No it wasn't. It was a marginally functional OS full of unbelievably quirky behavior. The underlying subsystems were so fundamentally broken (and poorly writte

No it wasn't. It was a marginally functional OS full of unbelievably quirky behavior. The underlying subsystems were so fundamentally broken (and poorly written) that Symbian itself couldn't actually fix them. There is a reason messaging never quite worked right. The installer was perpetually broken as well. I never seen a project that introduced more regression from release to release than Symbian. Fundamentally it was a C++ based OS that was introduced before C++ really existed as a standard. They independently invented and implemented a number of features that would eventually become standard within C++ (exceptions spring to mind). Either way, Symbian is a mess. It's seriously a warning about the dangers of Object Oriented development gone terribly wrong. Huge class hierarchies? Yep, Symbian's got em. Convoluted multiple inheritance with indeterminate behavior? Check. The list goes on and on. Symbian was (and is) so fundamentally flawed that while your phone did all of those things, it also failed far to often at installing apps, providing usable interfaces, and actually getting messaging and things to work. *note: I'm a bitter refugee from the Symbian world having been principally involved in one of the most widely distributed apps written for the platform.