From the software engineer's point of view, there can be no question that Symbian is by far the nicest platform to work on. It's got the same two decades of her

From the software engineer's point of view, there can be no question that Symbian is by far the nicest platform to work on. It's got the same two decades of heritage as pretty much every other popular operating system that exists today, but it shows what can be achieved if the people who designed the OS in the 80s were thinking clearly about the future. It's so refreshing to work on an Operating System where character sets aren't anything you have to worry about, that has Unicode designed in to every component from the file server on up. To use processes rather than DLLs as the basic unit of code reuse is just great, and with platsec to have a decent mechanism for policing access to those processes... Well, I could go on and on, but I better not. It also helps to have a quarter of a billion phone installed base, and almost 1 in every 10 phones shipped being a Symbian phone. Not just Smartphones, mind, all types of phone.