Nokia's 808 PureView Officially the End of the Symbian Line

Snirt writes "Symbian is now officially dead, Nokia confirmed today. In the company's earnings announcement that came out a little while ago, Nokia confirmed that the 808 PureView, released last year, was the very last device that the company would make on the Symbian platform: 'During our transition to Windows Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian,' the company wrote. 'The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia.'"

Comments

I didn't like it

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't like it when the Symbians kidnapped Patty Hearst, but their phones were OK for a while.

Re:I didn't like it

[cshark]

Both systems are expensive, clunky, profit losing failures. I wish Nokia would go with Android. Their hardware isn't bad.

Re:I didn't like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia going w Android is a brilliant move. Maybe we can get back to the indestructible mobile device of yesteryear.

I was a solid and loyal Nokia fan for 10+ years until Symbian forced me to rethink.

I remember cycling to work, dropping my nokia into the street. Came apart, battery on the road. No problem worked fiine. Cracked screen or whatnot, worked fine. Those things would not die!

tl;dr Nokia phones were famous for rock solid, abuse-proof hardware. Hope they attach this to a proper OS and live again.

Re:I didn't like it

[1s44c]

Android loses money for everyone except Samsung. Anyway you go, Nokia was fucked.

Anyway, these threads are always funny with the clueless Symbian fanboys and the usual M$ hater-extremes circle-jerking each other.

How about Nokia stop trying to implode and build a better phone instead? Take the n900, make it thiner and lighter, with longer battery life, a faster processor, and a better screen. Upgrade the camera too but keep the nice keyboard. How about they offer that phone with a choice of Windows or Maemo?

I'd stay clear of Windows phones personally but it should be possible to build hardware that all OS's can run on, unless the terms of the MS suicide pill forbid using anything else that is.

Re:I didn't like it

[Kjella]

People like you don't seem to get it. Symbian HAS failed. If it hadn't it would be here today.

That's like saying a man's heart failed - because it had a knife stabbed through it. It's dead but not by natural causes and the CEO holding the knife is Elop.

Re:I didn't like it

[Taco Cowboy]

Android loses money for everyone except Samsung.

[citation needed]

While there _are_ vendors who have failed on their Android offerings, many others are making decent profits from it.

While many of those second tier brands aren't well known to the West, they are being widely used in many third world countries in Africa, South America, as well as Asia.
 

Re:I didn't like it

[terryo]

For the last 5 years or so, you really had to work to buy a Nokia phone in the US. I have an N79, E72, N8 and an N900. I could sell them for close to what I paid for them even today. Well, except for the E72, which AT&T had, so there are a lot of them. I didn't mind Symbian too much but the lack of memory in the phone was short-sighted. OTOH, the battery life, the camera quality - they were ahead of their time for so long they took it for granted. Can't do that anymore in any industry.

However, the customer service was uniformly awful. Waiting for months or years as Nokia rolled out firmware updates? No thanks. That's why I look at the XDA-Dev forums for a supported phone when I need to buy a new one. (Last one was a Sony Xperia, now using a Samsung Captivate Glide, one of the few keyboards left.)

Re:I didn't like it

[mister2au]

Take the n900, make it thiner and lighter, with longer battery life, a faster processor, and a better screen.

Gee ... is that all ... faster and better screen but also better battery life ... and the battery can't be bigger because it has to be thinner and lighter ???

Upgrade the camera too but keep the nice keyboard.

While still making it thinner and lighter?

How about they offer that phone with a choice of Windows or Maemo?

Ok now I think the whole post was just sarcasm ???

You are suggesting a struggling company piles on the R&D to get a more feature packed phone with better battery life while staying smaller and supporting 2 different operating systems ... Sounds reasonable

Re:I didn't like it

[oztiks]

Hardly, though I like Android as my personal favourite. I keep breaking Android phones and have given up on them. The iPhone 3X was a sturdy phone (iPhone 4+ are as cruddy as any Android device IMHO, drop test my ass!) and lasted a few extra months of wear and tear but the Nokia is built the last, you could throw them at someone and kill'em they are so tough. Your "isn't that bad" should be "best damn quality hardware in the market" regardless of spec.

