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Nokia Reasserts Control Over Symbian OS
jfruhlinger writes "Nokia is asserting its control over the Symbian OS that runs many of its smartphones, taking the tasks of developing the operating system away from the independent Symbian Foundation, which will now focus on licensing and intellectual property issues. Of course, this also illustrates Symbian's importance to Nokia's smartphone plans, even though the company is also developing phones that run the Linux-based Meego OS."
After reading a different mobile phone thread on Slashdot, someone mentioned how much they loved their Nokia N900. I picked one up after that, and I absolutely love it. I even managed to put NES/SNES/Genesis/C-64 emulators on it, and paired a PS3 controller to it, good times. It supports skype / google video calls, and uses wifi. It's the most modern phone I've used, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I enjoy it :P
I have a n900 for personal use and an iphone for work.
The n900 is a decent phone but is starting to fall behind. The open source of it is nice, but doesn't make up for the flaws.
Little out of touch (see what I did there?) are you?
Maybe you should visit their website some day?
They are still the 800 pound gorilla in the cell industry. Just because you don't see them much in the USA, don't make the mistake of dismissing them.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You mean those stable easy to use no frills just work everywhere days on a battery nokia's?
Well, unless you're into the Google maps latitude facebook youtube pinging skype goatse there's this thingy with which you can talk to other people without software disruptions or lag. Only 20-30 bucks.
I just can't help myself, but to see Symbian dead in its tracks. In User Interface so far behind, that no matter of add-on modules can save it from obscurity.
Yep, i do, i did, and would never change my precious Nokia phone for any apple, berry or whatever piece of s....strawberry. Whenever i want to buy a computer, i would buy a real, desktop computer, not some funny expensive and useless brick.
This is good for both Symbian and Nokia; they can stop pretending that Symbian is a reasonable choice for non-Nokia companies (that would be better off with Android or MeeGo, operating systems that are designed to be vendor independent and don't require tons of Nokia specific knowledge to build).
Symbian still has lots of life in it, now that Nokia is getting their shit together (through massive technology refocus on Qt Quick, ending silly projects like Symbian4 that were only hammering nails on Symbians coffin). In a year or so, if Nokia has a few dozens of millions of phones running a developer platform that is as easy as iPhone/Android - there will be good momentum going.
Something Symbian never had before.
Market share is an iffy thing - it's here one day, gone the next. Unfortunately the Symbian adoption is not only slowing, it's negative (I say unfortunately because you can pry my beloved E72 out of my clammy, dead fingers.) Hopefully Nokia will be able to turn it around.
their top-phones beat an iphone in any hardware category available at a lower price, and they still sell more phones than anybody else. If they can make a more flashy UI, they can become a serious problem for Apple, Retaking control of their OS is the first step
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Tell me when you can do multitasking (I currently have 5 web pages, one terminal and mailbox open) and dual/triple boot on your working toy. And BTW, I have done the comparison with a co-worker here - his iphone 4G drops calls like crazy unlike my 'falling behind' and 'flawed' n900.
Stop pretending you have a N900 - stick to your beloved toy and leave the minority of us alone. Just go away.
SJ, is that you? Don't forget to take your liver medicine today.
I buy them because they "just work", can be abused(Taking a few baths, going from +20c to -25c and back hundreds of times and being dropped repeatedly) and when it's finaly dies you can just use a spare/old one or buy a new one for 50$.
Another good thing is that their chargers have used the same connector and voltage for something like 15 years. Everyone have a nokia charger.
Damn, that must be one huge screen to have all those up and readable at once.
The chargers are the same? No shit. I might have to look into that. It pisses me off that every time I buy a new phone they use a new proprietary usb charger, that costs me an arm and a leg to make sure I have a charger for work, home and the car. Any recommendations on a nice Nokia to look at?
It was obvious when they started that they weren't going to get a large Open Source development community around the Symbian kernel and libraries. It just was not interesting compared to Linux. But unfortunately they were so proud of their kernel that they weren't willing to listen to that (and yes, I had the chance to tell them, and was pretty frustrated that they didn't believe me). Now that Nokia is making its major development direction around Qt over either Linux or Symbian, there is even less interest in Open Source development of the underlying Symbian platform. The sad thing about this was that Symbian was a profitable business before they Open Sourced it, making about 10 to 15 Million per year, not a ton of bucks for a company like Nokia but it was self-supporting and I never saw a reason to destroy that since they weren't going to get the community. It would have been better for them to concentrate their Open Source work on Linux.
