9 ms·

I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an ex

I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Network operators desperately wanted an alternative ecosystem to avoid being dependent on Android and Apple (but mainly I believe so that they could build their own walled gardens). But by the time Nokia took over Symbian it became apparent that they saw Linux as the future OS for high-end devices and Symbian was to be relegated to mid-level devices.

franze 6y ago
My boss at the Austria Press Agency wanted a software to distribute our news to Mobile Phones in 2004 or 5 or so. So I took a deep dive into Symbian with very limited C++ understanding. It took me at least a month to figure that that C++ is not C++ at all. In the end senior engineers, were put on it. Project went nowhere. And then came iPhone and we went down the Mobile Browser Road (years later Apps I think).
- secondcoming 6y ago
  They adopted C++ very early on in the language's life. The standard at the time had not even specified how exceptions worked, so Symbian rolled their own (TRAP and User::Leave). But then they were stuck... breaking ABI was forbidden, so more modern C++ features couldn't be used (easily).
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    C++ was created in 1979 - I doubt Symbian adopted it "very early". Also, the standard doesn't specify "how exceptions work" even today, in the sense that a lot of what happens when running C++ is implementation dependent. But I can see what you mean about sticking to pre-C++11 (maybe even pre-C++98 ?) APIs.
    - easytiger 6y ago
      In 1998 c++ was a totally different ballgame to c++ in 2010 let alone now
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      The first C++ standardization was C++98, released in (you guessed it) 1998. Symbian's first release, under the EPOC32 name, was in 1997, with working starting on that OS in 1994 (and the company had a prior OS, EPOC16, that was from the late 80s)
pjmlp 6y ago
From the inside it wasn't that apparent, hence why the first Linux based prototypes did not had any radio support. And as cumbersome as Symbian C++ might have been, Android Studio + NDK + JNI wrappers still make me wish for Carbide + Symbian C++ + PIPS.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Originally we used CodeWarrior internally and then Carbide. Most of the Carbide work was done in Dallas and I remember them having a stressful time dealing with Symbian's weird MMP + abld build system.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Yeah, I know also those nice Perl based scripts with batch files glue somehow being called from CodeWarrior, just referred Carbide, because at the end the experience wasn't that bad, specially by the Belle days. Google just doesn't get it, note that major GDC 2020 Android talks are mostly related to NDK improvements, 10 years later.
- smichel17 6y ago
  Although the NDK is really annoying, it's not required to build an app, which it seems like Symbian C++ was. I think that's critical for getting the app ecosystem off the ground.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    You could use Java, Flash, Python and Web Runtime as alternatives back then. Much richer than Android still.
    - smichel17 6y ago
      Thanks for the clarification :) It was before my time.
- easytiger 6y ago
namdnay 6y ago
Oh god I've got flashbacks of those weird exception stacks you had to manage manually
derefr 6y ago
> It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++ Was this just a "using different elements of C++" kind of dialect, or was this an "early Win32 when you had to use pretend-C++ (ATL) together with your real C++, bridging the two with C" kind of dialect? I feel like a lot of application frameworks developed in the 90s ended up in the latter style, as C++ was just becoming popular around then, and many frameworks chose to "merge into" C++ support from C support, rather than creating a ground-up C++ SDK.
- defen 6y ago
  I was responsible for porting a fairly large C++ app to Symbian (this was like 15 years ago, so memory is hazy). The big problems were that exceptions were weird and non-standard, and you couldn't throw them from constructors, so anything using RAII had to be rewritten.
  - avereveard 6y ago
    and it used their own proprietary toolchain, as a layer on top of visual studio iirc, that kind of worked in debug but actually no, I remember we had to purchase a specific nokia to run in dev mode, as not every nokia supported it or was actually supported by the toolchain at the time. and I remember another pain point was feature detection, but can't recall the specifics.
    - secondcoming 6y ago
      I think VS was used before my time (2005), but then it used CodeWarrior and then after that Nokia's own IDE called Carbide. It had MMP files which described the project and the files in it, a then a tool called 'abld' which was a perl script that did the compiling, which actually had two commands to clean... 'abld clean' and 'abld reallyclean' :)
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    RAII can be used without constructors and without exceptions. The acronym is misleading.
kevsim 6y ago
I worked at Nokia starting in about 2004. Looking back on my career, one of the single greatest feelings of accomplishment was getting a Hello World application to run on Symbian/S60. I thought I knew C++ going in, but I wasn't prepared for two phase constructors and the 6 files you'd need to draw a simple list view on the screen. Felt amazing once it worked though!
- QuercusMax 6y ago
  I totally know what you mean - the sense of satisfaction and joy when you get even the most basic "end-to-end" functionality working in a new environment is hard to match.
  - ngcc_hk 6y ago
