slide. Yum) and I have to say, after experience of both Maemo and (at various stages) Symbian, Nokia needs to take a major step back and ask whether it really has the right technologies under development. I think Google and Palm really have the right idea here, and Nokia will hopefully learn from them.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Considering Nokia has ~37% of total mobile phone sales, that would be still a lot. But there's also Samsung (#2 with 21%) and SE (around 5%); and some devices made by Fujitsu, Sony Ericsson Japan, Mitsubishi, Sharp, et al for NTT Docomo.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

What do you mean? Vast majority of what Nokia sells is basically completely unlocked; some branding here and there, at most, being the rule.

In fact, the story goes that one of the contributing factors in Nokia being mostly driven out of US market was some unwillingness to castrate their phones too much.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[squiggleslash]

The sad part is that this is mostly true - relative to the other phone makers.

Virtually every Nokia handset has a number of permissions that enable and disable features of the phone, that are set or unset by the carriers when they're sold. As an example, my old (T-Mobile branded) Nokia 6085 has a crippled J2ME, that (believe it or not) doesn't allow apps to have access to the Internet. Various settings parts of the phone relating to APNs cannot be changed by the user. Essentially, unlocked, it's a voice/text messaging phone when given a non-T-Mobile SIM unless it's reflashed with hacked firmware.

Yes, Nokia tends to ship unlocked cellphones outside of the US (but so do most manufacturers), but within the US, short of ordering from a relatively limited selection from Nokia themselves, their phones are carrier locked, branded, and usually crippled in some way.

Nokia is a traditional mobile phone maker. They make phones they expect to sell to carriers, and they offer those carriers options they really shouldn't be. And so they've had trouble putting together a system that's designed, from the start, to be an open ecosystem. Maemo is waiting for mobile CPUs to increase in power and reduce in price, and has arguably missed the boat. And Symbian has an awkward architecture requiring the locked down aspects of the phone be hardware separated from the OS, or else phones be limited to running screened apps.

I don't think Nokia would have gotten into that state of mind if it wasn't for the relationship its allowed itself to have with carriers for the last few years. And, to be fair, at least they're trying. Motorola has slapped together MOTOMAGX for its voice phones, largely as a replacement for the somewhat long in the tooth custom OS thing they've had around for years, but I suspect they jumped on the Android platform with a sense of relief that someone had bolted something together that will work. The other operators, for the most part, don't even appear to have gotten that far, but ironically that means they're benefiting from the post iPhone fall out in a way Nokia isn't, simply because they haven't invested enormously in entrenched platforms that were going in entirely the wrong direction.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Seth Kriticos]

I'm sorry, but reading the page behind the link you provided does not convince me that the guy that wrote it has much backbone (or clue, for that matter).

Basically you are right in your statement, but you are missing most of the context.

Nokia bought the company behind the FOSS toolkit Qt because they are going to keep up with the market. That also means to move to a more future proof platform and system.

Unlike other companies that just abandon their old products, Nokia is going a different path: they fully support the Symbian system with the Qt framework (too much for my taste actually) and improve the development tools for it.. in parallel with the newer, more reasonable platform.

The higher level products will be phased out after the N8 model, that's right. But the applications built on the Nokia Qt framework will work on the new platform (MeeGo).

The midrange phones will also retain the Symbian system for the time being, so the phase out will take some time, if it ever occurs.

Now don't get me wrong, Nokia is not unfailing (I have an N800, I know that).. Still, they are presenting me with the most sane approach of a platform change I ever saw.

As for serious Symbian interested people: Symbian is released under the Eclipse Public License. It's not going away any time soon in form of preinstalled OS on consumer devices (think of years), but even when it will ultimately does that, your apps will run on the next gen OS + you'll be able to run Symbian on any flashable mobile phones if you like to.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Well, in that case you really should put upfront a disclaimer that what you're writing is from a perspective of a very atypical market...
Their ecosystem is opened, generally.

"Symbian has an awkward architecture requiring the locked down aspects of the phone be hardware separated from the OS, or else phones be limited to running screened apps"? One of the bonuses of Symbian is its EKA2 kernel, giving the ability to run signaling stack and the OS on one CPU (and hence lowering price). Requirement of apps to be signed can also be typically simply switched off.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Heh, not only more than "more then android and iphone combined", actually more than RIM and iPhone combined, the 2nd and 3rd (at this point); and actually still on the verge of selling more than next three (RIM, iPhone, Android) combined.
All in market reports; but go ahead and "call bullshit."

Sure, Symbian is only a small part (around 20%) of what Nokia sells, but that together with its dominating position is only a sign of how huge Nokia is - they sell annually an order of magnitude more phones than the total number of iPhones ever made.

Those $$$ reflect also feelings and expectations of "investors" (which is frawned by /. in other cases...oh well). But ignore things like Nokia actually owning all if their (over a dozen) manufacturing facilities (most of them not in China, half of them in the EU, one even quite close to Cupertino...), massive R&D (you have again no idea what you're talking about here, stuff like Webkit is nowhere near the same league; and some are possibly freeriding on this R&D, we'll see how this case ends up), or that Nokia contributing greatly to close to 5 billion mobile subscribers is a monumental shift for humanity (one which will also give great opportunities for "investment"). A shift many companies don't care about, openly stating they target only "premium" people living in "premium" places.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Skuld-Chan]

Yeah its the slowest browsing experience on any smartphone too.

I never could get over just how sodding slow the webbrowser is on S60-R5.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[upside]

Smartphones are not low margin, and Symbian outsells iOS and Android combined:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone

Last year Apple still outsold Nokia in touchscreen smartphones. I wouldn't be surprised if Nokia overtakook Apple this year as their lineup is shifting more to touchscreen phones.

http://www.gsmarena.com/touchscreen_smartphones_sales_rose_twice_apple_still_in_the_lead-news-1437.php

Regarding company size, market valuation is not necessarily the best gauge. For example, Nokia's revenue in 2009 was larger than Apple's. Also take into account that Nokia is almost exclusively in the phone business whereas it's only a part of Apple's.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Anonymous Coward]

in a way it's silly to discuss this, sybmian is ma bell, now how long has she been around? since the beginning? Duh.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

What's stopping you from using other software? It's, you know, a smartphone; that's the point behind it.

Opera Mini is nice for touchscreen devices now; and speeds up also the perceptual speed of the connection as a bonus.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[mdwh2]

Complete nonsense. Symbian is a smartphone OS. The term "smartphone" is rather ill-defined anyway, but I fail to see how phones like the 5800 don't count. What makes the Iphones smartphones? What does the IphoneOS have that Symbian doesn't - can they multitask yet? Finally got copy and paste, did we? Still waiting for Flash and Java? Can you run 3rd party apps of your choosing, like I'd expect on a smartphone rather than a locked down feature phone?

Even for their low end S40 (which is what you perhaps were thinking of), such phones can access the Internet and run apps. This has been the way for S40 and other "feature" phones for five years or more. Can you give me a definition of "smartphone" that includes the original Iphone, but not these feature phones?

The only reason S40 isn't a "smartphone" is brand marketing - Nokia label S60 and Maemo as "smartphones" to distinguish it from S40. But the old distinction between smartphones and dumbphones is long gone - almost all phones today, including S40, are "smart".

But yes, you're right that when people want a phone, they buy Nokia. When people want to brag about having an expensive phone that does the same, but with a nice Apple logo, they buy Iphone. It's the designer label of the technology world - the rest of us know you're paying extra for nothing more than a logo.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[mdwh2]

Nokia's "smartphones" (I hate that term, ever since Jobs redefined it to mean "Locked down phone that only runs software approved by the manufacturer"

I'm glad it's not just me :) Once upon a time, smartphone meant running apps and Internet access, basically a computer rather than just a phone. Since at least 2005, almost all phones were "smart", yet we've now had "smartphone" only used for some arbitrary high end phone. These days, even low end "feature" phones have large touchscreens.

It's more a marketing thing I think - vendors and manufacturers want a reason to explain why the more expensive phones are better, so they label them as "smart", rather than merely "feature" phones. At least one could still argue that the smartphones were more open, rather than being locked down like feature phones.

But as you say, since Apple decided that claim the Iphone was a "smartphone", this distinction no longer applied. It now allows them to misleadingly inflate their market share, by only quoting the market share of "smartphones" (they're still way behind Nokia though). Yet it's unfair to include the Iphones in that, whilst saying that the "feature" phones shouldn't be included.

It's also allowed them to perpetuate the myth that you need a smartphone "like the Iphone" to access the Internet. I've even seen geeks on Slashdot claim this - anyone would think it was still 2000.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[mdwh2]

Yes, they have some high end phones too like the N97 (and N900) (I'm not sure it's more expensive than any Iphone or Android phone though?), but the likes of the 5800 and X6 offer the same level of functionality of the Iphone (though lower specs than high end Android phones like from HTC) at lower prices. If you want to sacrifices the extra bells and whistles, you can get even cheaper Symbian phones in the 5XXX range.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[jo_ham]

This post above is one of the reasons I always laugh when people call for antitrust and cries about monopoly when talking about the iPhone. Yes, it has sold 100 million units since release, but it is *miles* behind Nokia.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Has sold half of what you think, actually.

And yeah, generally quite laughable; but could have (rather doesn't have of course) some merit, under certain bounds. Such proceedings would be on the level of one market, for starters; and there just happens to be a visible one where Nokia almost doesn't exist...though of course it doesn't seem like domination of Apple will be possible.
But there is another case possible - one market across the Pond to the mentioned above, which tries to protect customers / has, among other, rules about bundled deals, et al. The story goes that Apple dropping iTunes DRM was also influenced by several high profile lawsuits there about abusing iTunes lock-in. Remember monopoly itself isn't illegal, only when it abuses. And abuses themselves are enough.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[jo_ham]

iTunes dropping DRM was Apple's stated goal from the start - they didn't even want to start selling tracks with DRM on them in the first place, but had no choice - it was either no content, or DRM.

As such, they went with the weakest possible token DRM, that you could defeat using iTunes itself - something that Apple strongly encouraged you to do every time you downloaded a track.

It had nothing to do with lawsuits.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

And yet when Apple was claiming this (certainly not from the beginning) they were threatening right and left anybody trying to circumvent their DRM.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[moosesocks]

The problem is that unlike android and iphone, these phones are very competitively priced, and sacrifice "bling" features for actual function, such as better features, lower price and business-directed application support. As a result, there's many fewer people with "loose money" who are willing to sink a few euros/dollars/etc into some funny looking application on a weekly basis. They also tend to look much less pretty, focusing on function, and have slower hardware, meaning less responsive UI, which is advertised as a major feature on IOS and android.

Thanks for your opinion. Having used all major mobile platforms, I will respectfully disagree (as, I suppose, would anybody else who's switched from Blackberry or Symbian to an Apple or Android-based phone). A responsive UI, high-resolution screen, and reasonable aesthetics, I argue, can indeed improve the usability of a device, even for business users.

Honestly, I don't see much of a future for Symbian -- in my mind, they represent the "old" mobile phone industry, and the inferiority and stagnation that came along with it. Similarly, RIM needs to watch its back, as the enterprise market is ripe for the picking. Developing applications for the Blackberry is like pulling teeth, and their mobile browser is slightly less capable than Netscape 4.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[jo_ham]

Where was this?

What about Apple's statement that accompanied downloads when they had DRM that said "We strongly encourage you to make backups of your purchases (removing the DRM) by burning them to Audio CD. Would you like to burn them to CD now?" (Don't Burn) (Burn [default highlight])

They altered the way the Fairplay DRM worked on a couple of occasions, when it was circumvented in breach of the DMCA, but they never threatened anyone, and the ability to remove the DRM via Apple's built in method has always been in iTunes, and continues to be to this day.

I bought music from the store in DRM format the day it opened, and was given that choice. I bought an album and burned it to CD and it is in my car to this day, DRM free.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Right, burning to the CD (backups? Are you sure you're not remembering this incorrectly / that's no way to do them)...so why, again, they needed it at all in the initial non-transcoded files that people usually put on their (their) player?

And you really don't remember numerous cease and desist letters? Some as recently as around a year ago? (Requiem software, forcing some forums to remove posts about it and the software itself into Tor hidden server). Plus, and arms race (also recent one about Requiem) with changing the way iTunes DRM works is very much optional on the part of Apple; as is DMCA.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[CarpetShark]

Complete nonsense. Symbian is a smartphone OS.

Completely irrelevant. I'm not talking about the OS's technical capabilities/potential. Go check Nokia's strategy, and you'll find out I'm right.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[jo_ham]

The DMCA is not optional, if the content providers (who own the music) tell Apple (who runs the store) to "do something about" the people going around the DRM. Apple doesn't even want it there in the first place, but they have to deal with it if their supplier asks them to (or there is no content for the store).

The burning to CD option has two settings: Audio CD (strips off the DRM) and regular CD (just burns the files as they are). You could choose with a drop down selection menu which format you preferred. Apple called it "backing up" in both respects, primarily as a cover measure. Initially it would only allow you to make 10 copies of a playlist that contained DRM tracks, but you could reset this by changing the order of the tracks, or adding one, or removing one. This restriction was later lifted (when it was no longer part of the whole content protection scheme - it was really just a token "iTunes won;t allow someone to mass produce this album and distribute it after buying it once" (although obviously it would be trivially easy to just duplicate the first audio CD it made to the same effect, but hey, no one said DRM made any sense).

I am not misremembering, because this topic frequently comes up on slashdot with "facts" about how iTunes DRM worked, and why it was there, and Apple's motivations behind it.

I have also been using it since the day the iTunes store started selling tracks, back when it was called the iTunes Music Store.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

That was just part of optional very vigorous arms race there...

And really, stop presenting Audio CD as just "stripping the DRM", it also does you no good.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[jo_ham]

That is precisely what it does.

The original DRM track is converted to Wav/Aiff (I forget precisely what bit format is used) and put on the CD, sans DRM. The quality of the track at this point does not go down, as it is not recompressed in the usual meaning of the word (eg, mp3 > mp3, jpg > jpg, aac > mp3), although you could argue that any conversion step is "lossy" in some respect. The music now on the CD is exactly the same audio quality as the DRM file.

From that point, it is now up to you - it can be reripped into mp3 or aac, or into a lossless format if you choose.

What making an audio CD does for you in iTunes (or did, back when the store had DRM) was precisely that - strip the DRM. Was it ideal? No. Was it the best they could do at the time? Yes.

The DRM arms race was not optional for Apple in the sense that if they clearly weren't trying to "protect" their content, then the music industry would have simply refused to supply the content for the store. So, every time Fairplay was broken, Apple patched it up. In the meantime, they also raised the limit on the number of CDs you could burn of the same DRM playlist from 10 to 15, before you had to alter the tracklist to reset the count. Their choice could have been to not bother fixing the Fairplay workarounds, but then they wouldn't have to worry about running the store either, since they would have nothing to sell.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Why won't people just record loop via audio out/in, with present equipment the quality also won't really go down...

Sure DRM was not optional; Apple liked that music from iTunes is locked into iPods; most importantly, they "freed" music only when other types of content started becoming popular; and which are still very much locked.

(really, don't you see a problem with following what they claim, since 2007 only, to the letter?)

Re:Symbian is a goner

[AuMatar]

grandparent of your post- says if they dump S60 GUI for a better one Symbian may survive.
parent of your post- says they're moving to QT (a GUI framework)
your post- an utter lack of reading comprehension.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[jo_ham]

The "freed" music back when they ran the Rip. Mix. Burn. commercials, way back before the iTunes store even existed.

The provided a way to remove the DRM from their store downloads (although not ideally), and then later stopped selling DRM music entirely. Using an audio loop is also possible (but clearly has to be done at normal speed, rather than just burning a CD) - the analog hole is always going to exist unless it gets legislated away (HDCP on digital video connections for example). There were numerous ways get around the original iTunes DRM - I went straight to MiniDisc in the early days, back before I had an iPod, and via audio CD for my car.

Right now, their music supports any player that can play AAC files. I listen to music from the iTunes store on my Ubuntu box. It's hardly "locked" to iPods. If they wanted a completely closed up system they would have modified a format and made their own completely proprietary format that only iTunes (Quicktime), iPods and iPhones etc could read. Sort of how MS tried to do that with WMA (although I believe that too, is now opened up). They didn't go for that however, they chose an open standard format (although patented, it is an open standard) that they do not control. Hardly the moves of someone who wants to make it impossible to take your music elsewhere.

They chose to use AAc format, which (like mp3) is patented, but offered better quality for the same bitrate. The issues of using AAC on a portable player are exactly the same as using mp3 - both are patented formats not owned primarily by the device makers (Apple does not control AAC). There's nothing stopping someone making a portable player that supports music from the iTunes store, and anything that already supports AAC files is already compatible. So, not "locked" to iPods at all.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Got it, they freed the music before they even offered it; even better now...

Why the change the subject to encoding format suddenly? Trying to put something behind? (NVM that it isn't nearly only about music; how did you dismiss that they "freed" music just when other types of content, still DRM'd, became semi-popular?)
Plus, Apple isn't that great at supporting DRM; it took them a long time to support eAAC; they still can't support properly eAAC+ stream when encountering one.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[jo_ham]

I'm talking about format because you started talking about them "locking in music" to iPods - I was merely pointing out that that really isn't the case.

"Freeing" the music was one of Apple's commercial marketing ideas on the original iMac (the multi coloured one with the built in screen and the G3 CPU) entitled "Rip, Mix, Burn". They ran a series of TV commercials about it, about how you could use iTunes to make mix CDs of your own music from (at the time, since there was no online music store) your CDs. Their goal with the original iTunes was a jukebox program (and yes, I know, not the first jukebox software, and not originally an Apple project, just have to head that off at the pass before it gets brought up) that you could use to import all your CDs and create mix CDs any way you wanted and use anywhere, likely in response (although this is just speculation on my part) to the trend of one or two good tracks being released on an album full of filler that was common at the time, and being gradually pressured out of existence now by the ability to buy tracks individually online from all manner of online music stores and services.

iTunes 9.2 and iOS 4 fully support eAAC+

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

You were talking about format, ergo something which doesn't have much to do with this locking / etc.

