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Symbian Foundation Sites To Close
Following news earlier this month that Nokia is taking back control of Symbian platform development, the Symbian Foundation has now announced that its websites will shut down on December 17th. Source repositories will no longer be hosted online, and user-submitted content databases may be available later upon request.
"We are working hard to make sure that most of the content accessible through web services (such as the source code, kits, wiki, bug database, reference documentation & Symbian Ideas) is available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation. Preparing this content will take some time, hence it will not be distributable before 31st January 2011. A charge may be levied for media and shipping.
Symbian is dead. No need to wait for Netcraft to confirm it.
How will this affect the high-end adult toy industry?
Android stands a top Symbian's beheaded body: "There can be only one!"
If they want to keep the work done until now available, why don't they just "freeze" the website as it is now, in stead of preparing a USB-HD/DVD?
They say they won't be hosting the source code online and that some of the user-submitted content databases will be available on request.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this means that Symbian ceases to be free software.
Okay then, I won't buy the N8 and look for an Android phone instead.
You could always buy an N900
I am not aware of any store in my city that sells the N900. I tried back in May, and zero out of three stores had an N900 for me to try. Nor do any of my friends who live in my city have one so that I could try one before I buy one online.
All they need to do is to make a few torrents and then let the community re-host the content.
There are several sites which offer the Yahoo Geocities archives - so there are undoubtedly more than enough people willing to share hosting resources.
Time to download the PDK whilst I still can, would love to see someone fork Symbian OS and develop some of the research projects e.g. X86, minimal ARM builds. Perhaps some of the ex-Symbian engineers will do this as a hobby project now that Nokia are sacking many of the OS developers.
On a purely technical basis Symbian is still light years ahead of Android, it's just Nokia's decision to run on slow hardware and have crappy apps, UI. If you don't believe me compare N97 and Samsun Omnia which share a common baseline/Symbian OS.
I am not much of a programmer; so, this is not too relevant to me. However, I am saddened to see the last vestiges of Psion go.
I had several Psion PDA's and they were great. I used the early, and later generation palm devices, the windows CE and windows PDA devices along with the Psion. The keyboard on the Psion 5 series could not be beat in that form factor. It would have been interesting to see what they would have become if they had made it into the current era of wireless internet communications.
The PDAs are pretty much all replaced by smartphones. I even have a smartphone. I have discovered that they are not as good as the old combo of having a dedicated PDA and a dedicated cellphone. The simple fact is that smartphones are not that good as a phone. Further, they, needing to also be a phone are not optimized for use as a PDA. They are a classic example of a compromise device; or a multi-tool, they are not great ant any given function.
One has to wonder if Nokia really knows where it's going.
It's going to MeeGo. As I understand it, Symbian is just the legacy system that Nokia uses on "feature phones" until MeeGo matures.
I was one of a series strategic consultants hired when Symbian was considering conversion to an Open Source project. Unfortunately, what I told them was not what they wanted to hear. One element I pushed was that nobody was going to be interested in their kernel, regardless of what they did, and that conversion to Linux would eventually be necessary if they were not to continue to expend millions on re-inventing the wheel. Another element was licensing and strategy so that the project would continue to make money, which, amazingly, was rejected as Symbian's customers were also its owners and didn't care for it to continue as a for-profit project. Rather than the direction they took, I would have preferred to see them continue to operate as a profitable proprietary software company, because they very obviously weren't going to make it in Open Source.
But in truth, this project started too late to have much hope.
Bruce Perens.
Series 30 (or Series 40 which is 30 with Java more or less) was a great OS. In fact, there probably never was or will be a telephone OS that can be brought up on a new platform as fast as 30 or 40 could be.
Symbian was a "good, we found something other than Microsoft" solution. A Series 60 phone can run on 33Mhz with 2 megs of RAM. Yes, I know, Linux can theoretically do that too. But Linux does NOT have a good out of memory handling strategy... well neither does Symbian, but the crap design of Symbian otherwise actually makes it quite suitable for these 2 megabyte platforms.
Symbian apps are all designed from the ground up to suck for almost all purposes, but not to crash on low memory. You spend 90% of your programming time on Symbian trying to figure out how to use the string class because just saying String A= String B take 10 lines of code. And that's because every line of a Symbian app is designed to take low memory into consideration.
Linux is NOT suited for that and anyone who would suggest doing such a horrible thing to Linux as has been done to Symbian should be shot just for making such a bad suggestion.
A Nokia Series 60 phone is a phone containing the absolute least expensive components possible. Occasionally you get lucky and they'll use an 8meg RAM chip instead of a 4meg RAM chip because they found out that if they spent $0.04 more for it, they could save $0.05 on a cheaper battery as the 8meg chip was processed at 45nm instead of 65nm.
Additionally, Nokia can brag to the press that they're the #1 smart phone vendor in the world because 90% of their phones are shipping with a Smart Phone OS. It makes it so people will still believe that one day Nokia might actually be able to make a real smart phone that people might actually not think sucks.
Nokia might want to have the coolest high end smart phone on the planet for marketing purposes, but they're going to sell 100,000 of them at $500 profit (on components) each. On the other hand, they'll sell 100,000,000 series 60 phones at $10 profit on each during that same period.
To make Linux fit on that cheapy device, they'd have to rewrite every single app. The only actual Linux component would be the kernel itself and that will be instrumented from hell to high water to do things like signal when this thing is low on memory. Or shutdown this subsystem when that app needs a little more RAM. blah blah blah.
Linux is the wrong operating system for this. Even if it were the right operating system for Nokia, it's the wrong application for the Linux world in general.