Add to this the recent switch from Maemo to Meego, and it pushes Nokia's plans for Linux further back, even though n900 PR1.3 works excellently. So Nokia has to scramble to shore up Symbian for another generation of phones.
Bruce Perens.
When moronic drivel like this is modded "insightful", you know Slashdot is no longer a site for geeks and nerds.
Yeah, it's not a phone for the masses, but it's definitely the best "geek phone" around. It's shameful companies like google and adobe don't make software for it, but the fact I can run or at least recompile and run thousands of other things for it makes up for this.
I'm always disappointed to see news of Nokia continuing to use Symbian, if they'd just dump it for MeeGo the added market share and dollars spent on their own software developemnt would "fix" most of the problems with the platform (currently maemo).
Of course, this also illustrates Symbian's importance to Nokia's smartphone plans, even though the company is also developing phones that run the Linux-based Meego OS.
To me this illustrates that Nokia is not aware of the 80/20 rule and has no focused coherent strategy for their OS platform.
At the same time as Nokia's competitors are hard at work proving the world needs only one smartphone platform, and it's their one platform, Nokia is one company making two platforms...
The N900 is a great device that's insanely open, but the things you're listing have become pretty much everyday type things on Android and also, to a certain extent, iOS. The Skype support on the N900 is unparalleled, of course, and I haven't tried an actual PS3 controller on Android yet (do those work as Bluetooth HID devices? Because if so, the BlueZ module in CyanogenMod should pick it up fine, right?), but emulators are very standard fare these days, as is pairing a WiiMote for on-the-go gaming and WiFi and VoIP. :)
Now if you wanted to talk about, say, the N900's vastly superior multitasking (at least it seemed like it in the 15 minutes I used it), the much better keyboard than most Android devices and, well, the fact that you can much more easily run, well, pretty much anything on Maemo... that would be a different story ;)
Well, I have been serial modded to say anything against apple or anything pro-(apple competitor) so much that I had to choose to post anonymous all the time. And then Taco went and blocked my ip.
Now a days, I still visit /. - but only when there is nothing worth to read elsewhere.
This place is full of Steve Jobs' bitches.
I've been following the Meego 1.1 release news (I enjoyed http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/11/the-meego-progress-report-a-or-d/), and have read up on a few other Nokia stories (N8 reviews, rumored N9 devices, etc.) and I don't quite understand what their long run goals with Symbian are. I mostly read bad opinions of it, e.g. Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/14/nokia-n8-review/) loved certain aspects of the N8's hardware but didn't like the software. Symbian is probably the main thing keeping me from getting an N8 (that and the screen is disappointing). Nokia has announced there will be no more high end phones (higher than the N8) that will run Symbian, they will all run Meego. Phones are always getting more capable and I imagine the Meego stack will be optimized going forward, so how many interesting phones going forward are even going to run Symbian?
Given that Meego isn’t ready, I could be a lot more interested in Symbian if Nokia released hardware that they promise will support Meego when 1.2 is released, but for now runs Symbian. I was hoping that would be the case with the N8 since I really like the camera on that phone, and it literally seems to have no competition right now, but I can find nothing online speculating that Meego will ever work on an N8. Going with a transition strategy would let them release more phones even though Meego isn’t really ready (I hope it is ready in Q1, but maybe it won’t be working all that well into Q4 or later.
One more gripe for Nokia - I sure hope they aren’t considering releasing an N9 with a camera that doesn’t match or supersede the N8. The leaks (which could be totally bogus) implied the camera was not as capable (smaller sensor size, no Zeiss, less pixels). What the hell. I’m not going to feel great about spending money on a Meego phone when older Symbian phones can outperform it in ANY area (GPS, call quality, speed, picture/video quality, you name it).
One big plug for Nokia - good job making offline map viewing a key part of Ovi Maps. One of the things I hate about my iPhone (and Android phones I’ve tried) is that getting Google to cache maps seems like a super pain - I don’t want to install third party programs just to be able to use this fancy piece of electronics with huge memory, nice display and a GPS as a stand-alone GPS. It is the main thing that got me to investigate Nokia as an option to move to from iPhone instead of Android. But I’m not really sure I can wait long enough for Meego and Symbian isn’t inspiring enough.