Now you try to attach to it mixtapes / "mix CDs"...ehhh.

Oh, right, they just now (gee, sorry I missed something like that) added something which others had for half a decade... (the more in the past, the more useful - sizes and bandwidths were smaller)

Re:Symbian is a goner

[jo_ham]

Yes, they "just now" added it - your assertion was that they "still couldn't" play eAAC+ files, when they actually can (and supported most of the eAAC format before that, just lacked PS, ie, the v1 spec is supported on the iPhone and iTunes before the release of iOS4). Would it be ideal for them to have supported it fully right away when the spec was finalised? Of course, but that's not what we're talking about, we're talking about correcting your erroneous statement.

Also, what do you mean "trying to attach it to mix tapes"? That was the entire ad campaign - "Rip, Mix, Burn" was the slogan. There's not "trying" about it - that was the original idea. Go and look up the ads - I am sure they are on youtube. Go revel in late 90's ad music.

And format has *everything* do do with locking in. Just look at something like .docx - originally designed to keep you stuck in MS Office (and .doc before that), or WMA, originally only able to be decoded by Windows Media Player. There are still v9 versions of the WMV/WMA codec around that you *still* cannot play back on any platform other than Windows (ie, even the Mac version of Microsoft;s official player does not support them), but fortunately they got rid of that madness with the later incarnations. So, Apple, when deciding what format to use for the iTunes store went with an open standard - AAC, so that when the DRM was gone (should that ever happen, and we now know did happen) their whole infrastructure (encoding, installed base, players, etc) would be based around it so you would have portability with your music, like the ability to take it to competing players and operating systems that support AAC. The alternative would be a music file that only worked on iPods/iPhones, which is not the case (in the absence of the DRM). You were the one who brought up lock in to the iPod, I was refuting that.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Hah, you're sure meandering somewhere. We're actually talking about long-term trends for Apple, supporting eAAC+ for less than a month certainly falls under that.

Mixtapes, not DRM. What they actually do with format (sure they would take a good, ready one...why wouldn't they?).

And most generally, about weird coincidences between when Apple announces dropping DRM, starts to convince people "we always wanted it" (nothing new, really, with all "we are first" from them...) just while other types of content were becoming popular (and are still DRM'd) and when few serious investigations were getting up to speed.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[jo_ham]

Ah, revisionist history. Go look at some of Apple's early information on the topic. They never wanted DRM in the first place. The salient quote I remember is from a letter written by Jobs himself that explains that DRM was a requirement of the music industry to allow music to be sold on the store.

Then, the emergence and massive success of iTunes created a self imposed monopoly - users were only buying iTunes tracks (despite other stores selling different DRM'ed tracks) so the industry was faced with "keep selling iTunes and iPod only tracks" or "drop DRM". In reality, if they had thought ahead they would have specified the DRM scheme used rather than letting Apple roll their own (which they didn't licence to others), so that the industry could have provided a universal DRM scheme (like CSS for DVDs) to all the different online music stores, but they weren't thinking like that - they were thinking that Apple's efforts would fade into insignificance and the whole "online music download as a business model" would be quietly swept under the carpet.

So what "other types of content" are you talking about? iTunes movies?

Also, Apple has supported most of the eAAC format (the v1 spec) for a lot longer than one month. The full spec (v2) with the PS went in with the iOS4 upgrade, likely since the full mpeg4 audio bundle (with eAAC) was finally standardised in 2009, despite the eAAC+ format being a standard for longer than that. No, it's certainly not ideal if the format is well deployed (like a portable player not supporting mp3) but it is what it is. It has now been fixed.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Look, it's simple; that Jobs letter was in 2007 (with the circumstances I mentioned). Previously DRM was sugar-coted.

Apple was very actively preventing other companies / entities from licensing (etc.) their DRM, so you are the one who plays revisionist history, again and again.

More than music, less than apps...there's plenty.

And please, eAAC and eAAC+ ar two different things; if you play V2 on a device which supports only V1, it sounds worse than just feeding it V1.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[jo_ham]

Yes, Apple refused to licence its DRM - why would it? It wanted to get rid of it, no entrench it in a multitude of different devices and stores.

The letter was written in 2007, explaining Apple's motivations from before that time.

You are dodging the question. What *specific* other types of content are affected by DRM, that either might be, or are, or have been suggested to be the subject of a lawsuit/antitrust?

I mistyped eAAC+, wherever you read eAAC, it should say eAAC+ - I missed off the + despite typing it. Go me, I should proofread.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[sznupi]

Hence you start to deconstruct your own points...well, at least I don't have to do it much / we're getting somewhere.

(you don't know what's on iTunes suddenly?)

You know well you were talking about eAAC/V1 there, you placed it clearly in context of "for a lot longer than one month" (actually not that much longer, just one year)

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Luckyo]

A responsive UI, high-resolution screen, and reasonable aesthetics, I argue, can indeed improve the usability of a device, even for business users.

It is funny how when it comes to both high res screen, and reasonable aesthetics, OS has nothing to do with it. In fact, symbian powers both highest resolution phones available (japanese symbian^2 phones) and quite possibly some of the most aesthetic phones available (vertu luxury models).

Response times are up to the hardware more so then OS, and mind you, symbian is FAR better then ios or android when it comes to response times on similar hardware - it's far more lightweight of an OS by design. Better response times on android and iphone nowadays has nothing to do with software and everything to do with far more powerful hardware used in those phones in comparison to most symbian phones out in the west (we're looking at 1/2 to 1/4 memory and slightly over 400mhz weak ARM11 vs powerful ARM4 at much higher clocks at the moment).

On the other hand if you're willing to fork over premium, a la iphone, symbian doesn't really have anything for you in the west at the moment - though upcoming N8 seems to be able to rectify the problem nicely. This is really the main gripe most people seem to have with symbian at the moment in the west - there just aren't any real flagship phones running it at the moment. N97 is just a poor excuse with same hardware as 120euro 5230 (and largely the same OS).

Similarly, RIM needs to watch its back, as the enterprise market is ripe for the picking. Developing applications for the Blackberry is like pulling teeth, and their mobile browser is slightly less capable than Netscape 4.

In the end, this is something that "smartphones are sooooo cooooool" crowd just doesn't seem to grasp - that they are merely a very small fraction of the smart phone market, and a far smaller fraction of the mobile phone market. Few people using blackberry or nokia's business offerings care at all about applications other then bare necessities. Instead they care about productivity - and there having many applications, especially entertainment ones usually are a detriment rather then an advantage.
Which is why you see a LOT of execs nowadays use a "bling" phone as an image phone on golf course, and pull out a blackberry or nokia E series/communicator when real work needs to be done.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[moosesocks]

I'm talking about UI aesthetics, and those Vertu phones have got to be some of the gaudiest, ugliest things I've ever seen. I should also apologize for all the work I've been doing on my Android phone that's apparently "fake".

Honestly, this article and subsequent discussion sounds like a lot of Symbian developers trying to give themselves job security, while sneering at an unmistakable trend.

(And my particular employer does care about applications other than bare necessities. We're trying to port a few applications specific to our business to the Blackberry (because that's what the company issues to its employees by default), and are having a hell of a time doing it. It is hands-down the worst environment any of us have ever developed for. We're having to program every single UI widget from scratch using Blackberry's broken Java implementation.

I suspect Blackberry users don't care about other applications, because there are none, given just how awful Blackberry's developer platform is. Should I also mention their browser's godawful Javascript and CSS implementation, or their much-touted map/GPS application that looks like it was made in 1996? If you're going to do something, do it right.

The second that another company figures out how to market phones to the enterprise market, and can successfully sell itself on also being a good development platform, RIM will be toast. Those execs pull out their blackberry when "real work" needs to be done, because their enterprises are integrated into Exchange, which isn't supported nearly as well by any other platform (or because company policies prohibit Android/IOS devices on their network).

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Hognoxious]

All you wrote was "Symbian is a goner. They're moving to QT". How is that not equivalent to "Linux is a goner. They're moving to gnome"?

If you're too thick to include any necessary context then it's no wonder people misunderstand what you have to say (not that it's a great loss), you pompous little prick.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[mdwh2]

I'm not talking about the OS's technical capabilities/potential. Go check Nokia's strategy, and you'll find out I'm right.

So what are you talking about?

Even if we go by what the company markets it by (which, in terms of looking at the "smartphone market", is a poor indicator anyway), Nokia refer to Symbian phones as smartphones, and they refer to Symbian as a smartphone OS. E.g.:

http://www.symbian.org/ - "Contribute to the world's most widely used smartphone platform"

I presume you were thinking of S40, which (despite still being a smartphone by any non-arbitrary definition, in that it runs apps and has Internet access, and is an OS for a mobile computer in a phone) they market as not being a smartphone, to distinguish it from their Symbian (i.e., S60) phones.

Re:Symbian is a goner

[Luckyo]

Full disclosure:
I do not develop any software, hardware, or anything really for nokia, or symbian or any related company. My first smartphone is 5800XM which I still use, before that I used bare bones 3210 which was imho absolutely brilliant phone - it took tremendous amount of punishment, battery lasted forever and yet offered me all I needed (I'm a laptop + 3g modem kind of guy).

Honestly, I disagree with you on a personal level as well here, because you clearly work in programming - you said it yourself that your company "tried to port" your applications to other platforms. Most companies lack that option, and not being developers most of their phone tools include exchange integration, corporate email and intranet and internet browsing (which again, is mostly about intranet, possibly travel costs management, etc).

And most employers would strongly prefer a vastly limited browser - read on why explorer 6.0 is so popular among employers. Because it's so crippled on facebook et al, employers who keep it as the only browser on the workstation can actually expect people to get work done rather then sit filling their status updates.

Essentially your complaint remains not that you can't get work done on blackberry - which you can, easily, but that it's too crippled for entertainment.
But work phone isn't supposed to be an entertainment phone. At all. It's a lot like my 5800 - I find myself using it for entertainment more then actual work (i.e. listening to music, watching videos, occasionally playing games). This was never a problem with 3210 where the only entertainment was occasional game of snake when sitting in an airport.

Nothing to see here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Summary of interesting Symbian handsets on the market today:

*none*.

Symbian, the platform without a (decent) phone.

W
(I own a Nokia E-Series Symbian phone, and I hate it.)

Re:Nothing to see here.

[24-bit Voxel]

I've got a Nokia N95, which is a decent enough phone I guess, but the symbian OS is easily the 2nd clumsiest one I have ever used (first being windows mobile). It's like no one there cares at all about usability, almost like a Dilbert strip. My sound recorder is in office tools, for whatever reason, and it's like 7 clicks deep. I can't customize my appearance in terms of where buttons go or which do or don't show up very well, so whatever background image I am using is obscured by loads of useless crap I'll never need. Like the phone, hate the OS.

Re:Nothing to see here.

[drinkypoo]

I've got a Nokia N95, which is a decent enough phone I guess, but the symbian OS is easily the 2nd clumsiest one I have ever used (first being windows mobile).

Obviously, you've never used a Motorola phone with... what the hell do you call that operating system? Besides offensive?

Re:Nothing to see here.

[Steve Max]

You probably moved the sound recorder. You can move it back to wherever you want through the menu that comes from the left soft key. Also, if I understood well what you're saying, take some time to look at Tools -> Settings -> Phone Settings -> Standby mode.

Re:Nothing to see here.

[tumnasgt]

Unless your N95 is completely different to the two Symbian phones I have owned, you can move the icons into different folders and put them where you want. I have a folder called "Crap" for all the apps I don't use. You access the move functions by pressing Options in the menu (left soft key).

Re:Nothing to see here.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I think that might be Qualcomm's "BREW", running on its own RTOS, along with Motorola's... er... unique insights into user interface design(if you are really lucky, you are one of the people for whom the UI was a joint project between Motorola and Verizon...)

Re:Nothing to see here.

[sznupi]

It's a vestige from S40 (people do generally seem to like and appreciate its menu-driven UI BTW) - when S60 started, it was probably (and for a years) the best idea to built on UI concepts from S40; which worked decently nice.

Problem is, after a while all the functionality present started to outgrow that model of interaction.

)others have pointed out how you can move applications, I'll just add that you can certainly make the homescreen practically "clean")

Not to mention

[Monkeedude1212]

The competitors are GOOGLE and APPLE, which have done more than just created a phone operating system, so they get a lot of buzz.

The fact that these two names come up more than twice Daily might have something to do with why I'd be interested in their phone business.

Re:Not to mention

[levell]

Well Symbian has Nokia behind it, and they aren't a small company.

But I'm not persuaded it's all about the companies backing it. The soon to be released, MeeGo phones have Nokia backing too (as well as Intel) but I'm much more excited about that than Symbian. Having a fairly standard Linux stack on my phone is something I love about my N900 and I'm looking forward to its successor.

Re:Not to mention

[Kensai7]

Symbian hasn't got Nokia behind it more that it has, say, Apple.

Symbian is an autonomous Foundation today that licenses its open OS to phone manufacturer. Yes, Nokia is still the bigger user but this shouldn't be its selling point.

There is one other minor detail that everybody ignores and it will probably revolutionize the whole Symbian OS business: it's using Qt. Next year a bunch of MeeGo devices will be out (both from Nokia and other manufacturers) and by using Qt a developer could target- with minor changes to the code- devices ranging from a mainframe to a toaster, Symbian included. :)

This is a huge ace in the sleeve to instantly reach millions of potential users. The only thing they need now at Symbian is producers of high-quality smartphones to sell themselves.

Re:Not to mention

[stephanruby]

Since it's backed by Nokia (not just Intel), Meego will have the same problem as Symbian. Nokia's cut for their Ovi app store is 30%. Google's cut for the Android Market is 0% (they're basically giving away that 30% commission to the network operators/phone manufacturers, in addition to that Google is also giving away rev-share to the network operators for all the ads they serve through them).

Not only is this pricing structure encouraging *all* the network operators to adopt and promote the hell out of their own android-based devices, without making them want to try to cripple/disable as many apps as they can (unlike for the Ovi/iPhone App stores), but it will also become that much better once more people start using their phones as pre-paid debit cards, and/or paying for apps through operator-billing/SMS.

Currently, Nokia is paying developers close to 49% when an app is purchased through operator-billing, the 30% commission is taken out twice, once for the operator and once by Nokia). And again in the case of Android, Google is taking 0%, thus the commission is only taken out once even when the billing is solely done through the network operator. This is not something that Nokia likes to openly advertise and even Paul Beusterien (the Symbian guy being interviewed) fails to mention this. And of course, you could choose not to sell your app through operator-billing, but operator-billing, which results in higher conversion rates and access to new potentially untapped populations (that may not even have a credit card to begin with, but that can still prepay through their phones) is simply a growing area that can not be ignored.

Which brings me to my next point, in addition to the lower barrier to entry in Android for the independent and small to medium developers, which there are many, for which Paul Beusterien barely scratches the surface, and for which I won't detail here unless someone asks, Android is also taking away all the big software houses, large consulting companies, VCs, and network operators away from Nokia (not just the media attention) mostly because of the pricing structure Nokia is stubbornly unwilling/unable to match (and of course, it does help that Android is also maturing both in terms of software development for the developer and in terms of overall usability for the user).

Re:Not to mention

[__aabgfe356]

im still wishing google hadn't created buzz but anyway

Re:Not to mention

[(Score.5, Interestin]

Well Symbian has Nokia behind it, and they aren't a small company.

In compensation Symbian development is quite a bit less fun than an unnecessary root canal. I've developed for pretty much everything out there, and Symbian has a special place in terms of ghastly, unusable, crappy... ugh. So one reason why there's not much enthusiasm for it is because you practically have to hold a gun to someone's head (meaning bribe them with the prospect of $$$$$$$$$) to get them to develop for it. You certainly won't get enthusiasts hacking away at it for the fun of it, unless they're raving masochists.

Hmmm...

[PmanAce]

Who is going to want to develop applications for tiny arse screens for example? That market is a goner.

Re:Hmmm...

[dnaumov]

So the phone OS with the biggest worldwide marketshare (and by quite a margin) is a "goner"? Because you said so? Noone talks and writes to the media about developing for Symbian simply because it isn't sexy.

Re:Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tiny arse screens really sounds like a dead-end display tech.

Re:Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not a goner as an OS for mobile phones. It is a goner as a major platform for 3rd party apps and games on mobile smart phones. People who are interested in downloading and running lots of apps and games, probably own a droid, a nexus one or an iPhone. People who just use their phones as... hmmmm... phones, and don't give a shit about apps, are probably the biggest chunk of Symbian's market share.

Re:Hmmm...

[PmanAce]

Exactly, it isn't sexy and down the road will dwindle. Just curious, how many smart phones run Symbian?

Re:Hmmm...

[Minwee]

So the phone OS with the biggest worldwide marketshare (and by quite a margin) is a "goner"? Because you said so?

Well, technically Nokia says so, but what would they know about phones?

Re:Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? They say "We will use Symbian in all but one of our lines, the ones where we sell ~75% of our smartphones", and you see that as "Symbian is dead"? Really?

Imagine Apple said, "We won't use iOS on new versions of the iPad, but we'll keep developing it for the iPhone and iPod. iPads will use the full OS X." Would that mean iOS is dead too?

Re:Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever heard of Qt? Nokia is now moving their OS-es (Symbian, MeeGo) to Qt. That makes the underlying OS pretty irrelevant as far as app development is concerned. Symbian isn't a goner. Symbian^4 is based on Qt, which is used for app development (including games).