In any case WP8 is not clunky and it's just fine for what it does; which is make phone class; snap a few shots with a better camera than any other competitor's device; boast a proper GPS solution called "Nokia Drive" and was a feature "pre mainstream android versions" and works just as well (not like the Apple disaster); it doesn't suck battery; and it loads websites just fine. I'm really sick of hearing the "obligatory" it's shit because it's Microsoft. Please point out its failings? I've used it now for several months now and found absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Oh yes, the Appstore is smaller and boasts far less Fart Apps than its competitors and yes I am aware of this so make sure you strike that one off your list before responding.

Re:I didn't like it

[1s44c]

I'm suggesting they try to make something that people will like. The R&D budget is the last thing they should cut when they need a cool new product to sell.

If they try they may fail. If they don't try they will fail. You appear to be suggesting that they should just curl up in a corner and die quietly.

Sorry to see Symbian go

[johanw]

Symbian phones were very feature complete (much more so than Android and iOS, my E72 has functionality that even now isn't standard on those) and I don't like to see it go. I still use a Nokia E72 as my primary phone and plan to do so for some more years, I even bought a spare used E72 in case something happens to it. Now that rooting Symbian is easy I even get functionality that was Android specific for some time, like adblocking with a hostsfile. And of course a week of battary use, get that from any current device.

Re:Sorry to see Symbian go

[amiga3D]

I'm wondering since Symbian is open source now if someone else will make any Symbian phones.

Re:Sorry to see Symbian go

[gstoddart]

I'm betting you'd only get the core OS, but most of the stuff related to actual telephony would be patented/proprietary.

I'd be surprised if you could fully operate your phone with the open source bits -- but admittedly, that's mostly just a guess.

Re:Sorry to see Symbian go

[johanw]

Well, things some service providers didn't like like sending files over Bluetooth n(of infrared for the models that had that). My E72 has out of the box functionality to choose which phone calls can be directly diverted to /dev/null or voicemail. It comes with a dictionary and office reading software, and, most importantly, with offline navigation. It uses a decent profile system so when I'm at work I can set it to vibrate only with just changing profiles. Added software can even do that automatically on a timed basis so I can program in office hours, or even detect which cell towers it connects to there and let it dwitch when it connects to those towers. And, of cource, a lot of models have a decent keyboard. Only disadvantage I know is that the non-toch models won't run Angry Birds.

Re:Sorry to see Symbian go

[gl4ss]

symbian open source was always back-and-forth lipservice and confusion. they never did it properly and always restarted and backpedaled, reorganized and reshuffled, put repos up and down...

the state was such that there's this legend that you could get it to boot on a beagle.

frankly if someone would pick it up and try to turn it into a working product from that they would be in a legal minefield AND IN AN INSANE ASYLUM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!fewr junk fewer junk

Re:Sorry to see Symbian go

[gl4ss]

well, of symbian^4 (or 4 or wtf it was supposed to be, who the fuck knows since apparently whenever they reorganized the new guy at the top thought that instead of fixing things it was just important to rename things) you would've gotten the ui(and well, not that much else relevant for making a phone..).

it was axed though(the four), but they did do one public commit of the tree at least which included homescreen. around the axing they decided to go all qml.
so you'd get some ui pieces for a dead tree.

and earlier symbian source.. well, if you want to go insane, take a look. there's really nothing that much worthwhile saving there without properiaty phone stack to go along with it.. so you could run the whole phone on a single arm chip or execute in place from rom. symbian did some neat tricks like that, but with current chip pricing they don't matter that much.

the reason why the story isn't pretty is that always they just went adding api's instead of fixing them. as if stacking an extra api on top of a broken one would fix the broken api underneath! how the fuck that's supposed to work? I'll suddenly get videoframes from the original api underneath by adding an extra layer on top of it? it wasn't most of the time that big of a problem that the api was totally obscure to use but that it was just plain unimplemented to do half the things it should have done now that was a real problem! but due to the totally broken chain of authority nobody could be arsed to do the work to actually tell people to do the fucking fixes. this plays a major role in why the whole symbian got axed and dumped, the organization was deemed to be bloated beyond repairable, employing 10x the people needed and that just impaired the development - every reorg they did just made things worse and at the height of the organizations size they were still relying on contractors for writing critical pieces of code all the way from kernel to ui. another reason of course is that elop is one lazy fat bastard and this was a very easy way out of the mess for him - just take n9's shell, license sw from MS and call it a day - or rather call it two years of work in a day, but hey at least he didn't have to deal with aholes who had entrenched themselves as guardians of buggy code.