Anything in the E-series, Nokia's business line.
You have the E6x and E7x series if you want a Blackberry-like form factor with a full keyboard, or if you just want a good phone, the E5x series in soap-bar form factor.
All run a recent version of Symbian, all are full smartphones, although the ones without a full keyboard are of course a bit less useful in that regard.
And make no mistake, running Symbian is an advantage. It is a clunky OS to write apps for, but it's a real embedded real-time OS dedicated to running phone hardware, not a stripped-down PC OS shoehorned into a smaller box. So Nokia phones are just plain good at their primary task: being a phone.
Mart (Nokia fanboy)
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
I have two reservations about N900:
1. Resistive touchscreen; as I understand, it also means no multitouch in practice
2. Lack of applications. The official store has around 70. Sure, you can run vanilla Linux Gtk apps, but they look very small and are horribly inconvenient to operate on such a tiny screen.
Hence my choice was Nexus One. But now that it is no longer sold, and no other "guaranteed to be open" Android phone is there to take its place, the next upgrade round is going to be interesting.
nokia still sells more devices each quarter. so their share is getting smaller, but nowhere negative.
Well, most of the Nokia dumb/feature phones use the same plug. Their smarthpones have switched to the Micro USB standard for combo charging/data transfer (My n97 being an example). But for the most part, there's only 2 plugs that nokia's used and that's it.
"Its easier to port a shell than a shell script"
Seriously, a shell along the lines of iOS or Android could be easily written for Symbian.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Did you check the repo(s) for N900? I don't see why the store and vanilla Linux apps would be your only (nor primary) source?
It is what it is.
And for example N8 still has a small plug so you can charge it with your old charger too, even if the primary way to charge it is the micro USB.
It is what it is.
All "visual" apps are full screen, or desktop widgets, so unless you check the task list, you don't "see" those apps running at once. Of course, the typical use of reading RSS means potentially a lot of browsers loading pages on background, and having running too some "invisible" apps (pedometer, music, gps related apps, etc) make you feel what means to multitask in such devices.
On iphone you can do some kind of multitasking, but is not even a shadow of what you can do in the n900, nor you can do it with the apps you want, not the apple provided. And if well things are a bit better in Android, still is not quite there.
Negative? When not presented as "percentage of growth" (deceiving if one player is much closer to the absolute limit "total number of mobile phones sold"), but as "annual growth in number of units shipped" - it's a top player.
And will continue to be big, if only because of being pushed into lower market segments (what happened to S30, which is still around, and S40, which is still around - in fact, is the most popular phone platform on the planet)
One that hath name thou can not otter
1) yes, no multitouch. i got over it. I could connect a mouse & keyboard via bluetooth if I really wanted to though, and I can use a real stylus. It's not all bad.
2) what's a store? I'm glad this "store" thing with apps that cost money is nearly empty. Okay, so they have some free stuff there too, but the real place you should be looking is HERE. That's the "extras" maemo repository, full of the free apps that made it through the community based testing & voting process. They're mostly written for the platform, not generic gtk stuff. There's other repositories with even more "apps" that are still in development or testing, and companies and individuals can host their own as well.
Actually one of the disadvantages of the N900 is that it's too small (screen & keyboard).
Whenever I have to use some form of public transport I usually take my 5" Archos Android tablet with me too, since its larger screen is more comfortable. And it doesn't hurt that Android offers far more apps than Maemo.
OTOH writing your own Android apps can be a pain in the ass, since they did such a half-assed job with the debugging capabilities of the SDK's emulator. But that's something for a different topic.
Resistive have advantages and disadvantages over capacitive. You don't have multitouch, but you can have more precision, use more than just your fingers (i.e. the included stylus), and have pressure sensiivity (and be able to do things like this).
Regarding lack of applications, yes, there is very few in Ovi Store, but a lot more in the repositories. Is not in the order of the iphone or android apps, but could be enough for your needs.
Resistive have advantages and disadvantages over capacitive. You don't have multitouch, but you can have more precision, use more than just your fingers (i.e. the included stylus), and have pressure sensiivity
I've used resistive touchscreen devices exclusively before going for Android, so I am familiar with the advantages, and I do not consider them to outweigh the flaws. More precision is only needed when the UI is designed to require it, and such a UI is generally still more clumsy than finger-oriented one on such small screens.