Re:Hmmm...

[Minwee]

Imagine Apple said, "We won't use iOS on new versions of the iPad, but we'll keep developing it for the iPhone and iPod. iPads will use the full OS X." Would that mean iOS is dead too?

If you wanted an Apple analogy, try "We won't use MacOS 9 for new versions of our desktops and notebooks, but you can still run it on your old hardware. Our new line will use only OS X." And then one year later this happened.

While the Symbian software may be alive and well, its biggest supporter has decided that it is no longer a viable product in the smart phone market and is phasing it out in favour of the Next Big Thing. That's what they do.

Really? They say "We will use Symbian in all but one of our lines, the ones where we sell ~75% of our smartphones", and you see that as "Symbian is dead"? Really?

Last year 100% of their smartphones used Symbian. This year it is 75%. It's not going to stay at 75% next year, though. Can you buy a phone with Symbian OS 6? No, they were phased out in 2003 in favour of Symbian 7. Can you still buy that? Nope, it was kicked to the curb in 2005 so that Symbian 8 and 9 could replace it. If you replace the words "Symbian 10.0" with "Meego" then the next step is obvious.

Re:Hmmm...

[peppepz]

I think your analogy is not accurate because:
- Nokia said that all future *n-series* devices would not run Symbian^3. Thus c-series, e-series and x-series are getting Symbian^3 in the future. N-series is a small part of Nokia's sales.
- Nokia *is* developing a next version of Symbian, which is not Meego (that replaces Maemo), but Symbian^4. A few days ago they confirmed that future n-series devices will get Symbian^4 too (and it's not vapourware, since anybody can follow Symbian^4 development on symbian.org).

The real reason nobody talks about Symbian..

[multipartmixed]

...is they keep forgetting if it's Symbian or Sybian that's "work safe"

Re:The real reason nobody talks about Symbian..

[Anonymous Coward]

Symbian is:
  dominating frameworks,
  lots of weird stringtypes,
  constant cleanup colon.. sorry stack ****ing.

Re:The real reason nobody talks about Symbian..

[Anonymous Coward]

stack ****ing.

FYI this is the internet, it's ok to swear on here.

Re:The real reason nobody talks about Symbian..

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 Speaks the truth!

Re:The real reason nobody talks about Symbian..

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither is work-safe. NSFW

It isn't ignored

[0xdeadbeef]

It is actively despised.

Re:It isn't ignored

[Balial]

This.

The first Symbian product shipped under than name in 2001 (according to wikipedia). Blackberry shipped in 2002 (also wikipedia) and was destroying it ever since. Every single Symbian phone was garbage to use. Android and iPhone have only helped push it down further towards its rightful place.

Re:It isn't ignored

[zaivala]

"Actively despised" seems more to fit Windows Mobile. On my phone, I can only synch anything if I have access to a commercial server with Outlook -- won't even think about using Outlook on my PC. I'd love to load Symbian (or just about anything else) onto my Pantech Matrix C820.

Re:It isn't ignored

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an "opportunity" to try out a high-end Blackberry for couple weeks half an year ago or so. Call me European, or even Finnish, but I were immensely disappointed in contrast to expectations I had. I'd switch back to Nokia E90 or even E70 any day in if I had that device in use. But then again, I have something that serves me even better than my preceding phones: N900.

I have really failed to spot the excellence of Blackberry, apart from their mobile mail solution, which of course is an established player and keeps them alive. Otherwise, I'd expect them to be six feet under.

Re:It isn't ignored

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like you have ever used a Symbian device. Go back under your rock dufus.

Re:It isn't ignored

[edivad]

It is actively despised.

Yup, by both users and developers.
Can we please restrict "buzz posts" to developer communities that have at least 10 members, from now on?

Re:It isn't ignored

[Anonymous Coward]

Your not wrong about that. The company I work for our symbian developer hates the platform, and not thats not a bad work attitude, he adores certain other handsets and his symbian hate has been shared by all 3 of his predecessors.

Its got a competely munted API thats really hard to find good documentation on, its a slut to debug, it doesnt play nice with foreign libraries (because of that damn munted API) and getting apps onto the handset is a bigger horror than even the iphone.

But in its favor its not goddamn windows mobile. Prior to 7, thats one ugly handset OS. Windows C++ api's are gruesome enough, but the mobile versions are just ugly.

  7 might be a game changer though. dot net is good stuff.

Re:It isn't ignored

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why everybody and his dog keep complaining that Symbian UI is outdated, yet I've never heard anybody say that about Blackberries. A text-only, bi-chromatic user interface? With a text cursor blinking even over not-editable fields? I don't remember seeing that since the days of DOS. Also, those devices are unusable without paying an expensive monthly subscription. Why?

Re:It isn't ignored

[bar-agent]

Its got a competely munted API thats really hard to find good documentation on

I don't know this word, "munted." Do you mean "munged," meaning jerry-rigged, slapdash, or badly improvised?

its a slut to debug,

I believe you mean "bitch." Sluts are more-or-less good things. Or, at least, not all bad.

Bad memories

[goto begin]

Most people I know remember Symbian as an uncomfortable, clumsy OS before real smartphones even existed. Personally, I wouldn't use it since I'm biased away from it for this exact reason.

iPhone (and Android) have both kinds

[SuperKendall]

If you look around, you can ALSO find the same groups of people doing consulting work for companies around iPhone and Android development. Yes it's true that both platforms also have the hobby developers, but that's only a small part of the overall market.

In fact if you think about it you could argue the iPhone had a leg up on said base of serious developers, because there was already a reasonably large base of professional Mac developers around before the iPhone - I would argue probably more than there were ever dedicated Symbian developers.

The problem Symbian had is the same problem WinCE and the same problem Android WOULD have had if, being Java based, they had just tried to bring J2ME forward a bit more into the smartphone realm. Both Android and iPhoneOS are designed from the ground up to be fully featured operating systems, without a ton of compromises and pretty old design philosophies baked into other existing mobile platforms. Yes there are a ton of Symbian devices around, but does that matter when you know you can sell an order of magnitude more software developing for the iPhone or Android?

It's only a matter of time before corporate use of these two platforms totally eclipses Symbian development in the enterprise, if it's not already happened.

 

Re:iPhone (and Android) have both kinds

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only a matter of time before corporate use of these two platforms totally eclipses Symbian development in the enterprise, if it's not already happened.

Ehem, Blackberry?

Symbian was the OS when no one knew a mobile phone could do more than just make calls.
Then they'd upgrade to WinMo/Palm/Blackberry.

Then WinMo tanked, which left Blackberry as the dominant smartphone OS. (no, I don't count Symbian as a smartphone OS)

Despite all the press iPhone/Droid get, BB still leads.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[multipartmixed]

Minor nit -- it's not that you need a different phone to get tethering, you need a better carrier.

My Rogers iPhone works just fine for tethering. All I have to do is turn Internet Tethering on in the preferences, then plug it into the sync cable. Leopard pops up a dialog box which says something like "Hey! New Ethernet Interface found; would you like to use it?" -- click Ok, disable any other active network interface (or tweak your routing table) and bam: you're surfing on 3G.

I don't know how to do it in Windows, but it can't be much harder.

Symbian is dead

[faragon]

Past benefits doesn't guarantee future income. In my opinion it makes no sense unless for "dumb devices".

Nokia, what happened to you?

[msgmonkey]

My last two Nokia phones have been an absolute disaster, the first a 6600 fold locks up if you press the 6 key, thats right you can't use the 6 key. It's a common fault and and seems like one of those bugs that is so bizzare that nokia have n't been able to fix it because it does n't affect every phone. I then made the mistake of getting a N97 Mini and I can honestly say it will be my last Nokia phone, the CPU is so under powered its like a sick joke and the phone interface is terrible.

There was a time when you knew getting a Nokia meant a quality phone, I'm sorry to say that is n't the case anymore.

Re:Nokia, what happened to you?

[oldspewey]

msgmonkey at the pub: "Hey, why don't you give me your number, I'd like to give you a call sometime."
hot chick at the pub: "Sure, I'd love to get together and do something."
msgmonkey: "Cool, let me put you in my mobile. I just really, really hope you're number doesn't contain the digit 6."

Re:Nokia, what happened to you?

[horza]

I have to say that I'm very happy with my E71. Full keyboard, nice screen, and Symbian so I can run whatever software I want. Opera Mini really improves it. Camera is not great, but has full GPS. Much slimmer than the Blackberry.

I've read that in Android Google can remotely install and remove apps at will, so that goes on my blacklist along with the iPhone. Hopefully HTC can port their Sense interface directly onto Linux. Now THAT is a phone I would buy.

Phillip.

Re:Nokia, what happened to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I then made the mistake of getting a N97 Mini and I can honestly say it will be my last Nokia phone, the CPU is so under powered its like a sick joke and the phone interface is terrible.

Huh? My girlfriend has an N97 mini, and it's great. 5MP camera, which does video, free full SatNav, music player, FM radio - hell, I forget some of the stuff it has. Its speed is fine too.

Re:Nokia, what happened to you?

[Skuld-Chan]

Why is it that the Nokia fanboys always base their experience off their friend or girlfriend. Trust me - if you had one of these phones you wouldn't be happy. My n97 is honestly the only phone I could say was worse than a Windows mobile phone (N97 and my WinMo phone - only phones I had to occasionally take the battery out to reset).

Re:Nokia, what happened to you?

[Luckyo]

I think that everyone can agree with you that n97 is bad for the cost. In fact, if you look into it, well over 3/4 of all "nokia is bad" gripes are about n97.

Reality is, n97 is a 200 euro platform - same one used in all mid range smart phones like 5800XM and even low end like 5230. This is why it's so horrible. It just isn't a flagship in any sense, in spite of nokia marketing it as such.
Rest of nokia's line up at the moment is very good. They just don't have the flagship model at all - n900 is too techie and n97 is basically n5800 with bigger screen and keyboard.

Re:Nokia, what happened to you?

[the plant doctor]

I've got a N97 Mini. I have to agree. If you had one yourself you'd be disappointed with it. It seems cool, until you have to use it yourself.

Re:Nokia, what happened to you?

[Hognoxious]

Almost a full keyboard. You have to press shift to get control, which makes copy/paste a real pain in the ass. This is fixed on the E72.

The GPS is slow to lock on but I guess it's better than nothing. Ovi maps is clumsy, but at least it's free (as in beer) - but only after thousands of people said they'd never buy another Nokia.

I also find bluetooth is flaky - sometimes it just refuses to connect even to a device that's been previously paired and set to authorised.

All the more for me

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I'm concerned, all the better, with a ridiculous number of Symbian phones already deployed in corporate environments people like me can move in and develop tailored apps for existing infrastructure and make very decent money doing it whilst others go along with the fads, spend twice as much effort and earn less than half what I'm making, all the while being controlled by abnormally restrictive policies imposed by the hardware vendor. Mind you, Symbian is a bitch to work with but frankly when compare the effort and reward it really is easy pickings.

Still waiting for an open-source release...

[hackel]

I've got a Symbian S60 device myself, an aging Nokia N73... I can't wait to switch to a more modern Linux-based operating system. Even Nokia has dumped it on their N-series devices! I tried writing some PyS60 apps for mine, but it was just too slow and underpowered. I can't have more than one app open at a time because it has so little memory...but it did do a lot with a little.

Re:Still waiting for an open-source release...

[Pentium100]

It has so little memory because it was released, what, 3 years ago? My N93 is not much better, having ~20MB of free RAM after boot, but they probably could not fit more memory to it without making it too expensive. Still, I can use Google Maps, Garmin Mobile XT (with external bluetooth GPS receiver) and Opera Mobile 10.00 though not at the same time and Opera sometimes runs out of memory, especially on large sites.

But the phone is easy to use, has a large keypad and no touch screen (I read somewhere that most of the touch screen cell phones do not work with a stylus, only with a finger, and I do not want the screen to get dirty I also do not want to wash my hands every time I want to use the phone).

The phone is enough for me. If I needed to use other apps on a small device, I would probably get an Atom based netbook, like the Fujitsu U810 or U820. Much bigger (and higher resolution) screen, keyboard and x86.

Re:Still waiting for an open-source release...

[peppepz]

Did they fix the alarm clock in the Desire? My HTC Tattoo's alarm clock will just *not* go off at all if the phone is turned off. So I can't rely on it waking me up in the morning, because the phone might turn itself off during the night (e.g. because it's low on battery). Every phone I've ever used in my life does turn itself on to ring the alarm. Every phone *with a clock*, that is.

It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Yuioup]

The reason why it's ignored is because it's a pain in the ass to develop for. The options that you have is as follows:

* Download a very heavy C++ ide which was, till recently, locked down. You had to get a "professional" license if you wanted to do something useful. There is the "express" version but it was deliberately crippled. Oh yeah it only runs on Windows.

* If you wanted to distribute your app you had to get it signed. Ok sure yeah that sounds easy enough, but I can't tell you how often I get the "this app is untrusted" message.

* If you're a developer like me who is uncomfortable using a low level language you can go the Java route. Yeah. Write once, debug everywhere. It's a mess. I can't even get my midlet to get the IMEI code of the phone so I can use it for authentication.

* A beautiful middle ground is Python for S60. I tried to install it recently on my Nokia N73. A huge bag of fail.

* Yeah sure Symbian is open source. I want to download the source, build it and run it. Have you read the instructions to get it up and running under Linux? Let's just say that it goes way over my head. I heard on a podcast that Nokia uses some kind of circuit board made by Texas Instruments. Ok, so I need to go get some specialized device just to run the kernel? Please.

* Ooh ooh. There's also Qt Creator. Cool. Tried to install the demos. Didn't work.

* JavaFx. ... *sound of crickets*

So basically the choices you have as a developer are too many and every choice leads to a dead end.
It's really frustrating. That's why my next phone is the HTC desire. I can download and run the development environment on Linux. I can also be sure that my users will be able to run it without jumping through hoops. Trying to support an app running in Symbian is a nightmare.

Y

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you're just not that good...
Just sayin, they aren't dead ends for everyone.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Abcd1234]

If you're a developer like me who is uncomfortable using a low level language...

*sigh* Kids these days. This statement makes me a sad panda...

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[IamTheRealMike]

Yeah, that's a real killer. Samsungs Bada is the same - dev environment is Windows only. As soon as I saw that I knew it was dead in the water. I know a lot of really great, passionate software developers. The sort who obsess over the details of their software and make great things. None of them use Windows as their primary OS.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[stanlyb]

I am developer too, and in a matter of day, i succeeded to make a virtual machine, with all the C++ IDE, QT IDE, whatever IDE installed and configured, and to actually create the famous "HELLO WORLD" application, out of the box. As simple as that. And my current phone is Nokia too, and it is under Symbian, and it has OVI MAPS, which is FREE, i repeat, FREE, and it has Ovi Store with a tons of free applications and tones and wallpapers, and much much more. Oh, one last thing, my phone actually works, as is supposed to work every single decent phone, without having the funny ANTENNA problem, like some other funny "smart"-phones do.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[arf_barf]

Same experience here. Developing in Symbian C++ is very slow and tedious. It is almost as bad as developing for AVR with AVRStudio.

They also fumbled big time when it some to Python.I created a few apps with it but unfortunately the runtime has too many crashing bugs and it looks like they are not interested in fixing those.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[stanlyb]

Yep, i wonder, is he using Prolog? lol. These kids.....

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Anonymous Coward]

It is almost as bad as developing for AVR with AVRStudio.

Such as? I haven't encountered any big issues and I don't consider myself an expert by any measure.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Fraggy_the_undead]

It is almost as bad as developing for AVR with AVRStudio.

I'm not following that analogy. I think AVRStudio is just fine as far as IDEs for microcontrollers go.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[arf_barf]

It all depends on what you expect out of your tools and what you are used to. For me, the debugging capabilities just are substandard. I can't even remember when I used another IDE that did not have a debug callstack window. And in a way you are right, AVR Studio is similar to most other microcontroller IDEs, it's just that all the other IDEs are not that good either.

Carbide and TRK is similar in that aspect. It's very buggy and crash prone. In my opinion, with the computing power of today's workstations there is no reason "application" developers should have jump through hoops to develop simple apps.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever heard of Qt? Nokia is now moving their OS-es (Symbian, MeeGo) to Qt. So, you can use Qt for app development for Symbian and it provides an easier development experience. That also makes the underlying OS irrelevant as far as app development is concerned.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Yuioup]

Yeah. Well I started out on Amstrad Basic, moved on to Pascal, had a brief detour to Java and then came back to Delphi. Now I'm a C# developer. I've been using high-level programming languages my whole life. Unfortunately I didn't get exposed much to C/C++. Just happened that way. So to me C++ is a low-level programming language.

Y

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Abcd1234]

That *is* a solvable problem. In fact, I'd argue it's to your detriment that you haven't solved it already. Curiosity and self-drive are important in a software developer.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I don't think it's some horrible, fundamental detriment, and I'm definitely not trying to troll or flame you, here. It's just weird that, in all these years, you haven't picked up C/C++ just, you know, for the fun of it.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a C# developer. You sad little man.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[dunkelfalke]

Why? I develop embedded Linux applications for a living and did some x86 assembler 15 years ago but still I don't really like lower level languages.

Using lower level languages just forces you to reinvent the wheel again and again, just for the sake of it.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[MattRog]

To me, the biggest drawback is its popularity: the hardware is insanely fragmented. Want to write a Symbian app? Browse the device list http://www.symbian.org/devices

App developers have to support:
1) mix of touch and non touch screens
2) Insanely different display resolutions
3) Crazy list of hardware buttons (some have keyboards, some none, some have the 10 digit numeric, etc.)
4) Different form factors (clamshell, block, etc.)