and they should just have gone android. or rather they should have done the open source aspect of symbian properly back in the day and should have made symbian into what became android. you don't execute a successful open source strategy by at the same time releasing source while you lock the platform from unauthorized code!

anyone doing a new phone os now from existing base is just going to go android now, jolla excluded and even them I think would have done better to go with android and extend it.. instead of what they're doing now. easy to find drivers/socs, plenty of sw.. complete open source package to roll the os with and less chance of just going clinically insane.

Re:Sorry to see Symbian go

[Anonymous Coward]

I got an N85 in 2008 (still using it) and it had tons of stuff that other phones at the time did not. A 5 MP camera, the ability to install apps from any source (including game emulators), ability to watch flash videos, FM radio (including an FM transmitter), an actual filesystem that you could access, offline turn by turn navigation, the ability to connect to an Microsoft Exchange server to name a few. I also had an N770 which had the full power of a Linux system. Meego was suppose to combine the two, but Nokia went with Microsoft killing the perfect phone.

Re:Sorry to see Symbian go

[ras]

It's sad, but my retired Symbian E70 remains to this day a better phone than any modern smart phone. It is smaller, faster to make a phone call, the battery lasted a week, the loud speaker was louder, the microphone is it was so good we ended using in preference to dedicated devices for recording messages, the native SIP stack in it (and we are talking 5 years go now) was better and more reliable than in Android 4.2.1 today, it could be doing several things and still play music and podcasts without a single glitch, and it was dropped numerous times without a case and still works to this day. Some of those things, like the battery life and real time performance (eg the SIP stack) were due to Symbian. That it was a absolute bitch to program on is also due to Symbian.

I retired the E70 when I could no longer buy batteries for it. I didn't like the smartphone that replaced it at first because it sucks at every thing the E70 was good at, but gradually I discovered the function I used least in the smartphone was the phone. Much as I liked it, it is Symbian's time to go. It belongs to a bygone era when RAM was expensive, CPU's were gutless and and mobile phones were used primarily as phones.

Re:Sorry to see Symbian go

[jrumney]

VoIP/SIP support is there in Android, it's just fairly well hidden (not in the main Settings menu, but in the Phone application's Settings menu, labelled as "Accounts", not to be confused with another menu labelled "Accounts" that controls the contact syncing with various providers). DLNA is an add on - most Samsung phones have it out of the box (branded as AllShare), I'm not sure why yours doesn't.

That's too bad, RIP Symbian...

[VP]

What is worse is that it is hard to find any existing Symbian devices...

For all the drawbacks of Symbian, the combination of a camera that put to shame any other cellphones, and the built-in capabilities of the phone (e.g. a complete SIP stack, integrated with the regular phone functionality) is still unmatched. Even Nokia themselves cannot replicate the hardware capabilities of the 808 in a Windows phone, because the OS can't handle them...

oh no!!!

[sunking2]

Women love them so much though!!!

Get your gruesome details here:

[whoever57]

Detailed analysis of Nokia.

Did you notice the line going up.

[tuppe666]

Android doesn't even mention a mention

Ignoring your insults...do you really not know why Google do Android. Google‘s original base intention with Android was just to make sure that Google wasn’t shut out of the mobile market. It is expected to make $4Billion from mobile advertising in the US alone this year.

Still don't believe me CEO Larry Page last conference call for *last quarter* [Now selling 1.5Billion device daily] "This time last year, I announced that our run rate from mobile advertising hit $2.5 billion . . . But now, we’ve built up additional mobile revenue from users paying for content and apps in Google Play . . . I can announce our new run rate for mobile is now over $8 billion. That’s quite a business."

Calling someone a fanboy, just because your too lazy to Google is a disgrace.