On a tablet, though, I'd probably prefer resistive, because I don't see much point for multi-touch there, and there are more meaningful applications for higher precision.
I have an iPhone supplied by my company and it stays tethered to my dev box as a debugger. I never once had the urge to carry it around with me as I was happy with a plain dumb phone and an older (but much more capable than an iPhone PDA - the X51v with full VGA, 624MHz etc) for when I wanted to watch movies (without having to recompress them) while traveling. And sometimes I would have to do a little work while on the road, so a full keyboard, ssh etc were required.
That was until a year ago, when I switched to a N900. It can do everything my phone, my pda and my netbook can do (with varying degrees of success) and more!
- As a phone: I still say basic phones are better than any smartphone (and especially touch-screen ones) for the actual making of calls where large screens are simply a disadvantage and small sizes, physical keys etc make a better experience. Moreover, I suspect the "flaws" you refer to are in the phone part of the N900, since it is rather obvious that the developers had geeks in mind, so it still feels like a phone app running on a computer and not a phone that has more capabilities. But there really is nothing particularly annoying and the audio quality and reception are very good. Plus there are some nice advantages. For example when making a call you can go through your voice network or through skype - this is rather seamless from a UI perspective. Then, you have "conversations" which is like a multi-IM client, but SMSs are also treated the same way, showing discussion threads with your contacts.
-As a PDA: See below. It can do much more than any PDA has ever been able to do.
-As a Netbook replacement: I can't really launch my IDE, but I have ssh/svn and vi to do my emergency code edits and have my projects rebuilt on my servers etc. That is what I personally needed the Netbook for, but apart from that it is a full linux machine, even has a full (flash etc) browser and I can open and switch from/to many apps/windows without feeling I am on a limited device. Plus I don't need an extra 3G usb dongle to have broadband everywhere, or an extra bluetooth gps to find my way!
Anyway, let us say this is the ultimate geek device that can also act as a phone and it would be great if they can give us a worthy successor and also work on polishing Maemo/MeeGo for non-geek users so that everyone can enjoy the best (says I) mobile platform.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
i can run kismet on it, get packet injection working (hard to get the driver but whatever), play with 3-4 different operating systems (using a boot menu), replace the camera app with one that does HDR and burst mode with full manual settings, connect to msn,skype,jabber,irc,etc all at the same time... I've also got an IR transmitter, usb-host mode, fm-transmitter, front camera, 32GB storage PLUS SD-card. It comes rooted, and I didn't even void the warranty to do any of these things. but, yeah, it doesn't have a RETINA display or stainless steel call dropper bezel, or sweet "store" to buy DRM laden crap I probably already own 3 times. okay, no google maps app either, and it took nokia just about forever to get some basic stuff working like the pc sync.
Hopefully they sell a crapload of MeeGo devices next year, and drop Symbian soon, because I've seen the potential of this device. With some more developer support, it would truly be the best (for me). One really can't complain that the default stuff on the phone is slow or hard to use, it's more like a prototype they were nice enough to manufactre and sell at a loss. They did their best (with limited resources) to support, update and fix it, and we can upgrade it to a MeeGo device with a simple firmware flash in the near future if we want. Meanwhile, the community has been patching and replacing whatever Nokia code we can, whenever we think we can do a better job than Nokia's developers.
and no, you can't conect a sixaxis to your phone. it doesn't work as a standard HID, sony is lame.
Developing for Qt is pretty straight forward. . . . in two or three days of playing around with Qt creator I was able to setup simple UI's that are not very symbianish (bizillion sub menus) at all for symbian^3. There are a bucket load of examples on Qts website/forums and the community is pretty helpful. As IDEs goes, its pretty good. Anyways, most of the developers for android and iPhone are trash (I expect the same for Qt at some point). They are just mediocre programmers (most phone apps are trivial) getting on the next big wave. This sort of business and market do not attract high quality engineers as its not really interesting.
we can thank the EU for that: http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/06/10-companies-agree-to-standardized-mobile-phone-charger-in-eu.ars
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Nokia has announced there will be no more high end phones (higher than the N8) that will run Symbian, they will all run Meego.
That has been heavily reported, but it is flat out wrong. They announced that the N8 is the last high-end phone to run Symbian^3 - future phones will run Meego or Symbian^4: source.
