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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They will only be a problem for Apple if they start to siphon significant developers away from Apple, Android, and Blackberry. They might be a problem for Windows Phone 7 though. That could be a battle.
They sell more phones than anybody, but not when you look at individual segments. For the smartphone market, they aren't doing very well and I really don't see what they can do to turn that around. Fantastic hardware isn't enough. In fact, I would say fantastic marketing is more important than engineering.
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 ;)
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'?
"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.
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
You miss the modus operandi of Nokia. They offer wide range of devices, starting from $20 (without contract!) S30 ones, via S40, Symbian, and now Meego. Each category made affordable to greater number of people, over time. "Slim chance of succeeding" is a misunderstanding.
"iPod is the only one that matters" is telling - you don't see how that's appears to be so only in very few atypical places (BTW, for a long time Nokia alone sells more music capable phones annually than the total number of iPods ever produced). Similar with "domination" of iPhone...
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
Well, Japanese seem to also think it's a reasonable choice (though their flavor is not part of S60 lineage of course)
And a few dozens of millions of phones are already there - Qt SDK supports Symbian versions which are hitting 4 years now.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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
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.
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.
...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.
> 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?
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.