4 ms·

Frankly i will eternally be puzzled why Symbian was dropped like a hot potato when iPhone and Android entered the scene. It was almost as if the American tech

Frankly i will eternally be puzzled why Symbian was dropped like a hot potato when iPhone and Android entered the scene. It was almost as if the American tech press was completely unfamiliar with the mobile world outside USA (never mind being stupefyingly in love with Apple), and thus they praised iPhone like something unique in the mobile world when it launched. The real puzzler though is that the rest of the world's tech press parroted that message like they believed it, when they should have known better.

willvarfar 10y ago
I was an insider so I was jaded and biased. But ... :) S60 was a horrid codebase and very hard to wrangle into modern things. UIQ was a cleaner smaller codebase where the main big apps (e.g. messaging) didn't actually use the latest greatest parts of the framework. UIQ was always being dragged in opposing directions by its two big owners - Sony Ericsson and Motorola. Sony Ericsson had some success with their early P800 and just wanted to keep on iterating that with the P900 etc, whereas Motorola wanted smarter feature phones and features like keypad navigation. Neither wanted capacitive touch, despite UIQ suggesting it umpteen times. The Symbian codebase was an antiquated C++ dialect. I happened to have liked it, and found it very expressive and powerful and simple, but there was definitely a learning curve. When the iphone came along it was so simple and beautiful and had a capacitive screen and basically everything else was obsolete immediately. Android was unreleased and actually had an extensional crisis at that point, but they quickly revamped it to be more iphone-like and launched. At that point everyone else thought "android will be cheaper to develop!" and dropped Symbian just as quick as they could. And I don't blame them.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  That all sounds oddly similar to a bunch of reasoning going on in the FOSS world right now.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Yes Symbian C++ was a pain and the Codewarrior replaced by Eclipse with CDT (attempt 1), replaced by Carbide (Eclipse CDT attempt 2), augmented with PIPS, extended with Qt, on top of Perl and BASH scripts wasn't very fun to use, if at all. Recall that Nokia blog post that was quickly removed, about only devs that get paid would develop for Symbian? When version 3 came out I was expecting Symbian C++ would be replaced by proper C++, given the overhaul the system got for security support. Yet, the OS itself with its mikro-kernel architecture, C++ instead of C, task based architecture and security model was quite interesting from OS architecture point of view. The updated Belle version was quite a joy to use on my Nokia C6-01.
- pjc50 10y ago
  If I remember rightly, the real innovation was the "app store" (even if that came slightly after the iPhone launch). It was surprisingly hard to actually get S60 apps.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    In Europe it was quite easy, as most operators had their own store and even Ovi Store was available since 2007, one year early than iPhone's one.
  - willvarfar 10y ago
    When the iphone was launched you couldn't make native apps. http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/13/2612736/ios-history-iphone-ipad http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/13/2612736/ios-history-iphon... What the iphone1 did was look and feel gorgeous. It was entirely the user experience that made it an obvious winner that made Symbian obsolete overnight.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Only for those that did not use a Nokia N95, Nokia Communicator or Nokia 7700 (one of the first touch screen mobiles), hence why I was hardly convinced back then.
      - willvarfar 10y ago
        And I was saying the iphone didn't start out with an appstore...
tdkl 10y ago
They were. American mobile phones didn't even have SMS.
- macintux 10y ago
  That's certainly not accurate. MMS was I believe rare, but I was (reluctantly and clumsily) texting on a Motorola Pebl before the iPhone was released.
Yaggo 10y ago
> Frankly i will eternally be puzzled why Symbian was dropped like a hot potato when iPhone and Android entered the scene. I had top of the line Symbian/UIQ phone when I got the original iPhone. Despite not having user-installable apps nor 3G, I still remember the amazing "sci-fi" feeling of the iPhone. Graphics, display quality, ux, responsiviness, web browser etc. were superior compared to my SonyEricsson.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  A clear reminder that the masses are shallow...
  - zelos 10y ago
    Demanding a decent user experience is shallow now?
  - ikurei 10y ago
    I would actually say that, to an extent, the masses are wise. Often they care more than we do about experience and reliabity. What good does it make to me if my phone has a micro-kernel architecture? Of course, on the other hand, the "masses" should care a tad more about security.
maxxxxx 10y ago
I tried to develop Symbian apps and this was probably the worst development experience I ever had. The SDK was a total mess and it felt like the OS was not much better behind the scenes.

