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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.'"
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.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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
As a Brit living in Switzerland, I disagree. Nobody cares about Symbian in Europe either.
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?
It is what it is.
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:
iPhone is much the same plus some sign-ups:
Here's Symbian/Nokia's idea of Getting Started:
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.
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.
One that hath name thou can not otter