By "store" you mean this new fangled App Store everybody is talking about? And so, you are completely discounting the repos? I have about 500 (and more) 'apps' to choose from for my N900.
Sorry, my bad. I meant developer adoption rate.
...I have this to say about Symbian:
JUST.
DIE.
Seriously, it is the most god awful programming environment I've ever had to use, and I have worked with a lot of different mobile operating systems (including some you've never heard of). Symbian has about five different (incompatible!) string classes. Symbian has its own home made exception mechanism built with macros and longjmp() which only allows you to throw integers and doesn't unwind the stack when you throw an exception. But that's okay because Symbian's also got a thing called a 'cleanup stack' which is a complicated and fragile way of allowing you to automatically do the cleanup in only 95% of the code it would have taken to do it manually. The Symbian standard data storage objects allocate memory in their constructors but don't free it again in their destructors. Somewhere, Bjarne Stroustrup is screaming.
The operating system itself is just as bad: it's a microkernel protected mode operating system with a strong emphasis on message passing... but it's also got a big writable shared memory area for use by the kernel, thus meaning it combines the worst aspects of microkernel operating systems (multiple slow context switches when calling OS components), protected mode operating systems (MMU and cache overhead) and unprotected operating systems (bugs can scribble over kernel memory and crash the system).
Let's not talk about the development environment, which is a chronically slow maze of perl scripts and autogenerated makefiles using a badly parsed and badly documented scripting language and which forces you to arrange the source files how it wants them, and not how your project wants them.
Symbian's big problem is chronic Not Invented Here syndrome. Everything is weird and different. It feels like the original designers didn't have enough oversight, and their pet ideas ran away with them and became top-heavy with kludges because nobody forced them to refactor the underlying concept once the problems arose. Those damned strings are a perfect example. Once they invented HBufC (an immutable string which is resizable and assignable!) someone should have said, um, guys, I think you're doing it wrong.
Usually at this point someone pops up and says something like, but C++ didn't have exceptions when Symbian was designed! (There's been solid support for exceptions in C++ compilers for about 15 years now.) Or, but this whole cleanup stack/string descriptor nonsense is needed to make applications run well on low memory systems! (No, good application design make applications run well on low memory systems.) Or, but you can do all those things if you use OpenC++/PIPS! (Unless you want to write code with a GUI.) These are not good reasons why we need to perpetrate such an abomination of an operating system. They are good reasons why it needs to be taken out and shot and stop sucking up programmer time. Even Windows CE is less evil to code for than Symbian, because even though it sucks, it at least allows us to use the programming skills we learnt on other platforms rather than forcing us to learn everything from scratch.
Now: things have gotten a lot better recently. Symbian did do a major push to modernise a lot of this crap with projects such as OpenC++ (real C++ on top of Symbian, although it's not useful for GUI code) and replacing the ghastly Series 60 API with Qt. The Qt stuff is particularly interesting because it also acts as an OS isolation layer, which means you can do things with the sane Qt APIs instead of the insane Symbian APIs. I'll admit that I've never had any contact with this, because our product is really aimed at Series 60, and it is faintly possible that if they do a good enough job they might make Symbian usable again. But if you're going to write code in Qt, why not just target Meego instead? And even if you do use Qt on Symbian, it's still built on top of all the Symbian crap underneath, and as soon as you stray out of Qt's comfort zone you are going to have to start wading through that crap.
Please. Let us work together to make the world a better place and just let Symbian die.
Actually, I can curse the EU for that. Nokia has kept the same charger for years. They shrunk the connector, and all of the phones that came with the newer socket came with an adaptor that let you use the old chargers with them. You can buy third party Nokia chargers for practically nothing. And now the EU has introduced a new rule saying that all of their new phones have to come with a different connector for charging - thanks EU. On the plus side, it's USB, so they can probably keep the old charging port as well as the USB port and support both kinds of charger.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
> But if you're going to write code in Qt, why not just target Meego instead?
Because of 100s of Millions of Symbian phones with potential customers?
so your saying your almost 1 year old nokia phone is STARTING to fall behind??? good thing you didn't buy an iPhone or Android phone last x-mass or your would really be in trouble...