Basically, writing a very good, elegant app that people WANT TO PAY FOR in Symbian is a disaster. Best to write for iOS and Android. Although both hardware platforms are fragmented they are not nearly as bad to deal with as Symbian. That, and there's a culture of "It's OK and normal to buy apps" (much more so on iOS than Android, of course) that doesn't appear to exist on other platforms (yet).

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Kumiorava]

Problem is that the article talks about "most used OS in the world". If we start limiting our selection to usable Symbian versions then we have to talk about "the least used OS in the world".

You cannot do it both ways, count all Symbian phones and versions out there and same time boast some irrelevantly small number of devices that supposedly makes development easy.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Abcd1234]

Why?

Because a broad skillset is important. You clearly have a broad skillset. The OP clearly doesn't.

Really, how is that event remotely controversial?

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Abcd1234]

And, as an aside, this:

Using lower level languages just forces you to reinvent the wheel again and again, just for the sake of it.

Is utterly false. Last I checked, C/C++ supports these fancy things called "libraries"...

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason why it's ignored is because it's a pain in the ass to develop for.

A friend who used to work with me for Symbian as a contract developer had a saying which summed all this up, which was 'Good for business!'. His business, of course.

Look at it this way: Now that the newer OS's available are even easier and friendlier to develop with, it has driven the market for software contractors down -- a race to the bottom.

In all seriousness, though, I think the tools were reasonably state of the art 10 years ago -- Symbian just didn't realize when it was time to throw it all away and start with something more modern, fresh and easy to develop for. A frog in slowly heated water...

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[JoeMerchant]

Hey Mr. Optomist, try the Nokia SDK 1.0 - it was taking forever to download, so I aborted it, but then I obviously don't want to write apps for Symbian as badly as you do. The blogs do point out that the SDK is still "rough around the edges" when compared with Qt Creator for desktop apps, but I think you might actually get "Hello World" running in the SDK.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

in a matter of day, i succeeded [...] to actually create the famous "HELLO WORLD" application

It takes an entire day to get a hello world running on symbian? Kinda hard to tell if you're arguing for or against symbian here...

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[sznupi]

Your slice of dev world might be not the rule. And BTW, bada OS will be big - Samsung seems to want to put it on the huge middle-segment they have. I wouldn't be too surprised if in two years or so bada will be fighting for top spot.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[sznupi]

Qt is really the only choice, the preferred way forward now (with bindings to almost whatever high-level language you want).
But since you had problems with Qt Creator...uhm, wow.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[sznupi]

Uhm, Qt is fine also for merely newish Symbian devices (last 2-3 years, basically); that's still much greater numbers than anything else.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[sznupi]

That's not really true. If you want to write something now (especially something which will be payed for), there's not much point in not using the Qt route (which gives access to all the newish devices anyway, last 2-3 years)

That means you target mostly just Qt. On very few resolutions (and you know, keyboard layouts are standardized; why candybar/slider/et al would matter much?)

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Yuioup]

I have picked it up. A few months ago. And then I realised: It's not for me. I'd rather be programming in C#, (Iron)Python or Scala.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[moonbender]

That's those places you go to to get books about C/C++ which help you reinvent the wheel, right?

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[peppepz]

* Download a very heavy C++ ide which was, till recently, locked down. You had to get a "professional" license if you wanted to do something useful. There is the "express" version but it was deliberately crippled. Oh yeah it only runs on Windows.

1) It's free now so what's the real problem? If you grieve because you had to pay in the past, then you should compare with how much the alternatives costed at the time.
2) It runs only on Windows? Well, everybody develops for the iPhone, whose SDK works only on OSX, which means even less machines than Windows. Anyway, the new Nokia-recommended SDKs for developing on Symbian work on Windows, Linux and OSX.
3) The "heavy C++ ide" is Eclipse, which was at the time one of the most used IDEs.
3) If you target Java, then you can use any IDE of your choice, you're not bound to use Nokia's heavy ide.

* If you wanted to distribute your app you had to get it signed.

Yeah, that's a pain, but every phone platform in the world won't accept unsigned apps without annoying the user to death. Some won't accept them at all. Still they seem quite successful.

* If you're a developer like me who is uncomfortable using a low level language you can go the Java route. Yeah. Write once, debug everywhere. It's a mess. I can't even get my midlet to get the IMEI code of the phone so I can use it for authentication.

Nokia did their job: they support the standard Sun APIs, and added specific APIs to access platform-specific features. Their phones will run unmodified JavaME JARs. What's specifically wrong with their Java implementation? They're even contributing a free virtual machine to the Symbian project. Btw I hear that System.getProperty("com.nokia.mid.imei"); will work on any S60 phone released after february 2007.

* A beautiful middle ground is Python for S60. I tried to install it recently on my Nokia N73. A huge bag of fail.

How exactly did it fail? It appears to work on my N73, and it's a 2006 phone. You have to sign the interpreter to access all phone features.

* Yeah sure Symbian is open source. I want to download the source, build it and run it. Have you read the instructions to get it up and running under Linux? Let's just say that it goes way over my head. I heard on a podcast that Nokia uses some kind of circuit board made by Texas Instruments. Ok, so I need to go get some specialized device just to run the kernel? Please.

You mean to be able to run it in an emulator? The emulator is currently windows-only, alas. Don't know if it works under wine.There's a project devoted to run Symbian on off-the-shelf hardware, too.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[jfanning]

* A beautiful middle ground is Python for S60. I tried to install it recently on my Nokia N73. A huge bag of fail.

So, let me get this right. You are complaining that you had problems developing for a phone that is nearly 1 year OLDER than the original iPhone?!?! The same iPhone that Apple dropped support for. And now you expect that Nokia still supports that 4 year old model?!

And you can't get QT Creator to run?!

From the sounds of it I wouldn't want you anywhere near a phone SDK.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Anonymous Coward]

Wayfinder developed for Symbian on a unix cluster. Not supported out of the box, but the components exist to roll your own Symbian build environemnt on unix. The same is done by some Symbian phone manufacturers as well.

It is mostly GCC, binutils and a lot of perl scripts, most of which you can live without anyway.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[jfanning]

So, is this like the calculation where Apple says that there are X million iPhones in existence and quietly ignores the fact that even AT&T says that only 75% of all activated iPhones are still active?

In any case the number of Symbian devices shipped is an several times greater than iPhone and Android every month. So even counting only the latest devices they are still far ahead.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Kumiorava]

Are you actually saying that I could make a Qt application and run it on any Symbian phone made in past 2-3 years? I don't think Qt is actually available with regularly pushed firmware upgrades, you most likely need to install some additional software to run it. That cannot be called "available" in this day and age.

I could be wrong, maybe firmware upgrades are delivered to Symbian devices with minimal user interaction and Qt is available after those upgrades.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[sznupi]

It's a lib... Can be packaged with application / fetched via Ovi / by Nokia smart installer if needed. And works from S60v3 FP1; very comfortably 3 years.

Why is it so hard to believe? That's why Nokia bought Trolltech.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[Kumiorava]

It's not hard to believe and I'm all for Meego based device being my next mobile phone. As a developer for mobile devices Nokia/Ovi/Symbian has just failed me at every turn whereas Apple/iTunes/iDevice has worked well.

I think we are looking the issue from different perspectives, your goal is to make things work. My goal is to sell the application and do it so with relative ease. Qt provides that ease but only for very limited device catalog, most likely from N8 onwards. Adding additional tasks for the user before application works or adding fragmented underperforming device catalog is just not going to work.

Re:It's a pain in the ass to develop for

[sznupi]

No, from S60v3 FP1 onwards... (and the "steps" are not for the user to make)

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[levell]

My Rogers iPhone works just fine for tethering. All I have to do is turn Internet Tethering on in the preferences, then plug it into the sync cable. Leopard pops up a dialog box which says something like "Hey! New Ethernet Interface found; would you like to use it?" -- click Ok, disable any other active network interface (or tweak your routing table) and bam: you're surfing on 3G.

Hmm... you made that sound fairly complicated. A cable? This is the 21st century! With my phone (an N900 but it works with many other phones including Symbian ones), I enable the internet sharing via a little app on my phone (Joikuspot) and then my laptop sees a new wireless access point.

Re:It's just not American

[IamTheRealMike]

As a Brit living in Switzerland, I disagree. Nobody cares about Symbian in Europe either.

no, the bog standard phones are S40

[Colin Smith]

Yes, Symbian is Nokia's (old, obsolete) OS for the mass-market phones that people buy when they just want a phone

Nope. That's the S40 range. Symbian is used on the smartphone range where ram,cpu,battery matter.

If you don't give a crap about battery life then there's the Linux systems which are coming in.
 

Re:no, the bog standard phones are S40

[Anonymous Coward]

Symbian development is hard and time consuming. It took me 2 hours give or take few minutes (including download of SDKs and its setup) to get my first Hello World running on Apple and Android. Yet I spent countless hours in attempts to getting the SDK up and running for Symbian.
- Firstly there is S40, S60 and countless other types of symbian devices.
- Then there are versions to each of S40, S60 etc.
- To further aggravate the development site from Nokia is a huge mess, link organization reminds you of your favorite pasta with articles cross referencing each other in such a manner that hierarchical progress cannot be made, you can't keep track of what you have read and what grounds you have to cover.

In the end I gave up. I had started as I loved a few Nokia phones, starting my love with the N95 and ending with N86, with a couple in handsets from Nokia in between.

Re:no, the bog standard phones are S40

[Steve Max]

I spent countless hours in attempts to getting the SDK up and running for Symbian.

My programming experience with Symbian has been very positive. I bypassed the whole SymbianC++ clusterfuck and went to Python. Can't use it for a high performance game, sure, but all you have to do to start up is installing the framework on your phone. Your first "hello world" can't take more than a few minutes after that.

- Firstly there is S40, S60 and countless other types of symbian devices.

Actually, there's only Symbian. S40 isn't a smartphone OS and isn't related to Symbian in any way; and UIQ, Series80 and Series90 are completely dead. Symbian now is the evolution of what was called S60.

- Then there are versions to each of S40, S60 etc.

If you want to target any device that is on the market now (and that has been on the market for the past 3 years), all you have is the touchscreen Symbian^1 and the non-touch S60v3. Develop for S60v3 (or S60 3rd edition) and any Symbian device can run your program; develop for Symbian^1 (also called S60v5, or S60 5th edition) and any touchscreen Symbian can run your program.

Re:no, the bog standard phones are S40

[sznupi]

S40 is not Symbian; makes one wonder who much you really tried developing for the latter.

And just use Qt... http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/symbian/ (also, the dev site was overhauled)

Re:no, the bog standard phones are S40

[sznupi]

Might be best now to just target Symbian Qt (with Nokia doing even new LGPL'd Qt Python bindings)

Re:no, the bog standard phones are S40

[jeff4747]

Develop for S60v3 (or S60 3rd edition)

Which one? S60 3rd, S60 3rd MR, S60 3rd FP1, S60 3rd FP2? S60 3rd WTF? Better pick the right one, 'cause they're all binary incompatible.

As you described in your post, C/C++ on Symbian is a massive clusterfuck of poorly-documented insanity. That is why it's ignored vs. iPhone and Android - Nokia made it very hard to develop for Symbian, and releasing it open-source doesn't erase that track record.

Symbian has been committing hara-kiri for ages

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for Symbian a few years back. The company has comprehensively screwed every big decision it has taken. In no particular order, these were:

- Treating the app developer as some annoyance to be fobbed off whenever possible. No idea what's it's like now, but back in the day, to develop an app for Symbian you have to splash out on a compiler which retailed at over $2k. And if god forbid you wanted to actually debug code running on your device (rather than the not particularly good emulator), well, then you need a HW debugger box which ran to another $2k

- Completely and comprehensively fragmenting the eco-system whenever the slightest opportunity to do so arose. Hence Symbian never really existed as a platform per se - it was all an obscure and vast ecosytem of devices each with its own configuration - hence the prolliferation of Series 40, 60, 70, UIQ etc etc.

- As an operating system, Symbian was passable, although it was written way before it's time. Hence it assumed the C++ compiler didn't know about exception handling and did everyting possible to conserve every last resource of the device at the expense of making developing for it an activity which took quite a long time to acquire a taste for.

- Quite a few bits of Symbian got taken over by the detritus that got ejected from Ericsson and Lucent when they collapsed. Hence you had all these big company people introducing processes used to launch space shuttles into space - exactly what you don't need if you're trying to innovate in one of the most rapidly changing industries.

Or at least that's my 2c.

Re:Symbian has been committing hara-kiri for ages

[IamTheRealMike]

This report does seem to agree with you. In particular I note things like this:

- In terms of debugging, ourbenchmarking shows that Android has the fastest debugging process, compared with iPhone, Symbian and Java ME. Debugging in Symbian takes up more than twice the time it takes on Android.

This isn't surprising. I am naturally a C++ developer - though I move between languages frequently, currently, I get paid to write mostly in C++. I've also done some J2ME in the past. So when I heard that Android was Java based, I was very skeptical. How could it compete with an interpreter for a language so bloated that simply representing the constant string "Hello World" took many multiples of the storage space C++ did. Then I sat down and wrote an Android app.

It's really easy to forget how much more productive a managed environment makes you, if you don't use one for a while. No memory corruptions. No leaks. The debugger always works. You can put together a simple crash reporter in 10 lines of code. Sure, the APIs can be a bit over-engineered, and Eclipse is a pig, but it still beats the crap out of C++ and a text editor.

Not to mention that many people don't even know C++ these days.

Re:Symbian has been committing hara-kiri for ages

[Anonymous Coward]

You claim:

I used to work for Symbian a few years back.

Did you? Are you really sure you're telling the truth? The reason why I am asking is because you then complain about

the prolliferation of Series 40, 60, 70, UIQ

Any serious Symbian developer would know that S40 isn't based on Symbian. S40 is a proprietary operating from Nokia for ultra-low-cost phones and it doesn't have anything to do with Symbian at all.

So either you didn't actually work for Symbian as you claim or you were a very ignorant developer.

Re:Symbian has been committing hara-kiri for ages

[sznupi]

That has all changed recently. It's all about Qt - one of the nicest things to develop in (probably the nicest for C++), freely available tools (also Ovi Store, basically, apart from small one-time payment meant to ward off random people probably), just this one environment.

Forcing some things was good when those device resources were much more scarce than now.

(also, S40?...)

Re:Symbian has been committing hara-kiri for ages

[sznupi]

Since there's a big chance you like Qt (hey, one of the cutest C++ environments around), perhaps Symbian is nice now after all?

Plus many bindings for those who don't know C++. And...Qt sort of gives some of the managed environment advantages.

Re:Symbian has been committing hara-kiri for ages

[peppepz]

I'm not saying what you say is not true, but you have to update your points to 2010.

- Treating the app developer as some annoyance to be fobbed off whenever possible. No idea what's it's like now, but back in the day, to develop an app for Symbian you have to splash out on a compiler which retailed at over $2k. And if god forbid you wanted to actually debug code running on your device (rather than the not particularly good emulator), well, then you need a HW debugger box which ran to another $2k

Yes, but the compiler has now been free for years, and in particular has been free since *before* the iPhone and Android existed. So if you really were interested in a fair comparison, you would compare Symbian with the alternatives of the time. Today Symbian is fully free, as in speech - you can hg clone the whole OS.

- Completely and comprehensively fragmenting the eco-system whenever the slightest opportunity to do so arose. Hence Symbian never really existed as a platform per se - it was all an obscure and vast ecosytem of devices each with its own configuration - hence the prolliferation of Series 40, 60, 70, UIQ etc etc.

Series 40 was never Symbian-based, so you're just trolling here. Series 70 never existed. Moreover, everything different than Series 60 went belly-up many years ago, long before there was any widespread interest in developing mobile applications. Also, all these points don't stand today, since Symbian is now a full platform with a single code repository and no "UIs" above it. See symbian.org.

I disagree when people say that Symbian is outdated or "catching up". Actually, it's the other OS who have been slowly catching up with Symbian.
- Symbian has had video calling support since 3G day 0 - iOS is getting it in 2010 and Android IIRC still hasn't it (you have to install 3rd party applications to do something similar).
- Symbian has had fully programmable bluetooth (and built-in file transfer support) since day 0 - iOS still hasn't it, and Android only got it in 2.1 version.
- Symbian has had full multitasking since day 0 - iOS is getting it in 2010, and half-baked.
- Symbian has had the ability to install applications in memory cards since day 0 - iOS doesn't support external media at all, and Android only got it in 2.2 version.
- Symbian has had a webkit-based web browser since before the iPhone came out.
- Symbian has had FM radio support since day 0 - iOS doesn't support it, and Android only got it in 2.2 version.
- Symbian has supported MMS, photo galleries, media- and playlist- editing, since forever - al things iOS and Android are only starting to get now (and whenever iOS catches up with something other platform have been able to for years, reviewers see a "revolution" instead).
- Symbian can be programmed in Java, Python, Flash, C++, Qt, WebRT - all officially supported runtimes with platform-specific APIs to access the phone hardware features. I think it's still the mobile platform which gives the developer the most choices.
- Except for the application signing hassle, Symbian is fully open: to sync, you can use SyncML; to send files, you use OBEX; and you can use them over almost any transport, be it TCP, Bluetooth, USB or IrDA. To load media on it, you can use MTP or just throw MP3s on the phone by using it as a USB MSD. Your phone hasn't got a GPS? You can use any bluetooth-based GPS receiver sending plain NMEA over a plain bluetooth serial link (this means you can recycle your receiver to use it with another open platform, for instance your netbook). Want to print some photos? You can just connect the phone to a PictBridge printer. You want to send a contact to somebody near you? You can send your phonebook entries as a vCard (including the contact photo) over Bluetooth (or SMS IIRC). See, there's almost never proprietary stuff involved.