    It still is; try blink or counter on a new fpga board.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Lol. At least you guys had actual phones to work with. Until we became Nokia all we had was a techview UI shell running on H2, or later, H4 boards that would boot an MMC card. Of course, when we became Nokia we got the flashing stations and access to Phoenix. Only a particular part of the company ever saw phones that were in development and you needed special access to get into that part of the building.
  - mightyscouse 6y ago
    First job out of uni was writing device drivers for Motorola Symbian devices on H4 boards (I want to say LDDs and PDDs?). Codewarrior or carbide if you fancied a reboot every 2 mins, 40 minute turn-around times to flash and boot your software, boards without working SD and having to log to the screen ...I do not miss those days at all. BlackBerry was like a bloody dream.
  - kevsim 6y ago
    I also went through a dev board phase later on when I was working on Maemo, etc. but they took it easy on me when I was fresh out of school and let me have real production hardware
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
But when J2ME support was added, it became easy to develop apps. I used to develop J2ME apps as hobby, I made a game and took it for my first job interview. In that job I had to port a 30,000+ J2ME code app to Android in 2010. The company I worked for was even experimenting with NFC payments in Nokia Symbian phones in 2010!
- pistoriusp 6y ago
  The J2ME world never really felt easy to me: What worked on 1 device didn't on another, there was very limited shared UI, and it felt like it was impossible to target multiple devices.
  - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
    There were MIDP profiles[1] as long the version matched, the apps worked fine in my experience on any device although the devices themselves varied in their key pad placements; Nokia went crazy in their phone designs[2]! [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Information_Device_Profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Information_Device_Prof... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZi-7V11k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZi-7V11k8
    - Steltek 6y ago
      Wow, thanks for that video down memory lane. I had a 3660 (friends called it the "communications brick"). There was no wifi and I couldn't afford a data plan but I was able to have the phone dialup via Bluetooth (think "reverse tether") to my Linux desktop. I never got into J2ME: being a fledgling Linux snob in college, I went for Nokia's C++ target and got stuck in the quagmire.
    - nradov 6y ago
      But MIDP profiles were so limited that you could only build the simplest apps. To do anything complex required calling proprietary extensions, which destroyed portability.
secondcoming 6y ago
I can't edit my comment, but the source code seems to be here: https://github.com/SymbianSource https://github.com/SymbianSource I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning.
- brianpursley 6y ago
  > I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning. OK, so I had to look. It's like they saw the two main camps (same line vs next line) and said "let's come up with something everyone will hate": TInt GetROMSize(TInt /*aDeviceNumber*/, TInt /*aAttrib*/, TBool /*aSet*/, TAny* aInOut) { TMemoryInfoV1 info; TPckg<TMemoryInfoV1> infoPckg(info); TInt r=UserSvr::HalFunction(EHalGroupKernel, EKernelHalMemoryInfo, (TAny*)&infoPckg, NULL); if (r==KErrNone) { *(TInt*)aInOut=info.iTotalRomInBytes; } return r; }
  - perennialmind 6y ago
    Wow. I had a CS professor insist on exactly that style. I couldn't stand it at first, but making accommodations was the whole point. Unfortunately it got me thinking about what I would want. Now I'm the weirdo and I rarely get to write it the way I want. <shrug>
  - mjevans 6y ago
    I can understand the desire to have the brackets at the same indent... but WOW does this break my brain having the inner code not indented from the bracket level. (I tend to prefer the opening backet being on the same line as the condition gate/guard and rely on the parser to inform me of missing brackets. This is even better in languages that have a single format convention.)
- AceJohnny2 6y ago
  > I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning. Hahaha, how bad could it be... ... Why the fuck would they need to indent every function by an 8-space tab!?
ollo 6y ago
You could even program in Python!
stiray 6y ago
I loved symbian and the whole "java on phone" never seemed right to me. I would prefer having a linux phone - I dont ask for much - working camera, working calls, mms and sms, gps, bluetooth). I dont care for anything else. All my hopes are now leaning into Cosmo Communicator( https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-communicator https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-communicator - please take care, I have jumped into this with "I will loose my money" mentality - I still dont trust, they will realize the linux part, but hope dies last), it reminds me of beloved Nokia Communicator and if they realize my conditions (camera, calls, mms, sms - gps already works same as bluetooth ) I will give my foot a very long swing and remove my Android phone (even if heavly modified) from my life.
- kccqzy 6y ago
  > the whole "java on phone" never seemed right to me I'm not sure which Java on phone you are referring to, the Android Java or the older J2ME. The older J2ME apps ran well in limited resources, but was also incredibly complicated to develop due to device fragmentation.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  The indiegogo page seems to imply that they're shipping these devices. Have you not received yours? The simulated pictures look nice...
  - stiray 6y ago
    I already have it, but it is usefull for me only as linux device (well until they release v22 firmware to mod it). But my main motive for buying it was linux/sailfish.
- afandian 6y ago