The really nice part about their strategy is a unified development platform between the two operating systems. Applications I write for MeeGo will run on Symbian with few to no changes. Since Symbian has a 41% global market share as of Q2 2010 (numbers from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system) it doesn't make any sense for them to drop it, especially with Qt able to target both platforms trivially.
This is the AC you replied to. I have Verizon, and after checking the only available Nokia is the Nokia Twist.. and umm no thx. lol.
Verizon is the only real choice in my area, as AT&T sucks around here.
Although the N8 series looks really nice from what I can see.
My first cellphone was a Nokia 5165 It was the most reliable cellphone ever. They have reused the number apparently, but this phone has the same body. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_5110
Good summary. As for the Sixaxis, were you telling the Android user they can't pair up a Sixaxis, or the N900? It took me forever, and I almost broke my Windows 7 install (something funky with the USB drivers and 64 bit) as Sony's controllers don't work outright. But they pair up nicely now with my N900, even the sixaxis part works, now I just have to figure out how to disable the tilt sensor, it's messing with the C-64 emulator :P
android, i tried googling it and it looks like someone made a driver, but its just for a single phone :(
http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Sixaxis
some good info there
People do pretty fancy things on capacitive touch screens too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8TBY7z79L8&feature=related
I'm always disappointed to see news of Nokia continuing to use Symbian, if they'd just dump it for MeeGo the added market share and dollars spent on their own software developemnt would "fix" most of the problems with the platform (currently maemo).
Not everyone can afford a US$600+ phone, that is why the iPhone, Android etc has a very low overall market share in phones. People need low cost devices, and Meego won't run well on a low cost device, that is why we still have Symbian.
And it doesn't hurt that Android offers far more apps than Maemo.
You do realize that you can run pretty much any and all apps in $LINUXDISTRO repos right? I enjoy my N900, and yes I do run desktop Linux apps on my "minitabletwithaphonestrappedontoit". Anyways, ditto on the screen size. OpenOffice on that thing is a huge PITA.
Are you by any chance talking about something like this?
http://spb.com/symbian-software/mobileshell
Not true unfortunately.
There's the old fat one, the newer slim one, and now the micro-usb one.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
You can use some Debian-compatible apps, as long as they're compatible with the platform itself (no x68-only libraries), things like double-click and drag&drop pose a problem and many applications react sluggish at best. And the less said about native apps like Canola (performance measured in "bugs per minute") the better.
Things may improve in the future with the new devices (larger screens, move to Qt), but after the half-assed job Nokia did with the N900 (e.g., that Ovi Store clusterfuck, no native host mode for the USB port, keyboard would've neeeded another row, ...) I'll think twice before buying one of their devices again. And that's coming from someone who has been buying Nokia devices since the mid-90's (the 7710 was a true godsend).
This place is full of Steve Jobs' bitches.
Ain't that the truth... My theory is that when Slashdot first began, we were all real techies who had grown up writing software, editing configuration files, setting jumpers and putting computers together in crazy and inventive ways. After so many years, a number of us disappeared (whether due to real life obligations or because Slashdot started going downhill) and a younger generation of plug n play babies grew up into wannabe "techies" and infested Slashdot. It is this younger generation who latched on to the shiny plastic casings, point and drool interfaces and fanatically defend Apple against even the most innocuous or honest critique.
Eh yeah, a non-proprietary charging method, using a cheap and widely available cable, connecting to a port that pretty much every smartphone is going to have anyway if they want USB connectivity. You can now buy a 5 car cigarette lighter micro usb chargers, instead of a specific LG/SE/Nokia/Samsung/Apple one, how is that hurting you??
Like you said, they can keep the old charging port as well, and that's exactly what Nokia has done with its latest phones. Again, what is bad about that? Would they have skipped the USB port otherwise?
I agree with all your comments about Symbian development.
"I'll admit that I've never had any contact with this, because our product is really aimed at Series 60, and it is faintly possible that if they do a good enough job they might make Symbian usable again"
Well, it's really good, on the newer devices (N8 and onwards, post S60). Here they have the potential to minimize the role of Avkon and have a Qt UI pushing the pixels. The SDK is pretty painless, and development moves fast (you can follow it through gitorious).
I am not sure how things are going to be for S60, I am pretty confident the Qt SDK will isolate you from Symbian for normal application developments, but I'm not confident about the performance, let alone the pitiful C: drive space needed just for the libs.