The only field where Symbian has been lagging behind, is its UI. Which is very old-fashioned, but functional. Something they're definitely addressing in new releases. Also, to be honest, I think they need to drop the "phone memory" / "mass storage" distinction which I find very confusing, and overall improve the management of applications' life cycle.

Re:Symbian has been committing hara-kiri for ages

[jfanning]

And it seems that most of those things are solved now.

You can write normal C++ with QT using GCC and QT Creator and you can use the standard OpenC libraries and port just about any Linux/Unix app.

Nokia 5800

[Kenshin]

I recently picked-up a Nokia 5800 because it was a good price, I didn't need to get locked into a long contract (this is Canada), and I got an unusually cheap unlimited mobile data plan for it. (Money's tight.)

As a smart phone, yes, it's laughable how few apps are available for it, and I still have iPhone/Android envy... but it does the job well enough for me without breaking the bank.

Re:Nokia 5800

[sznupi]

"Few"? What are you missing? (well, specific games might be the only group; though Ovi Maps Racing is gorgeous - now, if it only had zombies... ;p )

Re:Nokia 5800

[Kenshin]

Specifically, a proper internet radio app. Even older Nokia phones have an internet radio tuner.

There's a few station-specific apps, but that's it.

Re:Nokia 5800

[sznupi]

Huh, weird, the nice Nokia Internet Radio is still not available... (despite being visible in a screenshot on v5 device on ith homepage?...)

Oh well, S60 Internet Radio, in a version for v5, not proper/good enough?

Re:Nokia 5800

[Kenshin]

Oh well, S60 Internet Radio, in a version for v5, not proper/good enough?

If it's not available for my phone, which it isn't (I've checked several times), I don't think it qualifies as "proper" or "good enough".

Re:Nokia 5800

[sznupi]

It very much is...since early 2009.

Personally...N97 ended my relationship with Nokia

[Skuld-Chan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU - is about as true as it gets. As someone who had the various n95 models reading about the n97 sounded like a dream come true - so I bought it the day it came out :/. Yes it can do everything the iPhone can do - or even Android (it even has features that Android doesn't have - like copying files over bluetooth) but they are all unusable or extremely clunky.

It had a webkit based browser, flashlite etc etc (so a good chunk of websites looked ok on it) - but was slow as hell (you often had to wait for the thing to download the entire site, and render it before even navigating around), had memory issues (128 megs o ram...) and loads of other issues documented in the video. When Ovi Maps came out for free on the device I couldn't even install it without clearing up space because it would only install to c:\ (yes for those who don't know - Symbian has dos style drive names) and not to the 32 gig partition it boasts (which asides from apps you download yourself only gets used for Music and pictures).

Nokia would have to give me a new phone before I'd own another - and that says a lot for someone who has a box under my bed full of these things.

Now days I use a Nexus One and it is literally 2-3 generations down the line from the BEST Nokia has to offer - the browser is also just as fast as the one on my PC's destkop. The only thing bad about it - it has a bit worse battery life than the N97, but that is honestly getting better with Froyo.

Re:It's just not American

[TheKidWho]

Yeah, that's why the iPhone has been selling so well in Europe and Japan.

No the real reason is that Nokia is a phone company. No one in tech news gives 2 shits about phone companies, they care about computer companies. Apple and Google, well they are computing companies, it's why they have actually made successful smartphone OSes and Nokia is lagging behind.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[TheKidWho]

I do that on my Palm Pre too. It eats the battery alive.

I get no respect

[Anonymous Coward]

Symbian is the Rodney Dangerfield of the mobile OS world?

It is all relative...

[jythie]

Symbian is the example of why I raise an eyebrow at people talking about how 'evil' Apple is because iPhones are locked down or have a restricted app store. Compared to desktops, sure, they are restrictive. Compared to cell phones before it? Amazingly open.

I can recall working on cell phone app kiosk a number of years back. The number of apps that the system carried could probably be measured in dozens or hundreds, and they required specialized developments that were in a single language with a single development environment... and do not even think about putting interpreters on there. It was more like developing for a console then anything else.

Re:It is all relative...

[shutdown -p now]

Symbian is the example of why I raise an eyebrow at people talking about how 'evil' Apple is because iPhones are locked down or have a restricted app store. Compared to desktops, sure, they are restrictive. Compared to cell phones before it? Amazingly open.

Symbian still doesn't (nor didn't) restrict users from installing third-party apps. And, of course, the "cell phones before it" weren't just Symbian - WinMo was also a very big player, and there was also PalmOS, all more open than iOS.

Re:It is all relative...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are living in self-deception. For instance, with S60v3 platform, Nokia didn't really control what kind of applications you could deploy; they just made the certification process to gain access to more "dangerous" features hobbyist-unfriendly. It's bad, but it's not actually closed in the sense that Apple store does it.

And don't get me started on the platform openness. Apple has total control of the platform and they're very vigorously trying to push out others' tools to create applications away - although Symbian applications have been normally developed by awful Nokia SDK, they haven't tried to do anything to prevent people tinkering their applications together with alternative compilers, or even building interpreters running on the platform (Python for S60 is/was official product of theirs).

But yes, Nokia isn't doing very well on smartphones at the moment, even if it's the biggest manufacturer of smartphones. Still, giving an idea that Apple would be more open, or could automatically cope better with installed base, target markets and length of market history Nokia has to consider is laughable, in my opinion.

Re:It is all relative...

[Skuld-Chan]

I'm no Symbian apologist (see my other posts on here) but it does let you run unsigned apps from any source, the OS itself is completely open - sounds like iPhones to me are far more locked down.

Re:It is all relative...

[Anonymous Coward]

And if I develop for Palm, or for WinMob, I get to do all my own marketing. And oh, on WinMob, I have to deal with all these different CPU types, and versions, echh. Symbian with its C++ compiler and all the different versions... why, it's almost as though all those companies did the best they could to PREVENT me from developing apps for them.

Yes, Symbian and WinMob are toast, no matter how popular they may appear today. It's developer mindshare that makes the real difference.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[ducomputergeek]

Um, you can run an SSH client just fine. There are several in the app store. I have a free one that does the job just fine. And I have used it to remote in and fix servers before. While I say it is not ideal because of the form factor, it is indeed better than nothing. What you can't do is run an SSH server on your phone without jailbreaking. Which, personally, my reaction is "why do you need to SSH into your phone?" Really.

Hobbyist?

[zolcos]

iPhone has really been successful at attracting just the hobbyist, or the one- or two-person company, or the person who just wants to go onto the web and start developing.'

This is despite the platform, not because of it. Of course, the "blingiest" offering will attract developers looking for a wide audience with money to blow. However, the iPhone isn't inherently more welcoming to small players -- one must buy Apple's blessing for the privelege of actually getting their own work on the device. (Legal) distribution is strictly controlled by Apple, allowing them to forcibly skim your profits. Doesn't sound all that indie-friendly. Symbian's main hurdle in being appreciated in itself is Nokia often using it on woefully under-powered hardware. The supposed hurdle in attracting developers is simply a matter of audience, in my opinion. Yes, platforms with centralized "app stores" are easier to commercialize, but those are targeted at users who enjoy their phone being a fun friendly device that eats their money as they use it. Such users, when faced with the choice of phone to buy, will get the more blingy phone in the first place. Symbian phones are an obvious plainer option, so is anyone who gets them really expecting a walled garden of $5 fart apps and Quake ports? Simply put, I own a late-model N95 and I've found free apps that do everything I need it to do. If I wanted entertainment from a phone I would have bought something more flashy.

Re:Hobbyist?

[aristotle-dude]

Yes, hobbyist. The price of entry is quite low at 99 dollars per year, Apple takes care of most of the marketing of the app and you get 70% of the price of the app instead of 30% like you would if dealing with the carriers directly.

Re:Personally...N97 ended my relationship with Nok

[Anonymous Coward]

Android has an app for BT file transfer, appropriately named "Bluetooth File Transfer", if I recall. =P

Symbian isn't talked about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Much like the opposite. It has been a running joke for past 5 years.

I'm serious. It's so filled with design errors, fragmentation in places where there shouldn't be any, buggy code, plain bloat and slowness, and other stupidities that I'm not sure if it's not funny or so not funny that it's funny again.

And none of that shit even comes close to the real original brain damage: Some dumb fucking ass thought that trap harnesses, leaves and other nonstandard madness would actually produce more reliable code than old school return -1; that everyone else was using.

So was BREW

[NicknamesAreStupid]

and Java ME. Just try to get an app certified, you may begin to appreciate iPhone or Android. BTW, phone companies want 70%, not 30%.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[raju1kabir]

Yeah, I do that on my Nokia E61i. It sucks the battery down to nothing in well under an hour. In order to really be useful, I still need a cable - the one going from the phone to the charger plugged into the wall.

Overall, the USB cable approach is a whole lot more flexible - works on buses, in taxis, all those places where I may need to get online for a while but don't have AC power.

Re:Personally...N97 ended my relationship with Nok

[stanlyb]

Comparing Apple with Pear....no pun intended, lol. Anyway, i also have OVI maps installed (on C:|), with all the maps downloaded on my 8GB microSD, and everything works pretty good and pretty fast. Oh, and i even have google maps, and 2-3 more maps/location related applications, and they work pretty damn good...

Re:It's just not American

[Palpatine_li]

No the real reason is that Nokia is a phone company.

remember TrollTech?

Jokia

[jjohnson]

I'm working on an independently funded project right now with a marketing exec, a UI guy, and a flash dev from Nokia. They're all good, smart people; they all refer to Nokia as "Jokia". The exec is running the project, and is continually astounded that the money she pays us consultants 1) actually gets her something, and 2) is paid out after delivering something on time.

Put Nokia in the same bin as Dell, where years of focus on cost-management has destroyed an innovative company that once led the market.

Re:It's just not American

[Anonymous Coward]

The upper level phones in japan allow you to make standard touchless debit transactions and have television tuners. I have yet to see an "iPhone wows Japanese consumers" article yet.

Sad state

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.osnews.com/story/23522/Symbian-Guru_Closing_Down

Re:It's just not American

[johncadengo]

Sad. As I post this comment there are 72 comments in this discussion.

A similar story on either the Android OS, or the iPhone OS, or the Android OS vs. the iPhone OS would have 720 comments by now.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of Bluetooth? It's specifically designed for this purpose (among others) in mind. And on non-operator-crippled phones, the Bluetooth tethering for packet data is basically always there unless the phone is an absolutely low-end device. No need to spend hundreds and hundreds of euros in unsubsidized price to get this feature that has been there for at least half a decade.

A mass-market future, but not an android killer

[majohns]

My understanding is that the S60 flavour, which was the one most people were getting excited about in the old days (pre-iphone, and def pre-android) is pretty much dead in the water going forward. Instead, Symbian's future lies in stripping back features - it's S40 that's going to hit the big time as a very simple, very cheap OS in the millions upon millions of phones that are being shipped into developing countries.

Re:A mass-market future, but not an android killer

[Steve Max]

S60 (in its 5th edition) was renamed Symbian^1. It's the point where current Symbian started. It's absolutely NOT dead at all. S40, on the other hand, isn't Symbian and isn't a smartphone OS, so I have no idea on why you mention it here.

Nokia currently sells, from cheaper to most expensive, lots of S40 dumbphones, lots of Symbian S60 smartphones and a tiny amount of Maemo-based smartphones. They are pushing Symbian S60 (now called just Symbian) down: they will have full smartphones being sold for the same price as others sell dumbphones with the same (or similar) hardware, in the mid-end. S40 dumbphones will be just the lowest end. So they will sell a few ultracheap S40 dumbphones, a crapload of Symbian smartphones, and a few Meego-based (Meego == Maemo + Intel's Moblin) smartphones.

People aren't seeing this. Nokia is increasing the smartphone market, so that people will be able to get good smartphones at $200 (before unsubsidies). These consumers will go up for their next phones. People really aren't seeing the situation, and seem to just believe the hype.

Re:A mass-market future, but not an android killer

[sznupi]

They are already at below $150, before subsidies of course, with Nokia 5230. Interestingly, even though it's S60v5/S^1 (well, in reality Nokia is also backporting many features of S^2 to that gen of hardware) touchscreen, it seems to be slightly less expensive than cheapest S60v3 devices; perhaps effects of large scale manufacturing simplified(?) by touchscreen?

There's still a lot of S30 BTW; and why exactly S40 is not a smartphone if the first iPhone was?... ;)

Re:A mass-market future, but not an android killer

[Steve Max]

The first iPhone wasn't a smartphone, at least until Apple developed a full native API. Yeah, the technical definition doesn't match the marketing definition; just like, by definition, my Mac is a Personal Computer (PC), but marketing makes "PC" and "Mac" sound like complete opposites.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[raju1kabir]

Ever heard of Bluetooth?

Still wears down both my phone's and my laptop's battery much faster than using the USB cable. It takes me about 5 seconds to find and connect the cable, and if I'm using the laptop, it's not like I'm running around anyway, so it's not particularly an inconvenience. Plus it was a whole lot easier to get Linux to work with the cable (worked immediately) than with Bluetooth (required installing additional packages and other puttery).

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[Pentium100]

With my my current (Nokia N93) and previous (Nokia 6310i) phones I did not even have to get permission from the carrier (I bought the phones separately, whithout contract). I just connect the phone to my laptop using Bluetooth and set up the dial-up connection (some bluetooth software manages that as well, but with standard Windows BT stack I needed to set it up manually).

If I can connect to the internet from my phone, then I can also do it from my laptop using the phone as a modem. If the connection is intended for web surfing on the phone then it may have a lot of ports blocked but otherwise the connection can be usable, since port 80 is still open.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[Pentium100]

Sorry, my previous phone was 6230i, not 6310i.

Um, no...

[IANAAC]

Well, technically Nokia says so, but what would they know about phones?

Um, no.

Someone from In-Stat and someone else from the 451 Group said that, not Nokia.

Go back and really read the article you referenced.

Re:It's just not American

[hyartep]

people in europe (non tech savvy) may not know "symbian" - they simply buy nokia. it's far more bigger buzzword.

Especially by developers...

[Ecuador]

The company I work for develops for many platforms and it was trying to have a line of Symbian apps as well. The effort required for porting from one OS version to the next was usualy not insignificant (ridiculous - most other OS's are more or less backwards compatible) and especially the jump from 8 to 9.x was so big that the boss just decided to give up on the platform (the non-existent app store or distribution system plus the fact we would have to keep working on separate versions to support pre-OS 9.x users were among the factors considered).

Re:Especially by developers...

[sznupi]

How many years ago was the 8->9 shift? And now one can simply target Qt.

Re:Especially by developers...

[Ecuador]

9.1 was released in 2005, however we did not try to port until there was a market, IIRC over a year later. Yeah, now you can target Qt, but, as they say, it is too little too late.
For the record, back at that time (2005) I bought a N770 for my company, as we usually evaluate all potentially interesting devices. I had told my boss that I could not believe Nokia keeps up with the Symbian madness and does not polish up Maemo and put it on a phone... It was so obvious that only Nokia could take 5 long years to figure it out...

Re:Especially by developers...

[peppepz]

1) You want to support phones that were manufactured in 2004? How many of them will be still functional in 2010?
2) The first App Store, Apple's, wasn't open until 2008 so how could its existence be a deciding factor in 2005?
3) Do all 2.1 Android apps work unmodified on 1.6 handsets? Will iOS 4 support 1st gen iPhones?

Re:Especially by developers...

[sznupi]

Considering they have still the largest, by far, chunk of smartphone market; and the biggest gains in numbers - it's most likely not too late at all (unless you mean your situation; which obviously wouldn't apply / Qt is a quite recent addition)

Plan with Maemo was quite clear for a long time - refine it in successive versions, with N900 being the last step before a device meant for mostly general consumption. If anything, battery technology allows something on such "full" OS just now (considering they usually try to not forget about battery life) - how large was the 770? How long it lasted?

BTW, a year before your 770 there was something with, supposedly, a precursor to Hildon UI - 7710. And generally quite "fully modern" touchscreen phone. Symbian, though... ;)

Re:Especially by developers...

[Ecuador]

1) In 2006 we wanted to support phones that were manufactured in 2004-2005. Actually there were official statistics updated monthly about the Symbian OS penetration and 3+ year old symbian devices at the time amounted to around 30% of the user base, more than the 9.x devices IIRC.
2) I am not talking about just an app store. Any distribution system would help. We had an equivalent app for BREW devices and it was distributed by carriers. Note that if it was *just* this problem it would not amount to much.
3) I am talking mainly about backward compatibility on OS level. Do android 1.6 apps work on android 2.1 (as-is or with minimal work)? I haven't worked on android but I suspect the answer is yes. Also, is it possible to have a single app run on android 1.6 - 2.1? I suspect the answer is also yes?
I don't get it about the iOS on old iphones comment. I never expected Symbian 9.x to run on ancient devices, this is all about app compatibility.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[Reapman]

Well.. I'm on the same network as the GP (ok FIdo, but it's essentially Rogers for this discussion) and I use the bluetooth wireless option as well.. no cable required, can leave the phone in my pocket in fact when i fire my laptop up at a cafe. It's not a WAP (jailbreak apps do exist for that) but the iPhone is capable. The cable would probably result in a bit faster connection compared to BT.

with that said i can't wait to drop the iPhone 3G for a decent Android in a year or so...

Re:It's just not American

[Hurricane78]

Bullshit. Nokia smart phones are so common here in Germany and around, that you can mostly just assume others have a Nokia S60 or S40. Usually you’re right.
So actually, there is no real point to developing for anything else than Symbian.
I mean Apple just kills your app off because you got a ooohhh-soo-evil “forbidden” word in it. (Caused by the mental illness that is religion, which creates mind distortions like these). [And good games tend to surpass such boundaries almost by definition.]
And Windows Mobile? Just as much a lock-in OS. And a crappy one too. Since it has no Java, it’s a goner anyway. (Just like iOS.)
This leaves Linux-like OSes like MeeGo and Android as alternatives. And they are way too tiny to be worth it.