  As an owner of a Gemini, the hardware is innovative and good enough, but the OS is really an afterthought. You can browse their current wiki and see how organised it is. No disrespect to the team, it just seems like taking sufficient care of this is a bigger job than they have the resources for. But I'm glad I backed the kickstarter, and would do the same for something similar in order to diversify a very un-diverse market.
speeder 6y ago
I am Brazillian, and I think killing Symbian was a huge and stupid mistake. When Microsoft release that memo that killed Symbian, in Brazil its marketshare was INCREASING, there was a lot of people learning how to code for it, many people saw it as a good future, because with it you could make blazing fast CHEAP phones, iPhones were crazy expensive, and android was a slow buggy mess. Thing is... iPhones are STILL crazy expensive, and android STILL is a slow buggy mess if you buy a cheap one. I am yet to find a smartphone I like as much I liked symbian based phones, that are phones first, smart second, and work great for actually phoning people.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Symbian Belle, the last iteration was just great. I only moved to Android when forced to.
  - behnamoh 6y ago
    And this whole notion of "Symbian Won" reminds me how "Windows Phone Won" too. Just look at the latest iOS 14 widgets which is inspired by WP tiles.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      And webOS! https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/15/16300402/iphone-x-webos-palm-pre-cards-gestures-nostalgia https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/15/16300402/iphone-x-webos-p...
- russfink 6y ago
  I could enable GPS and leave the phone on without charging... for THREE WEEKS at a time.
  - nexuist 6y ago
    GPS is a completely passive signal, so it's not really surprising that it lasts a long time. You can get similar battery life with IoT SoCs deployed on the field. The difference between then and now is that modern smartphones use sensor fusion, combining cellular, WiFi, and GPS signals to generate a location. The end result is more accurate output, at the expense of battery life.
malkia 6y ago
Was it the case where no globals were allowed, since "executables" (not really) were more remiscent of dll/shared libs/etc.?
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Good question, I can't remember if globals were allowed, maybe they were as long as they were const so the OS could be executed directly from ROM. But again, I'm not sure, it's been some time.
markus_zhang 6y ago
Oh I always want to write C/C++ code on a Non-Apple mobile but I didn't expect it to be THAT weird...
asjw 6y ago
This really reminds me of good times I started a company with friends to write games for phones, before they were smart Our fist breakthrough was at E3 in LA with a game for Nokia 7650, but we worked on prototypes years before My first mobile connection was with a Nokia 9000i communicator, I was working for an ISP at the time that gave them to us to test mobile connections, and it felt like a James Bond movie I learned so much developing on Symbian, especially being a diligent C++ programmer on a system that wasn't really using standard C++ Fast forward 20 years, I work on backends in Erlang/Elixir and never touched mobile development again J2ME was nice, but limited, I lost hope soon after when iPhones came out and it was clear that the mobile platform wouldn't be fun anymore
neilv 6y ago
Symbian was great, and I loved my indestructible all-silver Nokia E61 non-US version (which included WiFi, unlike the carrier-crippled ones I found in the US). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E61 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E61 I actually looked recently at trying to buy another E61 in good condition, and how much trouble it would be to kludge up access to my email through it. I figured it would be more productive for email than my current mainstream smartphone setup. I have to resist the urge to look into this open-sourced Symbian... :)
- edeion 6y ago
  My beloved E6 had its flaws. It was a pain to sync, the syncs were not serviceable, but at least it was syncing to my computer, not to the cloud. On this one, Symbian Anna felt better than Symbian Belle and it would have been a pain to revert. That said, it was small, smaller than an iPhone SE. And it had a hardware keyboard. I'm not against fancy apps and stuff on my phone but, besides calling reliability, the first thing I want is to be able to type small things. I must confess I was unhappy that it even had a touchscreen: a nightmare when it was raining. I guess I just loved the form factor and its promises. I'm thinking of making this an ode. The E6 ballad. Sorry for that long little-informative comment...
grishka 6y ago
Oh, I got a Symbian phone when I was 16 (I think?) and of course I did try writing native apps for it. Yes, the SDK was horrendous. The C++ dialect was so weird I was never able to make sense of it. (I probably could with my current experience.) I just remember that there were many, many methods that ended with L, this meant "Leave", and this was some bizarre replacement for exceptions, apparently. There were more types of strings than I could count. The naming conventions for things were very weird. The hello world consisted of something like 5 classes and took a minute to build. When you wanted to actually run the thing you made, you had two options: running it in an emulator that took several seconds to process inputs, or running it on your phone via some connector app that only worked 1/3 of the time. I didn't get very far with native Symbian development. J2ME was just so much easier, and ran on everything under the Sun (pun intended).
pabs3 6y ago
The Symbian source code was only briefly public and open source, it got closed and unpublished again fairly quickly.