But about your point, a Linux kernel would not be as efficient on eg the N8 as Symbian. It's the legacy UI stuff that is holding it back. If executed well, developers could care less what contortions the core OS is performing as long as they can pass in a QString. The build system is supposedly also improved, but the Qt SDK does a good job hiding its warts from you anyway. I quite like Qt Creator.
Why don't you think multi-touch is as useful on a tablet? Given there is more room to use your hand, it seems like the larger screen allows better use of multi-touch gestures.
Are there resistive touchscreens out there that have decent pressure sensitivity?
You can still get pressure sensitivity on a capacitive touchscreen via a stylus. I'm sure Wacom tablets have better pressure sensitivity than any resistive touchscreen and that's how they do it.
Not tried a lot of "graduations" of pressure in my n900... seem to be very responsive to normal pressures (i.e. the gestures to scroll), you can do very light pressure to select something without clicking on it, and some interaction seem to feel harder ones. The video on the link of my previous post shows how it works for a drawing. Other resistive touchscreens could work better or worse than it, but is my reference implementation.
Regarding capacitive with stylus, afaik the capacitive (on iphone, could be different kinds) need to be with the finger or at least something conductive as it, i.e. no gloves or full plastic stylus.
It's the moderation system- the fact that any kiddie can moderate an intelligent, insightful, and factual comment down merely because they disagree means it discourages those smart, intelligent, insightful people from posting. In contrast, the rabid zealots whose arguments rarely make any sense whatsoever and demonstrate a complete lack of understanding about computing will continue to post regardless of moderation precisely because they are zealots to their cause. The net result is, there are ever more stupid people getting mod points which means ever more modding down and discouraging of the smart people who express their knowledge out of a simple willingness to help others learn and understand things and an increase in the zealots who express their bullshit simply because they feel it's their duty to defend their cause no matter how hypocritical it makes them- i.e. one minute they'll decry DRM because it's "cool" to do so then the next minute they'll rabidly defend the likes of Sony, Valve, Apple, or whoever their favourite toy company is despite them being the worst DRM pushers in the industry.
Slashdot is broken, and the moderation system only encourages it's decline over time. The moderation system was even handing me out about 60 mod points a day once, I was moderating sensibly, correctly moderating down comments that I personally knew were certainly wrong, and moderating others up that were smart and insightful. I did target some people, but those who have a loyal fanbase of zealots who mod them up because they worship the same corporation, rather than because the comments were correct, but I was sure to only moderate down commentst that truly were invalid or trolling and I didn't mod down just for the sake of modding them down. I was meta-moderating in between and getting mod points back very quickly as a result- sometimes 4 times a day and this lasted a few weeks, then my account stopped working properly and I've never had mod points since so can only assume Taco and co. don't actually like balance and reason being brought to moderation and actually prefer to see moderation based on zealotry, I guess feeding the zealots with trollish stories and moderation just provides a better business model, certainly this is the path The Register has taken too in that it generally just posts stories nowadays that will incite the mindless hoardes into a typical flamewar and generate lots of hits, even if it means losing everyone with any amount of actual worthwhile knowledge and a willingness to pass it on.
Slashdot really has become a bastion of stupidity for the most part, it's just a shame there's not really anywhere else to go to find more intelligent discussion- even sites like XKCD are full of undergrads and college students thinking they know more than they do and insisting they're right and the other person is wrong in the face of people with far more knowledge and experience than them. Kids who simply don't recognise where the bounds of their knowledge end, and who would rather than accept they're wrong will continue to insist they're right.
bought mine for $300 used a few months ago. the prices of hardware keep coming down. one day, everyone can afford these.
It's not that multi-touch is less useful, it's that tablets allow for more complicated, "more serious" tasks and their UIs, where the higher precision of a resistive screen is more useful. While the usefulness of multi-touch remains the same.
I'm not sure pressing lightly to select something matters that much. iOS gets around this with tap and hold. Some Wacom tablet do 1024 levels of pressure -- it is more designed as a drawing feature than part of interacting with the GUI in general.
There are already styluses out there that work on the iPad. I'm guessing they have a metal tip coated in plastic.
The only task I can think of that is much more suited to a tablet that benefits from precision is drawing/writting, as a finger is still just as big on a tablet.
When talking about market share?
One that hath name thou can not otter