Ok, actually if performance is not an issue, you just develop for Java MIDP2+ and be done with 99% of the target market.

Oh, and I’m an actual phone software developer.

P.S.: While Symbian itself is pretty shitty to program in, you gotta love the tons of APIs they have. It’s really already a full grown gaming station that just has way too little power... yet.

Yes, true... but little app traction

[SuperKendall]

Ehem, Blackberry?

Blackberry is indeed still the predominant enterprise mobile OS. But it's just not having much traction in the application space - and if you'd every looked at the API, you'd know why. It also has the same problem of a very old infrastructure, but they've been able to survive through extreme optimization of one task - email.

Application space in the enterprise will be taken up by iPhone/Android standalone devices - like the tablet form factor, or the Touch.

Re:It's just not American

[aristotle-dude]

The upper level phones in japan allow you to make standard touchless debit transactions and have television tuners. I have yet to see an "iPhone wows Japanese consumers" article yet.

You mean the Mobile Suica system? You can pick up a Suica/Passmo card at a subway station ticket machine, buy a case from Softbank with a slit for placing the card in and voila, your phone case pays for your transit trips and convenience store purchases. I did exactly that with my 3GS when I was in Tokyo during golden week a couple months ago.

Low level?

[SuperKendall]

C++ is actually a pretty high level abstraction, there's not much low about it apart from easily using C when you need to. But that's optional... (unless the API is all C, but I thought it was C++).

Yes, the biggest is a goner

[Anonymous Coward]

The phone OS with the biggest worldwide marketshare is a goner, because the phone is a goner. Few people want a phone; they want a personal computer that fits in their pocket and happens to be able to do "phone stuff."

Saying Symbian is the King of Phones, while possibly true, is like saying my rawhide whip business is the King of Buggy Whips. I could have 100% marketshare but you'd be a damn fool to invest in me, unless I tell you about how I'm getting into the chewy doggie-treat business.

The answer to "who makes the most typewriters?" isn't Wang or IBM. The correct and most accurate and enlightened answer is "who cares?"

Re:Yes, the biggest is a goner

[sznupi]

Call me baffled - first you write that "the phone is a goner", that people "want a personal computer that fits in their pocket and happens to be able to do phone stuff"...and then you seem to see it as a thing working against Symbian, which gives them just that?

Re:Yes, the biggest is a goner

[upside]

I think there's a strong perception that Symbian isn't used in smartphones. Ironic.

Re:Yes, the biggest is a goner

[dzfoo]

No, there's a perception that Symbian is used only in smartphones that do not do any of the latest smartphone-ish stuff. That is, Symbian smartphones are for those who really do not want a smartphone.

          -dZ.

Re:Yes, the biggest is a goner

[Eunuchswear]

No, there's a perception that Symbian is used only in smartphones that do not do any of the latest smartphone-ish stuff.

So, pray tell, what exactly is the "latest smartphone-ish stuff"?

Nope

[Weezul]

MeeoGo will only become the OS for Nokia's flagship smart phones. In fact, Symbian's market share will only increase over the next 5 years as Nokia roles out smaller mid- to low-level smartphones. You'll never see Apple selling an iPhone for only $25. Android has no intrinsic distaste for inexpensive phones, but all that java code eats cpu cycles.

All your Nokia and Symbian fan boys are also major fans of raw hardware specs, which means they're annoyed at choosing between owning the beefy power phone funning unfamiliar MeeGo, or the slimmer cuter more generic phone running Symbian. In fact, your most die hard Symbian fanatics will likely benefit by gaining phones analogous to an N95 with far greater batter life, but many won't like not owning the flagship device.

Symbian easily goes toe-to-toe with iPhoneOS and Android functionality and usability wise, but iPhoneOS and Android offer more friendly and familiar development environments. MeeGo arguably offers an even better development environment than iPhoneOS and Android, given you may leverage existing OSS, but that's only super appealing for Linux heads who know the available OSS.

We'll likely see some new applications developed for Maemo/MeeGo which then get ported to Symbian & Qt, which gives developers a more gentile route to Nokia's enormous market share. If you however develop an app worth selling for Maemo/MeeGo, then two days later some kid will develop a fully open source version, destroying your market share. Nice little Catch 22, eh?

Btw, dialer, conversations, and contacts integration is the killer feature of Maemo/MeeGo that lacking in other platforms. Phone, Skype, SIP, etc. calls are all handled exactly alike. I'd hope that native srtp/zrtp integration isn't far behind. Afaik, all IM protocols are supported using various extensions.

Re:It's just not American

[IICV]

Yeah, Nokia just makes the world's most popular phone, that doesn't mean they know anything about smartphone OS design.

It does, however, mean they know a whole hell of a lot about phone design, which seems to be the one major complaint most people have about smartphones - they may be extra smart, but they're light on the "phone" (just see Apple's iPhone 4 antenna thing!). If Nokia can come up with a smartphone that's also a really really good phone, then there might be something worthwhile there - especially if they manage to introduce it at a price point that world markets can appreciate. After all, there's up-and-coming businessmen in poorer countries who may not be able to afford a modern smartphone, but would still like to check their e-mail and do other business-y stuff. If Nokia can get in on that like they got in on the spread of cellphones with the 1100, they're pretty golden.

Who marketed the name Symbian? Nokia?

[cellurl]

Symbian is a horrible name. 'like Ubuntu, makes my skin crawl just saying them, much less developing for them.

Android is a nice name, hip name, still sounds good to say it. iPhone word is fast becoming blase...

jp

Re:Who marketed the name Symbian? Nokia?

[sznupi]

It's really mostly just "Nokia" anyway. Or S60, IIRC what is used on the box, etc. - so there's a good chance it might be S^3 or S^4, I guess (and Symbian was around for quite a while before Nokia had direct control over it)

Re:Who marketed the name Symbian? Nokia?

[krischik]

Depends. See the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

Of corse both Symbian Ltd and Symbian Foundation are mostly owed by Nokia.

Re:Who marketed the name Symbian? Nokia?

[Plug]

Symbian Ltd. was folded into Nokia. Some of its assets, staff, and copyright, were transferred to the Symbian Foundation, a newly created and independent company, by Nokia.

(A marketing company came up with the name.)

Re:Who marketed the name Symbian? Nokia?

[krischik]

(A marketing company came up with the name.)

I did not know that but somehow I am not surprised either.

Android may be Wild West but iPhone

[Ranger]

is anything but. It's a tightly controlled platform and if Apple doesn't like the cut of your jeans, you're out.

20,000 fart applications?

[Colin Smith]

As a smart phone, yes, it's laughable how few apps are available for it

Apple claim something like 20k applications. Think about that for a second, and then... What exactly could they all possibly be?

So you've got what? 500 different fart applications? Or what? No really. How many different word processors (for example) can survive in a market? MS Word. Open Office, which is free, and then?

Clearly if you want your fart application in a specific shade of brown rather than green, Apple have got you covered. For the slightly less discerning among us, maybe fewer/better apps isn't so bad.
 

Re:20,000 fart applications?

[dropadrop]

As a smart phone, yes, it's laughable how few apps are available for it

Apple claim something like 20k applications. Think about that for a second, and then... What exactly could they all possibly be?

So you've got what? 500 different fart applications? Or what? No really. How many different word processors (for example) can survive in a market? MS Word. Open Office, which is free, and then?

Clearly if you want your fart application in a specific shade of brown rather than green, Apple have got you covered. For the slightly less discerning among us, maybe fewer/better apps isn't so bad.

Over 200000 apps actually. The app store works pretty well, it seems fairly easy to find whatever you are looking for. Sure there are a lot of options, just pick the one that has a lot of good ratings. I don't know where this fart app comment comes from since I keep hearing it, but somehow it always takes the credibility away from any Apple appstore critic. There are plenty of good apps, and they cost surprisingly little (the most I payed for an app was about around 8€ (don't remember exactly) and it felt like a lot (Grand Theft Auto). The game is very nice, and works smoothly on my phone.

Re:20,000 fart applications?

[aristotle-dude]

Why don't you go search instead of spreading FUD with hyperbole? There many categories of apps and the Apple App store has one of the largest collection of modern games.

Re:20,000 fart applications?

[fm6]

Sure, most iPhone and Android apps are useless and/or redundant. I can personally confirm this for Android, and there's no reason to assume iPhone is any different. But you're taking exactly the wrong lesson from this.

Ask yourself why thousands of losers bother to write and publish "fart" apps for these platforms. Because it's easy to do, that's why. And that easiness means there are a lot of gems amongst all those turds.

Let's see. (Pulls out HTC Hero.) I've got Evernote (notebook, automatically syncs to web and PC versions) MortPlay (the only MP3 player that suits my particular needs, had to sort through a couple dozen others to find it), StreamItRadio (MP3 streams, same comments), Weather Channel (automatically updates itself based on my current location) and Yelp (very handy when I'm in a strange neighborhood and feeling peckish). Not a lot of apps, but I haven't seen comparable apps on other platforms. Don't know about Symbian, but I'll bet not.

Oh yeah, and there are direct links on my Android desktop for Google Reader (never know when you might have to wait in a really long line) and for the web pages for the BART stations I use the most. Those last ones get updated once a minute with actual (not scheduled) train arrivals, which minimizes my stand-around time.

None of these features are life-changing, but I find them worth having. And I don't see anybody rushing to write similar apps on Symbian.

Re:20,000 fart applications?

[jfanning]

Come on, you can't be serious. The largest single category in the "apps" store are books! Just how many versions of "Jane Eyre" do you need?

The number of "apps" that are quoted by Apple are a complete joke.

Re:20,000 fart applications?

[Colin Smith]

largest collection of modern games.

Right... As I said, Apple is clearly number 1 in fart apps.

Oh wait, they have another worthy application making up the numbers... iFreshener.
http://itunes.apple.com/app/ifreshener-shake-spray-virtual/id303536257?mt=8

Or the angry cat.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/angrycat-free-the-angry-cat/id315640417?mt=8

Class.
 

Re:20,000 fart applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got Evernote (notebook, automatically syncs to web and PC versions)

I was around at Evernote when we considered making a port to other platforms than Windows. Symbian was considered briefly, but rejected because it basically required a rewrite of our entire code base. We had enough trouble with Palm OS, which was the once-great platform of the day. After I left, it took them little time to release applications for iPhone and, recently, Android.

Yeah, but that's changing

[pavon]

All of Nokia's N-series smartphones will run MeeGo not Symbian after the N8.

Re:Yeah, but that's changing

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia doesn't seem to agree with you... http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/07/02/the-fightback-starts-now/

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of Bluetooth? It's specifically designed for this purpose (among others) in mind. And on non-operator-crippled phones, the Bluetooth tethering for packet data is basically always there unless the phone is an absolutely low-end device. No need to spend hundreds and hundreds of euros in unsubsidized price to get this feature that has been there for at least half a decade.

Yah, that works, but you're burning the candle at both ends. Plugging the phone into a laptop with USB simultaneously uses the lower power wired data connection and powers the phone off the bigger laptop battery. WTF would you do it the other way unless you simply did not have a USB cable?

iPhone attracts big and small developers

[Phat_Tony]

iPhone has really been successful at attracting just the hobbyist, or the one- or two-person company, or the person who just wants to go onto the web and start developing.

Right, hobbyists like Microsoft, IBM, Accenture, Oracle, Computer Sciences Corporation, SAP, Yahoo!, Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, Take-Two...

iPhone has really been successful at attracting developers of all sizes including the hobbyist, or the one- or two-person company, or the person who just wants to go onto the web and start developing.

There, I fixed that for you.

Please rename the product

[houghi]

I always think it says sybian and am disappointed each time.

Re:Personally...N97 ended my relationship with Nok

[angus77]

(it even has features that Android doesn't have - like copying files over bluetooth)

I can (and do) copy files over bluetooth with my HTC Desire. Is this not common on other Android phones?

If you've ever developed for Symbian...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've ever developed for both Symbian and iOS or Android or whatever, you'll *know* why not many developers are excited about Symbian... When the iPhone entered the game with an easy-to-use developer toolchain (Xcode) Symbian's dev environment was still in the dark ages. It still is, in a number of respects. Not to mention all the weird legacy things in the Symbian OS... Anyone here remember Epoc? That's Symbian's direct ancestor.

The C++ variant is an absolute mess too

[bigtrike]

Until recently you had to jump through hoops for all object construction and memory allocation. It was very difficult to write or use even basic algorithms that are compatible with both Symbian and anything else. See http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Two-phase_construction If you don't do it quite right, your code will probably still work in their "simulator," but will fail on the actual device. Remote debugging the simulator used to require two physical serial ports looped to each other via null modem cable.

Personally, I'd rather develop for any other platform.

Re:The C++ variant is an absolute mess too

[sznupi]

And Qt, which you can use already, is one of the nicest C++ variants imaginable.

Anyway, the "hoops" seemed to be mostly about insisting (forcing...) on "code with discipline" for mobile platform. To use less power and stay stable. It's a platform which can run "user OS" and telephony stack on the same core (hence making large number of Symbian devices possible in the first place; and why they will be fine for mainstream), it couldn't have been much different.
Look how large part of Google I/O Android sessions is about power management, asynchronous programming and performance. How new versions try hard to improve on those areas. Symbian had it decently covered for some time now, and using much older tech.

Re:Personally...N97 ended my relationship with Nok

[Skuld-Chan]

If you search Google for nokia ovi maps c:\ installation problem you'll literally find hundreds of posts on official and non-official boards of people complaining about it. Its hardly a fringe issue. Maybe its something they fixed on the N97 mini? It did have more core memory...

Also Nokia themselves sent out a utility to help free up space on c:\ - I think its fair to say they admit there is a problem.

Re:It's just not American

[an unsound mind]

As someone from elsewhere in Europe... this is not the case everywhere in Europe.

Re:Personally...N97 ended my relationship with Nok

[Skuld-Chan]

I guess so - my Nexus One won't let me do this :/ and I'm running Froyo 2.2.

Symbian sure try hard to prevent you developing!

[pslam]

It's been a year or so since I last used Symbian (thank science) but it struck me at the time just how much crap they put in the way of you actually developing apps.

Take this quite normal scenario: You need an extra engineer on cell phone app development. You need them to install an environment and be productive as soon as possible. Here's what happens with Android:

• Google search for 'android sdk'. Download SDK after 1-2 click-thrus. A few minutes to download and install
• Run emulator (nod in appreciation how easy that was).
• Read instructions for favorite editor plugin (e.g eclipse), setup. Compile and run 'Hello World' app.
• 'Enable untrusted sources' on real device, couple of setup things, running Hello World on cell phone
• Be productive within 1 hour.

iPhone is much the same plus some sign-ups:

• Google search / go to apple.com, search. Get a developer account (quick verification). A few minutes to download and install
• Run Xcode. Use app generator tool, run in emulator (nod).
• Get signing key for real device (automated, few minutes). Select iPhone target, recompile, run with device connected, works on cell phone
• Be productive within 1 hour.

Here's Symbian/Nokia's idea of Getting Started:

• Google search for 'symbian sdk'. Ok there's like 3 versions depending on which device, all incompatible.
• Download appropriate version. 3 times: x86 simulator, arm emulator, arm target. Dick around with moving them into fixed locations on C:
• Download 10 patches for various compiler bugs. Manually move patches in place and run scripts.
• Find the bundled IDE is unusably shit and revert to your own editor. Dick around with poorly documented build systems and eventually get something compiled.
• Find you can't even run the simulator without a signing key (WTF). Apply for a developer key. Find that this is a Web 0.5 experience and imagine some Norwegian dude is sorting these by hand.
• HOURS LATER you finally run the simulator and find it doesn't work because of an obscure missing CFLAG.
• You then try it on a real Symbian device. Oh, you need another signing key. Some hours (took me 24 hours) later you have that.
• Swear in frustration as the build system fails to switch simply to ARM target on real device.
• Be productive within 1 week.

Pardon my English, but that's not how to make a fucking SDK. I will refrain from talking about the daily experience of coding for Symbian, because I may start using a lot of profanity.

That only means more Symbian

[sznupi]

Look at the shootout of platforms Nokia uses - there's still quite sizable number of S30 mobile phones (1200, 1208, 1202, 1280, 1616, C1-00...), 20% is Symbian, MeeGo a very small part; but majority is S40, the most popular mobile platform on the planet.

Nokia "replacing" Symbian with MeeGo on the high-end is a typical modus operandi for Nokia; time goes by, and what was once available only to very small group of people (S30 was once hot) can now be had by greater and greater numbers of them (1280 costs 20 Euro, without contract). Now it's time for Symbian on the mainstream (5230 is less than 120 Euro, also without contract of course)

And the beauty of it - both MeeGo and Symbian will soon have Qt as the main, underlying API. Expect Symbian to be very big throughout this decade; and also next one, when it might be good for the range where S30 is now, I guess. With shifts to MeeGo very smooth for people anyway.

PS. Another somehow forgotten OS which will be big is bada OS. Samsung plans to put it on very large number of devices, and considering they are the #2 manufacturer behind Nokia only...

As an American who just visited France

[DrDitto]

All I can say is Wow...job well done Apple. The iPhone was definitely the most ubiquitous smartphone I spotted throughout France.

So what if Ovi maps is free?

[SuperKendall]

Android has a fully featured Google Maps navigator, and you can use Google Maps on the iPhone (though not with voice navigation).

But there are also other free solutions, Waze for example runs on iPhone/Android/WinMo.