franze 6y ago

My boss at the Austria Press Agency wanted a software to distribute our news to Mobile Phones in 2004 or 5 or so. So I took a deep dive into Symbian with very limited C++ understanding. It took me at least a month to figure that that C++ is not C++ at all. In the end senior engineers, were put on it. Project went nowhere. And then came iPhone and we went down the Mobile Browser Road (years later Apps I think).

secondcoming 6y ago
They adopted C++ very early on in the language's life. The standard at the time had not even specified how exceptions worked, so Symbian rolled their own (TRAP and User::Leave). But then they were stuck... breaking ABI was forbidden, so more modern C++ features couldn't be used (easily).
- einpoklum 6y ago
  C++ was created in 1979 - I doubt Symbian adopted it "very early". Also, the standard doesn't specify "how exceptions work" even today, in the sense that a lot of what happens when running C++ is implementation dependent. But I can see what you mean about sticking to pre-C++11 (maybe even pre-C++98 ?) APIs.
  - easytiger 6y ago
    In 1998 c++ was a totally different ballgame to c++ in 2010 let alone now
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    The first C++ standardization was C++98, released in (you guessed it) 1998. Symbian's first release, under the EPOC32 name, was in 1997, with working starting on that OS in 1994 (and the company had a prior OS, EPOC16, that was from the late 80s)

pjmlp 6y ago

From the inside it wasn't that apparent, hence why the first Linux based prototypes did not had any radio support. And as cumbersome as Symbian C++ might have been, Android Studio + NDK + JNI wrappers still make me wish for Carbide + Symbian C++ + PIPS.