willvarfar 10y ago

I was an insider so I was jaded and biased. But ... :) S60 was a horrid codebase and very hard to wrangle into modern things. UIQ was a cleaner smaller codebase where the main big apps (e.g. messaging) didn't actually use the latest greatest parts of the framework. UIQ was always being dragged in opposing directions by its two big owners - Sony Ericsson and Motorola. Sony Ericsson had some success with their early P800 and just wanted to keep on iterating that with the P900 etc, whereas Motorola wanted smarter feature phones and features like keypad navigation. Neither wanted capacitive touch, despite UIQ suggesting it umpteen times. The Symbian codebase was an antiquated C++ dialect. I happened to have liked it, and found it very expressive and powerful and simple, but there was definitely a learning curve. When the iphone came along it was so simple and beautiful and had a capacitive screen and basically everything else was obsolete immediately. Android was unreleased and actually had an extensional crisis at that point, but they quickly revamped it to be more iphone-like and launched. At that point everyone else thought "android will be cheaper to develop!" and dropped Symbian just as quick as they could. And I don't blame them.

digi_owl 10y ago
That all sounds oddly similar to a bunch of reasoning going on in the FOSS world right now.
pjmlp 10y ago
Yes Symbian C++ was a pain and the Codewarrior replaced by Eclipse with CDT (attempt 1), replaced by Carbide (Eclipse CDT attempt 2), augmented with PIPS, extended with Qt, on top of Perl and BASH scripts wasn't very fun to use, if at all. Recall that Nokia blog post that was quickly removed, about only devs that get paid would develop for Symbian? When version 3 came out I was expecting Symbian C++ would be replaced by proper C++, given the overhaul the system got for security support. Yet, the OS itself with its mikro-kernel architecture, C++ instead of C, task based architecture and security model was quite interesting from OS architecture point of view. The updated Belle version was quite a joy to use on my Nokia C6-01.
pjc50 10y ago
If I remember rightly, the real innovation was the "app store" (even if that came slightly after the iPhone launch). It was surprisingly hard to actually get S60 apps.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  In Europe it was quite easy, as most operators had their own store and even Ovi Store was available since 2007, one year early than iPhone's one.
- willvarfar 10y ago
  When the iphone was launched you couldn't make native apps. http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/13/2612736/ios-history-iphone-ipad http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/13/2612736/ios-history-iphon... What the iphone1 did was look and feel gorgeous. It was entirely the user experience that made it an obvious winner that made Symbian obsolete overnight.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Only for those that did not use a Nokia N95, Nokia Communicator or Nokia 7700 (one of the first touch screen mobiles), hence why I was hardly convinced back then.
    - willvarfar 10y ago
      And I was saying the iphone didn't start out with an appstore...

tdkl 10y ago

They were. American mobile phones didn't even have SMS.

macintux 10y ago
That's certainly not accurate. MMS was I believe rare, but I was (reluctantly and clumsily) texting on a Motorola Pebl before the iPhone was released.

Yaggo 10y ago

> Frankly i will eternally be puzzled why Symbian was dropped like a hot potato when iPhone and Android entered the scene. I had top of the line Symbian/UIQ phone when I got the original iPhone. Despite not having user-installable apps nor 3G, I still remember the amazing "sci-fi" feeling of the iPhone. Graphics, display quality, ux, responsiviness, web browser etc. were superior compared to my SonyEricsson.

digi_owl 10y ago
A clear reminder that the masses are shallow...
- zelos 10y ago
  Demanding a decent user experience is shallow now?
- ikurei 10y ago
  I would actually say that, to an extent, the masses are wise. Often they care more than we do about experience and reliabity. What good does it make to me if my phone has a micro-kernel architecture? Of course, on the other hand, the "masses" should care a tad more about security.

maxxxxx 10y ago

I tried to develop Symbian apps and this was probably the worst development experience I ever had. The SDK was a total mess and it felt like the OS was not much better behind the scenes.