And for anyone wanting offline maps that don't require a constant working network connection - I think there are about five or so options currently on the App Store.

I mean, it's nice and all that Nokia is giving away navigation for free but that does not replace the ability to have many different kinds of navigation applications.

Re:So what if Ovi maps is free?

[sznupi]

Bang for the buck is a powerful thing. With offline capability not being just some bonus.

Re:So what if Ovi maps is free?

[natehoy]

Offline capability is HUGE. Not only because you can lose signal, but because waiting for maps to load is just horribly inconvenient and slow over a cell connection compared to reading it off a local chip (not to mention limits or overage charges your data plan may have).

Having that, plus voice guidance, all included in the 5800 (a $270 unlocked handset) is very nice indeed.

Add in a 5 megapixel camera and WiFi (no need for a carrier data plan!) and as far as we're concerned Nokia has made a serious winner of a phone for our purposes.

Re:So what if Ovi maps is free?

[sznupi]

It goes even further - after all, one of the most useful scenarios / types of places for GPS is also precisely where a reliable data connection might be a problem. (plus, are others trying to put unnecessary strain on data networks?)

5230 is probably even nicer BTW - basically the same capabilities, less than $150 unlocked. That's not a lot more expensive than basic dedicated GPS units, but with easy & free map updates and the possibility of additional "online" features (such as traffic congestion info). Oh, and phone, media player, et al thrown in ;p
Yes, it lacks WiFi - not that important to me in a mobile phone, and probably for a lot of people; plus only 2mp basic shooter...but it does have surprisingly good video recording (the more useful, IMHO, thing for "when something suddenly happens"; also, such phone + basic digicam still probably gives better results for comparable price, I have some sack with me most of the time anyway, and digicam can be nicer when its upgrades don't have to follow the phone ones)

Re:So what if Ovi maps is free?

[natehoy]

We looked seriously at the 5230, but my wife wanted to consolidate her phone and her iPod Touch into a single device that could do both, so the 5800 (at $100 more) was the least expensive unlocked unit I could find with WiFi.

The GPS was actually a happy bonus, but man oh man what a bonus it was! We don't use my Blackberry for street navigation any more because turn-by-turn voice would cost an extra $10 a month and I don't think my company would spring for it.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually have an iPhone, which I doubt, search the app store for SSH clients. There are dozens.

Name one Symbian phone sold in America...

[Miamicanes]

OK, here's the two hundred ton elephant wearing a pink tutu dancing between Lady Gaga and Madonna that (surprisingly) nobody seems to have mentioned yet: for all intents and purposes, Symbian doesn't exist in the United States. As far as I know, you can't go to a store operated by Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile and buy a brand new phone subsidized by the carrier that runs Symbian (maybe, MAYBE Nextel might have one imported from Japan, but I wouldn't count on it).

Actually, it goes deeper than that -- as far as I know, you can't even buy a phone running Symbian, period, that's capable of 3G data on any network in the United States (with the *possible* exception of an imported Japanese phone that by some miracle of God might work on Nextel). For whatever reason, Symbian is almost a synonym for "Expensive GSM phone that nevertheless can't do EDGE, and is capable of 3G UMTS only at 1900/2100MHz". Thus, no sane American likely to be remotely interested in a phone running Symbian is going to go out and spend $500 or more to buy an unlocked phone that's basically a GPRS paperweight capable of making voice calls in a pinch.

"Invisible and Irrelevant in America" == "Invisible and Irrelevant to American Journalists" (who happen to generate most of the English-language content that gets read worldwide, and highly influence the rest of it). Thus, daily headlines about iPhone and Android. Occasional mentions of Palm. <tongue location="cheek">Symbian? Is that, like, the new name for Palm or Windows Mobile or something? </tongue>

The fact that Symbian started enforcing code-signing a couple of years ago (effectively shutting out casual developers who've always been welcomed with open arms by Android and pre-Kin/7 Microsoft) certainly hasn't helped, either... the moment they did that, they effectively wrote off a big chunk of their most influential and outspoken EUROPEAN former users, too.

Re:Name one Symbian phone sold in America...

[vanza]

No trying to detract from your greater point, which I agree with, but...

T-Mobile sells the Nokia Nuron, which runs Symbian S60 and has 3G, subsidized.

You can also get phones directly from Nokia (or from non-carrier stores - even Fry's has them) that work on AT&T's 3G, and a couple that even work on T-Mobile's 3G.

None of them are advertised as "Symbian phones", though, just as "smartphones".

Re:Name one Symbian phone sold in America...

[peppepz]

Yes, but the Nuron is a crippled version of the 5230, which in its turn is already a cheap phone. If this is the best Nokia offers in the USA, then I begin to understand why Nokia has such a thin market share there.

Re:Name one Symbian phone sold in America...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear - maybe a little research is called for first before posting the above rubbish. ATT for one have offered several S60 devices e.g the E62 and E71x and I believe TMobile also offer the E73. These devices are able to quite happily use the US carriers frequencies for 3G/HSPA and degrade to GPRS/EDGE when out of UMTS coverage.

Nextel by the way was an iDEN carrier not GSM so it truly would be a miracle if a GSM device worked on a non GSM network, AFAIK the only iDEN carrier in Japan was NEXNET with unsurprisingly no Symbian devices ever shipped, infact I'm not aware on any Symbian based iDEN device.

Re:Name one Symbian phone sold in America...

[r_jensen11]

All of my Nokia's run Symbian, and I've lived in the US my whole life. The first came from a service provider that VZW bought out in the early 2000's. The 2nd and 3rd came from T-Mobile shops. The The last one I purchased (5800) came via Dell.

Re:Name one Symbian phone sold in America...

[Anonymous Coward]

--Symbian doesn't exist in the United States. As far as I know, you can't go to a store operated by Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile and buy a brand new phone subsidized by the carrier that runs Symbian (maybe, MAYBE Nextel might have one imported from Japan, but I wouldn't count on it).

Symbian exists and you wouldn't even known it.

Go to T-Mobile...pick up their Nokia 5230 Nuron. Note - I think it's a free phone now, was $60 originally. Note - T-Mobile does NOT consider it a smart phone - so you don't get hit with the $30 charge for Web Access (only $10).

5230 is a Symbian S60. Picked it up when I couldn't justify an Android Phone.

Download the SDK. It's not as easy as developing for the Android (got that working in the emulator in less than an hour), but there is something there.

Re:Name one Symbian phone sold in America...

[Anonymous Coward]

> As far as I know, you can't go to a store operated by Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile and buy a brand new phone subsidized by the carrier that runs Symbian

You don't know?

T-Mobile Nuron:
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/phones/Cell-Phone-Detail.aspx?cell-phone=Nokia-5230-Nuron
T-Mobile E73:
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/phones/Cell-Phone-Detail.aspx?cell-phone=Nokia-E73
AT&T E71x
http://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/NokiaE71x/index.jsp

Re:Name one Symbian phone sold in America...

[natehoy]

Actually, it goes deeper than that -- as far as I know, you can't even buy a phone running Symbian, period, that's capable of 3G data on any network in the United States (with the *possible* exception of an imported Japanese phone that by some miracle of God might work on Nextel). For whatever reason, Symbian is almost a synonym for "Expensive GSM phone that nevertheless can't do EDGE, and is capable of 3G UMTS only at 1900/2100MHz". Thus, no sane American likely to be remotely interested in a phone running Symbian is going to go out and spend $500 or more to buy an unlocked phone that's basically a GPRS paperweight capable of making voice calls in a pinch.

Wow. Just. Wow.

I'm sorry, I honestly don't mean offense, but I'd like to point out that in less than half the time it took to type all that you could have gone to Amazon and typed "Nokia unlocked 3G" and extended "as far as I know" into actual accurate territory. Nokia's had 3G capable phones in the US for some time now. They work great. I own one.

Cheapest result:

Nokia 5230, $183 UNLOCKED: http://www.amazon.com/Nokia-Unlocked-Touchscreen-Camera-microSD/dp/B003DZERC6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=wireless&qid=1278529745&sr=1-1

There's a whole page of them, most under $500, many under $200, and many of them support US 3G. You have to shop carefully if you want T-Mobile, AT&T, and/or European (some of them support only one, some support two, only a few support all three).

I have the $270 Nokia 5800 and I can assure you it works just fine on 3G in the United States on the AT&T network. I don't have a data plan and forgot to delete the carrier connection, and it clearly showed a "3G" indicator (and burned through a decent bit of data in the few seconds before I realized it was using Carrier Internet and not my WiFi connection, thereby incurring a data charge).

I'll grant that Nokia doesn't appear to make any Verizon-compatible phones any more, and that none of the carriers seem to carry Symbian phones in their stores based on a brief web search.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[ceoyoyo]

It works just as well with Bluetooth. And doesn't suck the battery dry as fast as wifi. And you don't need a third party app - it's built in.

The reason?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android is the future. Symbian is the past.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[nurb432]

Right, My other AT&T phone did just that, even via bluetooth. But for some stupid reason they just wont allow it on an iPhone unless you pay even more.

But of course there is your answer, so they can bilk us for more $.

Re:Personally...N97 ended my relationship with Nok

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I have to admit I'm the same. While I can goof off at lunchtime and browse websites my company's net nazies filter out, it really wasn't worth the $400 I paid for it. Random crashes, UI locks, C:\ filling up, lack of apps that aren't just a delivery device for the mobile phone advertising companies. The OVI software suite is some of the worst software I've ever seen. Music playlist creation is a joke.

One thing that may keep it alive a bit longer is that the latest Flash 10.1 (or whatever it is) is apparently going to appear on the Symbian OS, so I may delay getting an iPhone or Android device a bit longer.

But I will not be buying another Nokia, no matter what OS they put in the device. This has been a very disappointing experience.

Re:iPhone (and Andrhttp://mobioid) have both kinds

[JoeMerchant]

a reasonably large base of professional Mac developers around before the iPhone

Yeah, in absolute terms, if you put them all in a stadium, it would look like a reasonably large group of people. In percentage terms, I don't think Mac developers even represented 1% of the developer community, before iPhone came out.

Re:Symbian sure try hard to prevent you developing

[ccr]

I remember the "process", or rather the pain, of using Symbian SDK being on about the same level nearly 9 years ago. Which is exactly why Symbian is shit, and how Nokia in general sucks -- they've had a headstart of 10 years to make Symbian development experience better, but it's still the same piece of pigeon poop it was nearly decade ago.

Google and Apple have done better in way lesser time, and seemingly had the sense to avoid at least some of Symbian's mistakes (albeit they seem to have problems of their own, of course), but Nokia hasn't had the sensibility to improve their primary platform. I guess they finally did admit Symbian's inferiority by the partial move to Maemo/Meego.

I'm not even going to start with the often confusing mess that Symbian platform itself is...

Better & cheaper? Not my Nokia

[sjbe]

sacrifice "bling" features for actual function, such as better features, lower price and business-directed application support.

As an owner of a Nokia smartphone I gotta disagree with the "better features" and realistically with the "lower price" as well. Of course better is subjective and depends on your specific needs but my needs are pretty much businesses - email, web, occasional documents, tethering etc. My Nokia is quite functional - it can do more or less everything an iPhone can do. Give me a feature checklist and they'll be pretty close. However the fact that it can do it doesn't mean you'll want to. Yes it has a web browser but web browsing on my Nokia is painful. Email? Same thing. Only useful for occasional emergencies and not something that is pleasant to use. Frankly there is little that my Nokia does particularly elegantly. It works but it's quite clumsy and irritating and almost never gets updated. My phone was basically abandonware after 3 months.

I haven't found Nokia phones to be any cheaper at the end of the day for phones with comparable feature lists. In fact the higher end Nokias are actually quite expensive. It's easy to find Nokia smartphones that are more expensive than almost any iPhone or Android device. Yes Nokia makes cheaper phones as well but it is doubtful Nokia has meaningfully lower costs than Apple on similar hardware. If Nokia is pricing their phones cheaper (and I don't think they are) it is because they have to, not because they want to. (at least in the US market) I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to phone platforms but I'm not especially impressed with Symbian after fairly extensive first hand experience.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[sznupi]

Yeah, OS X. Or, in some other OSes, only when iTunes is installed.
It's still quite castrated if only because of that.

WiFi hotspot for some other device is often handy. Even more handy would be accessing the web also via BT connection made available by some other device (remember, iPod Touch + "feature phone" could be easily made very close to "smartphone" iPhone experience, with probably much more reliable phone functionality and much cheaper; probably why Apple won't allow it)

PS. "Bam"? You could at least try to preserve appearances ;p

No death grip, only Sidetalking.

[Psaakyrn]

Don't forget it's Nokia/Symbian which brought us the joys of side-talking!

Re:iPhone (and Andrhttp://mobioid) have both kinds

[SuperKendall]

In percentage terms, I don't think Mac developers even represented 1% of the developer community, before iPhone came out.

Of what group of developers though? My point was that numerically I think there were more Mac developers around than Symbian. Of course there were never as many developers as, say Windows developers, but that number which seemed small in the desktop arena translated to a large professional base ready to go for the iPhone compared to any other mobile platform... even though a lot of people knew Java the frameworks are all pretty different on Android, where Mac developers were already used to XCode and Interface Builder and the whole set of frameworks.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[sootman]

Sweet! Now I just need a USB cable long enough to reach Canada.

Re:Better & cheaper? Not my Nokia

[LandGator]

Well, Opera works _very_ well on my Nokia E90. Try it if you can.

Nokia Qt SDK

[guruz]

I really hope that the Nokia Qt SDK will change the Symbian 3rd party developer landscape.
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt/
Disclosure: I work inside Nokia on Qt.

Re:Nokia Qt SDK

[Anonymous Coward]

While the NDK is great it does not remove the two biggest problems with development for Symbian.

1) The truly awful signing process must still be used for anything non-trivial.

2) It still costs way too much and takes way too much time to get an app on the Ovi store.

Oh yeah... and the Ovi store is Nokia only. The Android folks managed to build their app store for the platform but after joining the fragments of Symbian, Nokia has once again fragmented the platform by keeping their app store for themselves so if you want to target some other Symbian phone (and they do exist) then you have to go do something else.

Re:Nokia Qt SDK

[herrmarder]

Are there any phones with Qt on the market? Or do I have to wait a couple of years (and buy a new phone.)

Re:Nokia Qt SDK

[peppepz]

Qt can be installed on all S60 3rd edition devices, that is every Symbian phone sold in the last three years or so (source). You can put Qt in you application package. Symbian^1 devices got Qt with their latest firmware updates. Symbian^3 devices have Qt factory-installed.

Re:Nokia Qt SDK

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully it will change it... Symbian has traditionally been a source of fear and terror for developers within Nokia... specifically for those working within Qt. The build system was a nightmare, the tools were clunky, and the signing process was perhaps the most ridiculous thing conceived in the modern era... It's a breeze at only 15 steps (taken from the Symbian website):

Sequence of events:

1. Developer visits the Symbian Signed website
2. Developer registers with Symbian Signed using the on-line form and completes the contractual agreement
3. Developer is provided with a username and password
4. Developer logs on with their account details
5. Developer downloads a tool for exporting their Publisher ID to a standard format for use with Makesis
6. Developer signs the .SIS file for the application (with downloaded tool and Makesis)
7. Developer submits their .PKG, user guide and signed .SIS file
8. Developer is provided with a receipt
9. If the digital signature on the signed .SIS file is verified to be a valid Publisher ID, the Test House provides a quote for the testing and sends it to the developer by email (with payment method attached)
10. On receipt of payment, the tests take

  place
11. If the application fails the test the developer should modify their application and resubmit it. The developer will be charged for resubmitting the application, so it is essential that they thoroughly test the application prior to submission.
12. Once all the tests have been passed, the application is re-signed using a single use Publisher ID that is trusted through the Symbian Root Certificate embedded on the phones. This end certificate contains the original developer information for complete traceability to the originator.
13. The signed application is uploaded onto the website under the developer's account
14. Developer is sent an email advising that signing is complete
15. Developer downloads signed application from the website

That being said, Symbian phones have in the end been some of the best phone experiences I've had (once the bugs were ironed out). They're reliable and effective, and generally come with a metric ton of awesome features which the iPhone4 is only just providing. The only drawback is the oviStore, which could use some external content badly.

[disclosure: I have worked for Nokia on Qt]

Hmh

[upside]

If Nokia knows nothing about smartphone OS design, how is it that they outsell Apple and Google in smartphones.? They must be doing something right.

Re:Hmh

[Anonymous Coward]

How come Microsoft outsells every other OS vendor combined?

Re:Hmh

[TheKidWho]

Because they label their crap-phones from a less sophisticated era as smartphones?

Re:Better & cheaper? Not my Nokia

[badran]

I would suggest that you look at the prices without the contracts. As with a contract you pay for your phone not in 1 go, but in installments.

And once you are through you have Ovi

[krischik]

And once you are through all that you have Ovi to sell your stuff. If you are a registered company that is. If not you are to be ripped of by Handango and the likes.

Disaster upon disaster.

Martin

MeeGo is a still birth

[krischik]

Only by the time MeGoo is ready the marked will be carved up between iOS, Android and maybe RIM and only some breadcrumbs will be left for other OS offerings.

Current and Future

[krischik]

For today your are right. But Nokia plans to shift the OS use.

S40 from low/mid the low marked only.
Symbian from mid/high to mid only.
And MoGoo new for high marked only.

I don't think it will work - but that is just me.

Re:Current and Future

[mdwh2]

Actually I think one of the best things about Nokia is that they do provide decent smartphones for lower end. Sure, they aren't the company if you want a phone with 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM like you get with HTC. But you can get a smartphone with several hundred MHz processor and hundreds of MBs or RAM that works just as well for most people, much cheaper than that HTC phone.