secondcoming 6y ago
Originally we used CodeWarrior internally and then Carbide. Most of the Carbide work was done in Dallas and I remember them having a stressful time dealing with Symbian's weird MMP + abld build system.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Yeah, I know also those nice Perl based scripts with batch files glue somehow being called from CodeWarrior, just referred Carbide, because at the end the experience wasn't that bad, specially by the Belle days. Google just doesn't get it, note that major GDC 2020 Android talks are mostly related to NDK improvements, 10 years later.
smichel17 6y ago
Although the NDK is really annoying, it's not required to build an app, which it seems like Symbian C++ was. I think that's critical for getting the app ecosystem off the ground.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  You could use Java, Flash, Python and Web Runtime as alternatives back then. Much richer than Android still.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    Thanks for the clarification :) It was before my time.
easytiger 6y ago

namdnay 6y ago

Oh god I've got flashbacks of those weird exception stacks you had to manage manually

derefr 6y ago

> It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++ Was this just a "using different elements of C++" kind of dialect, or was this an "early Win32 when you had to use pretend-C++ (ATL) together with your real C++, bridging the two with C" kind of dialect? I feel like a lot of application frameworks developed in the 90s ended up in the latter style, as C++ was just becoming popular around then, and many frameworks chose to "merge into" C++ support from C support, rather than creating a ground-up C++ SDK.

defen 6y ago
I was responsible for porting a fairly large C++ app to Symbian (this was like 15 years ago, so memory is hazy). The big problems were that exceptions were weird and non-standard, and you couldn't throw them from constructors, so anything using RAII had to be rewritten.
- avereveard 6y ago
  and it used their own proprietary toolchain, as a layer on top of visual studio iirc, that kind of worked in debug but actually no, I remember we had to purchase a specific nokia to run in dev mode, as not every nokia supported it or was actually supported by the toolchain at the time. and I remember another pain point was feature detection, but can't recall the specifics.
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    I think VS was used before my time (2005), but then it used CodeWarrior and then after that Nokia's own IDE called Carbide. It had MMP files which described the project and the files in it, a then a tool called 'abld' which was a perl script that did the compiling, which actually had two commands to clean... 'abld clean' and 'abld reallyclean' :)
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  RAII can be used without constructors and without exceptions. The acronym is misleading.

kevsim 6y ago

I worked at Nokia starting in about 2004. Looking back on my career, one of the single greatest feelings of accomplishment was getting a Hello World application to run on Symbian/S60. I thought I knew C++ going in, but I wasn't prepared for two phase constructors and the 6 files you'd need to draw a simple list view on the screen. Felt amazing once it worked though!

QuercusMax 6y ago
I totally know what you mean - the sense of satisfaction and joy when you get even the most basic "end-to-end" functionality working in a new environment is hard to match.
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  It still is; try blink or counter on a new fpga board.
secondcoming 6y ago
Lol. At least you guys had actual phones to work with. Until we became Nokia all we had was a techview UI shell running on H2, or later, H4 boards that would boot an MMC card. Of course, when we became Nokia we got the flashing stations and access to Phoenix. Only a particular part of the company ever saw phones that were in development and you needed special access to get into that part of the building.
- mightyscouse 6y ago
  First job out of uni was writing device drivers for Motorola Symbian devices on H4 boards (I want to say LDDs and PDDs?). Codewarrior or carbide if you fancied a reboot every 2 mins, 40 minute turn-around times to flash and boot your software, boards without working SD and having to log to the screen ...I do not miss those days at all. BlackBerry was like a bloody dream.
- kevsim 6y ago
  I also went through a dev board phase later on when I was working on Maemo, etc. but they took it easy on me when I was fresh out of school and let me have real production hardware

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

But when J2ME support was added, it became easy to develop apps. I used to develop J2ME apps as hobby, I made a game and took it for my first job interview. In that job I had to port a 30,000+ J2ME code app to Android in 2010. The company I worked for was even experimenting with NFC payments in Nokia Symbian phones in 2010!

