Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
After owning Nexus for about a year, N95 and N86 combined for over 4 years. I concluded that Nokia still makes excellent Phones. Things just work. Problem is, in this day an age of internet, Nokia is finding it hard to make things more than a Phone. Having said that, they did pretty well integrating media and camera into their phones.
Stuff like simple Bluetooth pairing worked flawlessly between my car and the N95/N86. With Nexus, it frustrates, sometimes it just wouldn't pair, when it does, often it picks up, the call stays on the phone speaker/mic. I mean really, Google, what gives. This same car had no issues with either of the Nokia. So there is definitely something to be said about the symbian kernel (something positive).
Battery life, they were great too. Further, after the N86 came the Nexus one. The day I got the Nexus one is the same day my Photo and Video collection stopped growing. I miss that from my N86. I have a collection of my kids pics and videos for almost everyday, with a decent 8MP camera, the pics aren't SLR quality, but not bad. I would go back to N86 if it wasn't so sluggish. I would really really give up internet browsing on a mobile device to have a fast peppy N86. N8 is tempting me, but where are the apps Nokia.... argh... Nothing is perfect.
they simply cannot forget symbian, because:
1) they are still relevant because of huge number of symbian users
2) meego is not ready and will some need time to mature
3) if there is problem with meego, or meego adoption and symbian is obsoleted, they are dead.
+ they need OS for low/mid-end and symbian is better for that than meego.
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
...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.