It would be nice if Android started appearing on more lower end devices, but the newer versions that come out require higher and higher specs. Nokia have the problem though that if they hold Symbian back for lower end phones, they also lose out on the high end. So I can see the advantage of having a separate OS for higher end phones.

Why should it not work? It doesn't split the application market, as Qt will cross-compile to both Symbian and Meego. (S40 is a different kettle of fish altogether, intended to run the Java apps you can get on all phones).

Apple have IOS and OS X. Google will have Android and ChromeOS. Microsoft have god knows how many versions of Windows.

Re:Current and Future

[badkarmadayaccount]

Someone please implement pvops for Symbian, please! I want both Symbian and Linux.

No hobbyist on Ovi

[krischik]

I rather think that the lack of games is due to the fact that only registered companies can publish on Ovi.

Martin

Re:No hobbyist on Ovi

[zander]

This is true, just want to add that OVI opened up just a week or so ago to allow free personal uploads too.

Re:Personally...N97 ended my relationship with Nok

[peppepz]

You could have bought a 5800, it would have costed you less than half the money as the N97, and still have more features than any remotely comparable phone in that price range. Nokia flagships are very overpriced, they've always been, because apparently there are people who buy them anyways. Perhaps the N97 debacle will change things, and in fact it looks like the N8 will be quite affordable.

Symbian could be a Smartphone OS

[krischik]

with emphasis in "could". Symbian/UIQ was a great offer crippled by low CPU, low memory phones. Symbian/S60 is crippled by being effectively non-tochscreen (S60E5 is just a bodge job). And by the time Symbian^4 comes out it will be "Symbian could have been a great Smartphone OS if only...".

The Wikipedia (disambiguation) page on Symbian might give you an idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

Re:Symbian could be a Smartphone OS

[sznupi]

So now we'll just twist what the term means at will, to include just what we want at a given moment?

Re:Symbian could be a Smartphone OS

[krischik]

So now we'll just twist what the term means at will, to include just what we want at a given moment?

Spot on. But note that from a technical point there is always the real time operating system underneath. And a pretty good one. But without good GUI and good phone to show of once abilities it makes no difference.

that would be Symbian^4 then

[krischik]

That will be Symbian^4 - and I fear that Symbian^4 will be to late to successfully catch up with iOS or Android.

And some catch you have to do. I developed for Smybian/UIQ and later Symbian/S60E5 and now I develop for Andoid. And it is so much easier. Simpler to set-up, works not only on Windows, has a gratis IDE (eclipse), better Emulator, better on device debugging. logging framework, allows self signed application.

And last not least an application shop which pays a decent cut: http://my.opera.com/HP-45/blog/whats-in-a-price .

Re:Symbian sure try hard to prevent you developing

[Yuioup]

My point exactly! (See my post elsewhere in this thread).

Y

Re:It's just not American

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Brit living in Switzerland, I disagree. Nobody cares about Symbian in Europe either.

Also Expat in Switzerland and I can reveal the fact, that technologically aware persons don't give a shit about iOS. Most crappiest shit ever marketed for douche-bags. Though nice marketing machine who is able to do this. :) Symbian and Android ftw!

Re:Symbian sure try hard to prevent you developing

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the Symbian build system requires a certain old ActivePerl build which is no longer being distributed. A newer or older one won't do. Of course Nokia hasn't acquired a redistribution license so they won't be able to provide you with it. The easiest way is to snatch it from a warez site.

Re:Symbian is (not) a goner

[zander]

The GP was a bit vague, I understood it differently from how you read it. From my point of view, it makes a lot of sense.

The point that I think makes a lot of sense it that Symbian is not dead because you can run Qt based applications on it. You can develop on your Windows/Linux box and deploy it on your Symbian device. You can also deploy the same app on a Meego device, if you want. Without rewriting it.

Saying an OS is dead in my mind means its not available anymore, or that there are no applications for it. The first is obviously false as there are still 100million devices with it with more coming from various vendors. The applications can be written using Qt (google for "Qt Quick") and as such the applications market is probably just going to get bigger, not smaller.

Symbian is not a goner just yet. But many will agree its going to be replaced eventually with things like Meego. Naturally, this is why developers should choose Qt as they can develop for both the current and the next generation at the same time.

The dying breed

[Anonymous Coward]

If my past experience working at Nokia is a guide then I could tell you that even the Nokian in-house programmers themselves duck and cover whenever the need to program in Symbian arises in a pilot project. There are not too many programmers who have the sisu (Finnish word for balls) to endure the pain and suffering. The pool of Symbian know-hows is diminishing and newcomers aren't exactly dying to learn Symbian either given a choice. It's too bad because Synbian isn't all that bad once you've overcome the steep learning curve. But in my opinion, you're better off learning a language which is more ubiquitous like Java if you want want to stay flexible in your career with more employer choices.

Hobbyist on Ovi?

[krischik]

I check it out. Even if it is true it took them a long time to notice that a shop without hobbyist wont't work. But then Nokia was never fast in noticing and rectifying there mistakes.

Symbian is a joke

[JonJ]

From a usability standpoint, Symbian sucks. The interface is horrible, and it's very clear that it's an interface made for buttons that's being shoehorned into touchscreens. I recently had to quit using my N97 because it's aggravating to use it. First of all, choosing a wireless network in your proximity takes a ridiculous amounts of clicks. Unless there's a better way to do it, but if it is, it's not intuitive. I also had a major issue with finding the numerical keyboard when I'm in a call, for advancing through automatic answering machines. Really, there was *NO* button that made sense to push for it to pop up that keyboard. It's really hard finding a replacement to the iPhone, especially when you want to go one step above and have a hardware keyboard. Right now I'm testing the N900, but since I'm changing my entire stack at home(Macs are going out, and GNU/Linux and PCs are going in.), it's hard to find some simple way of syncing the phone. I wish Nokia would release a proper way to do this, atleast something integrated with KDE, as they now own Qt.

3.7" is small? for a mobile device??

[krischik]

So you thing a 3.7" touch screen is small: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_i8910 - interesting. Remember we talk mobile OSs not desktop OS here.

No, you have to wait another 6 month.

[krischik]

Fittet all the answer into the heading, what now? Yes, pointing out that the 6 month are only a promise and there is no guarantee that it becomes reality. And maybe a link or two:

http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Symbian%5E4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_platform#Version_history

Of course it will to late when the Symbian^4 devices finally come out.

Qt is a dead end?

[mdwh2]

I appreciate the idea that Android is good in that it's supported by multiple manufacturers. Though the same is still true of Symbian anyway (e.g., Samsung at least). Your argument is better directed at platforms like IphoneOS or OS X, which can only be made by Apple.

Also note that the development environment is Qt. You can cross-compile the same code to Symbian and Meago (Meemo in future). Oh, and also Windows, Linux and OS X. Dead end, you say?

Old Symbian phones support Qt fine

[mdwh2]

I can confirm that Symbian/Maemo phones already support Qt, as the installer will just download the libraries as required. Future phones will include libraries as standard though, I believe.

Certainly works on my 5800 fine, and that's a two year old phone now. The Qt SDK has now made it out of beta, so now is the right time to start developing :) I'm new to it myself, and I'm impressed by the SDK, Qt is a very nice set of libraries.

Try with Qt, and S40 isn't Symbian

[mdwh2]

They now use Qt - the days of Symbian C++ are long gone.

Easy to set up. I had Hello World in less than two hours, easily (and I didn't have to buy a special Nokia computer, unlike a certain mobile OS...)

Firstly there is S40, S60 and countless other types of symbian devices.

No, S40 isn't Symbian. S40 doesn't support native code, only J2ME (as with all "feature" phones). You can't expect to write the same application for S60 and S40, anymore than you can expect your Motorola "feature" phone to run Droid apps, or your Ipad to run OS X apps.

There is only one type of "Symbian" device as far as development. Not to mention that Qt will compile the same code also to Maemo, Windows, Linux and OS X.

Then there are versions to each of S40, S60 etc.

There aren't different versions of Android and IOS? Of course, there are.

What is Symbian?

[gig]

Is that a kind of iPhone? I have to have an iPhone because it runs apps and has the most gee bees. That is where consumers are at.

Nerds call all the advanced phones "smartphones" but that is irrelevant to consumers, same as "MP3 player" is a nerd term. Everyone else calls them iPods. iPhone and Nokia phones have nothing in common. Nokia might as well be a kitchen appliance. They don't have an iTunes competitor, App Store competitor, Apple Store competitor, OS X competitor, iPod competitor, Safari competitor, and so on. Having a device that looks kind of like an iPhone is not enough. These things sell on word-of-mouth and because you see your friend's phone in action. Spec sheets are as irrelevant as they are in the iPod market. Having endless feature phones is not enough. Having email on a feature phone and calling it a smartphone and pointing to 40% market share means nothing. iOS is just getting started. iPhone 4 is in many ways just the second iPhone, after iPhone 3G/3GS. The original was US-only, had no 3G, no native 3rd party apps ... it was like a beta test.

If you want people to talk about your phone, give them something to talk about by delivering a phone that is better than iPhone. Or get out of the game. Nokia has become the Finnish word for "nostalgia."

Re:It's just not American

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, iPhone sales in Europe and Japan have actually been less than stellar, the vast majority of iPhone sales still stem from the US and are inflated somewhat by the fact Apple marketing bundles all iPhones together in a single statistic. If Apple say "50 million iPhones sold" what they don't mention is that many of those are no longer in use because they were old gen iPhones replaced by later gen iPhones at the end of 18 month - 2 year contracts etc. In contrast, a company like Nokia will say 10 mill N95's sold rather than 50 mill N-Series sold, and you can safely guess that most of those N95 aren't in use anymore, but the N96 and N900s may well be.

It's also worth pointing out there are the territories Apple doesn't dare mention, the iPhone has been an outright flop in India, China and much of South America, where Apple failed to adapt their marketing and sales patterns to suit the local market. They attempted to go down the premium "fashion accessory" route they do in the West, but that really doesn't cut it.

It's hard to get a grasp on the relative success of the iPhone because the figures are so badly distorted by marketing FUD and partial releases of numbers, but one things for sure, the number of active handsets out there (useful for developers to know) isn't close to what Apple states in it's marketing press, whilst the number of Symbian handsets out there does still number in the 100s of millions because of it's strong userbase in the likes of India and China.

What we do know though is that the original iPhone only shifted 6 million units (direct from Apple) which is far less than the resounding success it was sold at when you consider Nokia's contender the N95 at the time shifted 10 million units without even really trying.

I'm actually an Android fan, and although I've developed for Symbian I really don't like it. It's hard however to understate it's importance in the world though, and if anything the lack of reporting on Symbian isn't because it's lagging behind, but because it's in fact so ubiquitous across much of the world that it's not really news anymore- it's just part of a good portion of the world's population's daily lives. In contrast, despite Apple's excellent marketing division's spin on the situation, Apple's position in the world phone market really is comparable to a drop in the ocean, it's making headway, but it's news precisely because it's absolutely not ubiquitous or anything like a major player like Symbian (and Blackberry for that matter).

Re:It's just not American

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Italian living in France... Switzerland is not Europe.

$200? Yeah right!

[_2of1_]

There's a quick and simple answer to this one. You have to shell out $200 for a PublisherID or anything you code is worth squat. No good for freeware or the hobbyist coder at all!

No, you haven't to.

[peppepz]

Symbian^4 will be the first release to *use* Qt as its native toolkit. But all recent (less than 4 years old) Symbian phones support Qt as a runtime for third-party applications, so you can already develop Qt-based applications for current handsets.

Re:It's just not American

[JAlexoi]

Well.... Buzzwise, Europe is as much hyped up about iPhone and Android as the rest of the places, but when it comes to buying decisions people actually think before they buy. I mean, the iPhone plans in Europe are outrageous....

Re:Symbian sure try hard to prevent you developing

[jfanning]

Total FUD.

Surely you mean
1 Go to http://forum.nokia.com/
2 Click "Download Nokia QT SDK"
3 Run installer
4 Regsiter as Ovi Individual Developer
5 ????
6 Profit

Re:Symbian sure try hard to prevent you developing

[pslam]

You must be new, because:

Total FUD.

Surely you mean
1 Go to http://forum.nokia.com/
2 Click "Download Nokia QT SDK"

Guess when this started existing? June 23rd this year. So you started Symbian development 2 weeks ago?

It's also yet another incompatible SDK. It's not the same frameworks. It also requires S60 3.1 or above, which excludes a gigantic number of existing devices.

3 Run installer
4 Regsiter as Ovi Individual Developer
5 ????
6 Profit

Ovi supported devices: Nokia X6, Nokia N97 mini and Nokia N900. Wow, that's a huge number of devices and I can see the profits just rolling in.

Won't help

[krischik]

That won't help if you want to sell application. You can not rely on Qt to be there. Not even for Symbian^1 because many user will never see the firmware upgrade.

Re:Won't help

[peppepz]

That's why your application's installer, provided by Nokia, will install Qt on the device if it's not there.

Yes I have

[krischik]

I actually like to SELL my application and won't sell anything if my customers have to install QT first. All that will happen is that I will be swamped with complains and tell me how-to questions - please step by step. And getting 1 star ratings to boot. It makes me eek only to think about it.

Google did it right: they won't even show applications to those who won't be able to use them.

Re:Yes I have

[peppepz]

It's transparent to both you and your customers.

To you, because the installer that installs or upgrades Qt on the device if it's not there, is provided by Nokia in the Qt SDK.

To your customers, because they don't need to even realize that Qt is being installed alongside your application. It's simply part of the application's installation procedure.

You haven't looked at all.

[Colin Smith]

And I don't see anybody rushing to write similar apps on Symbian.

WTF? They already exist, as standard. Certainly on n97

ActiveNotes for syncable hierarchical multimedia notes.
Built in MP3 player & streamer.
Weather is built into Ovi Maps which comes on the phone, as is Find Places for local businesses etc.

Clearly you have no idea about Symbian apps. Did you look? I suspect that'd be a "no".

e.g.
http://store.ovi.com/
and
http://www.symbian-freeware.com/

 

Re:You haven't looked at all.

[fm6]

You're missing my point. I'm not saying that there are no Symbian apps in these categories. Of course there are. But I don't just want an app that does X, I want an app that does X the way I want it to be done.

Case in point: MP3 players. Every platform has them, but I keep trying them, and going back to my Cowan U2, because it was the only player I could find that let me dump a bunch of podcasts on to it and listen to them in chronological order, with automatic bookmarking.

The I got an Android phone. Tried a couple dozen different MP3 players before I found MortPlay. Which fortunately turned up just as my U2 died.

Tell me, are there even a dozen different MP3 players for Symbian? I'm guessing not. Which makes it unlikely that any of them have the feature set I'm looking for.

That was my point: that all those thousands of fartware apps may be useless, but they're signs of a platform that's popular with developers. And that popularity translates into the nice feature set I was looking for.

So, of the 200,000. How many are worthwhile?

[Colin Smith]

1,000?
100?
10?

How meaningful is the number 200,000?

Grand Theft Auto? Various versions (vice city, IV) have been available on S60 phones since 2007.

 

Re:So, of the 200,000. How many are worthwhile?

[Anonymous Coward]

(sorry, not logged in here).

I just googled for the amount of apps, the number was in one of the first hits. I agree it does not matter how many apps there are, rather how good they are, and how varied. GTA was just an example that even the most expensive app was not insanely expensive (though in comparison 8€ is a pretty expensive app).

However I still don't quite understand your point. The feeling I have been getting from your post is that you don't believe there would be a good variety of usefull apps available. However from my post above you picked the least important and relevant thing to pick on.

There's a firmware update.

[Colin Smith]

For the N97. Guess you didn't install it. Ovi Maps have been pushing out new releases on around a bimonthly basis fixing bugs and adding features; Free routing, public transport.

Now days I use a Nexus One and it is literally 2-3 generations down the line from the BEST Nokia has to offer

No, it's only just keeping up. Nokia's Linux based battery burner is the N900: http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/

 

Re:There's a firmware update.

[Skuld-Chan]

In the year and a half I had the phone they released a whopping total of two updates for the thing which fixed a grand total of nothing. They aren't releasing stuff for it bi-monthly.

The phone is still buggy as hell and clunky for its price.

Re:Symbian sure try hard to prevent you developing

[hardeep1singh]

You forgot to add a crucial step for iphone SDK. Step 1. "Buy a Mac"

Re:Symbian sure try hard to prevent you developing

[pslam]

You forgot to add a crucial step for iphone SDK. Step 1. "Buy a Mac"

And for Symbian SDK:
Step 1. "Buy a PC and Windows license"

Re:Symbian sure try hard to prevent you developing

[jfanning]

You were describing the situation one year ago. That is not the same as the situation now. So it was FUD.

The fact that the framework isn't the same as Symbian C++ has nothing to do with it. You have to start from scratch with the iPhone since it only supports Objective C. At least with Qt and OpenC/C++ libraries you can port nearly all Linux software.

QT works on all Symbian/S60 3.1, 3.2 and 5.0 devices. I think you will find that covers quite a huge number of devices including everything from the N95 onwards. So that is literally anything later than 2007, so actually rather more devices that there are existing iPhones.

Re:Better & cheaper? Not my Nokia

[sjbe]

I would suggest that you look at the prices without the contracts.

I bought my phone without any contract. In fact I've only once actually bought a subsidized phone.

As with a contract you pay for your phone not in 1 go, but in installments.

I've never seen an installment plan for a non-subsidized phone but perhaps they exist.

Re:Too bad Apple has so tightly controlled the app

[misiu_mp]

You need to do manual and potentially textual work to do that in MacOSX? Gnome with NetworkManager does it automatically (tested with Android 2.2 thetering). It is clear from the look and style that gnome had macosx as a role-model for the UI. Would the student start to be exceeding the teacher?