pistoriusp 6y ago
The J2ME world never really felt easy to me: What worked on 1 device didn't on another, there was very limited shared UI, and it felt like it was impossible to target multiple devices.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  There were MIDP profiles[1] as long the version matched, the apps worked fine in my experience on any device although the devices themselves varied in their key pad placements; Nokia went crazy in their phone designs[2]! [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Information_Device_Profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Information_Device_Prof... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZi-7V11k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZi-7V11k8
  - Steltek 6y ago
    Wow, thanks for that video down memory lane. I had a 3660 (friends called it the "communications brick"). There was no wifi and I couldn't afford a data plan but I was able to have the phone dialup via Bluetooth (think "reverse tether") to my Linux desktop. I never got into J2ME: being a fledgling Linux snob in college, I went for Nokia's C++ target and got stuck in the quagmire.
  - nradov 6y ago
    But MIDP profiles were so limited that you could only build the simplest apps. To do anything complex required calling proprietary extensions, which destroyed portability.

secondcoming 6y ago

I can't edit my comment, but the source code seems to be here: https://github.com/SymbianSource https://github.com/SymbianSource I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning.

brianpursley 6y ago
> I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning. OK, so I had to look. It's like they saw the two main camps (same line vs next line) and said "let's come up with something everyone will hate": TInt GetROMSize(TInt /*aDeviceNumber*/, TInt /*aAttrib*/, TBool /*aSet*/, TAny* aInOut) { TMemoryInfoV1 info; TPckg<TMemoryInfoV1> infoPckg(info); TInt r=UserSvr::HalFunction(EHalGroupKernel, EKernelHalMemoryInfo, (TAny*)&infoPckg, NULL); if (r==KErrNone) { *(TInt*)aInOut=info.iTotalRomInBytes; } return r; }
- perennialmind 6y ago
  Wow. I had a CS professor insist on exactly that style. I couldn't stand it at first, but making accommodations was the whole point. Unfortunately it got me thinking about what I would want. Now I'm the weirdo and I rarely get to write it the way I want. <shrug>
- mjevans 6y ago
  I can understand the desire to have the brackets at the same indent... but WOW does this break my brain having the inner code not indented from the bracket level. (I tend to prefer the opening backet being on the same line as the condition gate/guard and rely on the parser to inform me of missing brackets. This is even better in languages that have a single format convention.)
AceJohnny2 6y ago
> I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning. Hahaha, how bad could it be... ... Why the fuck would they need to indent every function by an 8-space tab!?

ollo 6y ago

You could even program in Python!

stiray 6y ago

I loved symbian and the whole "java on phone" never seemed right to me. I would prefer having a linux phone - I dont ask for much - working camera, working calls, mms and sms, gps, bluetooth). I dont care for anything else. All my hopes are now leaning into Cosmo Communicator( https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-communicator https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-communicator - please take care, I have jumped into this with "I will loose my money" mentality - I still dont trust, they will realize the linux part, but hope dies last), it reminds me of beloved Nokia Communicator and if they realize my conditions (camera, calls, mms, sms - gps already works same as bluetooth ) I will give my foot a very long swing and remove my Android phone (even if heavly modified) from my life.

kccqzy 6y ago
> the whole "java on phone" never seemed right to me I'm not sure which Java on phone you are referring to, the Android Java or the older J2ME. The older J2ME apps ran well in limited resources, but was also incredibly complicated to develop due to device fragmentation.
jessaustin 6y ago
The indiegogo page seems to imply that they're shipping these devices. Have you not received yours? The simulated pictures look nice...
- stiray 6y ago
  I already have it, but it is usefull for me only as linux device (well until they release v22 firmware to mod it). But my main motive for buying it was linux/sailfish.
afandian 6y ago
As an owner of a Gemini, the hardware is innovative and good enough, but the OS is really an afterthought. You can browse their current wiki and see how organised it is. No disrespect to the team, it just seems like taking sufficient care of this is a bigger job than they have the resources for. But I'm glad I backed the kickstarter, and would do the same for something similar in order to diversify a very un-diverse market.

speeder 6y ago

I am Brazillian, and I think killing Symbian was a huge and stupid mistake. When Microsoft release that memo that killed Symbian, in Brazil its marketshare was INCREASING, there was a lot of people learning how to code for it, many people saw it as a good future, because with it you could make blazing fast CHEAP phones, iPhones were crazy expensive, and android was a slow buggy mess. Thing is... iPhones are STILL crazy expensive, and android STILL is a slow buggy mess if you buy a cheap one. I am yet to find a smartphone I like as much I liked symbian based phones, that are phones first, smart second, and work great for actually phoning people.

