3 ms·

Symbian was simply atrocious compared to the other systems. The problem was not that they tanked it, but that they didn't tank it early enough.

bitL 10y ago
Yes, they were pretty asleep, yet MeeGo was quite nice, even Engadget, traditionally hostile to Symbian, was impressed with N9, and Elop did everything he could to kill it (couldn't be sold in the US/UK/Germany etc.), and it still managed to outsold first Lumias.
csours 10y ago
I haven't experienced Symbian; was it atrocious for devs? users? How was it atrocious?
- snuxoll 10y ago
  As someone who owned multiple Symbian phones, it was great as a user - developing for it was a different matter entirely with the bastardized C++ variant you had available (no exceptions or a lot of other common features that were left out because the original devices running Symbian had nowhere near enough CPU power to handle them, but once the S60 3rd Edition devices like my N75 started rolling around they should have been pushing hard on modernizing the toolchain - they didn't).
- ptaipale 10y ago
  It was atrocious to developers. I looked at it just a bit myself, decided not to go there at all; I knew many Symbian developers and they said they'd generally prefer contracting syphilis to contracting Symbian. Symbian was and probably still is the best phone platform, and the usability of most important phone functions (just making phone calls, and also things like what the phone does with alarm clock during call / when phone is switched off, or what it does when you get a text message during a call, etc) was very well designed. But Nokia leadership just wanted to keep doing what was selling so well (keyboard phones) so touchscreen development was ignored. The horrible complexity of Symbian app development was the other big issue.

3 ms·

Symbian was simply atrocious compared to the other systems. The problem was not that they tanked it, but that they didn't tank it early enough.

by tigershark 10y ago

bitL 10y ago
Yes, they were pretty asleep, yet MeeGo was quite nice, even Engadget, traditionally hostile to Symbian, was impressed with N9, and Elop did everything he could to kill it (couldn't be sold in the US/UK/Germany etc.), and it still managed to outsold first Lumias.
csours 10y ago
I haven't experienced Symbian; was it atrocious for devs? users? How was it atrocious?
- snuxoll 10y ago
  As someone who owned multiple Symbian phones, it was great as a user - developing for it was a different matter entirely with the bastardized C++ variant you had available (no exceptions or a lot of other common features that were left out because the original devices running Symbian had nowhere near enough CPU power to handle them, but once the S60 3rd Edition devices like my N75 started rolling around they should have been pushing hard on modernizing the toolchain - they didn't).
- ptaipale 10y ago
  It was atrocious to developers. I looked at it just a bit myself, decided not to go there at all; I knew many Symbian developers and they said they'd generally prefer contracting syphilis to contracting Symbian. Symbian was and probably still is the best phone platform, and the usability of most important phone functions (just making phone calls, and also things like what the phone does with alarm clock during call / when phone is switched off, or what it does when you get a text message during a call, etc) was very well designed. But Nokia leadership just wanted to keep doing what was selling so well (keyboard phones) so touchscreen development was ignored. The horrible complexity of Symbian app development was the other big issue.