pjmlp 6y ago
Symbian Belle, the last iteration was just great. I only moved to Android when forced to.
- behnamoh 6y ago
  And this whole notion of "Symbian Won" reminds me how "Windows Phone Won" too. Just look at the latest iOS 14 widgets which is inspired by WP tiles.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    And webOS! https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/15/16300402/iphone-x-webos-palm-pre-cards-gestures-nostalgia https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/15/16300402/iphone-x-webos-p...
russfink 6y ago
I could enable GPS and leave the phone on without charging... for THREE WEEKS at a time.
- nexuist 6y ago
  GPS is a completely passive signal, so it's not really surprising that it lasts a long time. You can get similar battery life with IoT SoCs deployed on the field. The difference between then and now is that modern smartphones use sensor fusion, combining cellular, WiFi, and GPS signals to generate a location. The end result is more accurate output, at the expense of battery life.

malkia 6y ago

Was it the case where no globals were allowed, since "executables" (not really) were more remiscent of dll/shared libs/etc.?

secondcoming 6y ago
Good question, I can't remember if globals were allowed, maybe they were as long as they were const so the OS could be executed directly from ROM. But again, I'm not sure, it's been some time.

markus_zhang 6y ago

Oh I always want to write C/C++ code on a Non-Apple mobile but I didn't expect it to be THAT weird...

asjw 6y ago

This really reminds me of good times I started a company with friends to write games for phones, before they were smart Our fist breakthrough was at E3 in LA with a game for Nokia 7650, but we worked on prototypes years before My first mobile connection was with a Nokia 9000i communicator, I was working for an ISP at the time that gave them to us to test mobile connections, and it felt like a James Bond movie I learned so much developing on Symbian, especially being a diligent C++ programmer on a system that wasn't really using standard C++ Fast forward 20 years, I work on backends in Erlang/Elixir and never touched mobile development again J2ME was nice, but limited, I lost hope soon after when iPhones came out and it was clear that the mobile platform wouldn't be fun anymore

neilv 6y ago

Symbian was great, and I loved my indestructible all-silver Nokia E61 non-US version (which included WiFi, unlike the carrier-crippled ones I found in the US). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E61 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E61 I actually looked recently at trying to buy another E61 in good condition, and how much trouble it would be to kludge up access to my email through it. I figured it would be more productive for email than my current mainstream smartphone setup. I have to resist the urge to look into this open-sourced Symbian... :)

edeion 6y ago
My beloved E6 had its flaws. It was a pain to sync, the syncs were not serviceable, but at least it was syncing to my computer, not to the cloud. On this one, Symbian Anna felt better than Symbian Belle and it would have been a pain to revert. That said, it was small, smaller than an iPhone SE. And it had a hardware keyboard. I'm not against fancy apps and stuff on my phone but, besides calling reliability, the first thing I want is to be able to type small things. I must confess I was unhappy that it even had a touchscreen: a nightmare when it was raining. I guess I just loved the form factor and its promises. I'm thinking of making this an ode. The E6 ballad. Sorry for that long little-informative comment...

grishka 6y ago

Oh, I got a Symbian phone when I was 16 (I think?) and of course I did try writing native apps for it. Yes, the SDK was horrendous. The C++ dialect was so weird I was never able to make sense of it. (I probably could with my current experience.) I just remember that there were many, many methods that ended with L, this meant "Leave", and this was some bizarre replacement for exceptions, apparently. There were more types of strings than I could count. The naming conventions for things were very weird. The hello world consisted of something like 5 classes and took a minute to build. When you wanted to actually run the thing you made, you had two options: running it in an emulator that took several seconds to process inputs, or running it on your phone via some connector app that only worked 1/3 of the time. I didn't get very far with native Symbian development. J2ME was just so much easier, and ran on everything under the Sun (pun intended).

pabs3 6y ago

The Symbian source code was only briefly public and open source, it got closed and unpublished again fairly quickly.