4 ms·

The first Symbian based Nokia device was the 9210. I helped integrate the fax functionality - was amazing to see the first faxes sent and received :)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lproven 4y ago
Fair enough! I defer to your superior wisdom. So, four years earlier, not five. :-) I have seen comments from people who worked at Accenture in the last days of Symbian, about the difficulty of putting together the build system today. Apparently bits need a specific MS C++ compiler that only runs on WinXP. I think it would be wonderful to see this resurrected and ported to the RasPi or something. Symbian was capable of SMP, and there were a lot of 3rd party apps back in the day. One of the things that crippled Symbian in the market was the range of UIs, all incompatible. I owned devices running Series 90 (Nokia 7710), Series 60 (E90 Communicator), and UIQ (Sony-Ericsson P910i). There was also Series 80 (earlier Communicators), and MOAP and OPP in Japan only. AIUI all needed different programming tools and apps from one couldn't run on the other. Frankly, none of that matters any more. Whatever is in this FOSS release and can be used with modern FOSS tooling is all that matters. Nobody needs early-noughties phone apps on a RasPi. Just something that can be used on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard. I suspect a few old Psion and Symbian enthusiasts would appear and enjoy modernising their own apps to get them working again. It's not that long ago. EPOC32 and Symbian were great OSes to use: fast as hell, stable, and low-resource. On a RasPi 4 I think it'd stomp all over Linux, and it's vastly more modern than RISC OS. C++ has come a long way, too, since Psion chose it. The rough edges have been smoothed away.
- girvo 4y ago
  I loved UIQ3. My M600i is still my second-favourite smartphone, only overtaken by the Nokia N9 running Maemo/Meego
  - lproven 4y ago
    I had 3 different Symbian devices with different UIs. All of them were good. I'm not arguing about the pros and cons of any particular UI. The problem was that there were about half a dozen different Symbian UIs, and the devices were totally incompatible. You couldn't run an app from one UI on another device with the same OS version but a different UI. Apps even had to be developed with different toolchains. Some GUI toolkits were entirely proprietary, some used Qt, some used Java. Apps weren't even portable between UIs! That was disastrous. Under the skin, Symbian was quite remarkably good in some ways. For instance it was the only phone OS where the main CPU could also run the GSM comms stack: its realtime support and multitasking made this viable. Every other smartphone dedicates a separate, loosely-couple CPU with its own OS to running the comms. Symbian devices with say a 16MHz ARM and 8MB of RAM were entirely usable. That is unachievable with any UNIX-based smartphone OS. No, it doesn't matter any more in efficiency terms, when a $5 computer has a gig of RAM and 4 cores. (I am thinking of the Raspberry Pi Zero W here, for clarity.) But think of attack surfaces. Think of size of stack to be ported to a new platform. Think of the amount of code to learn before making changes. Think of amount of code to verify. Think of the rebuild time. Think of team sizes. Think of there being any chance that a small team can study and learn the entire codebase. This is meaningfully impossible with any modern xNix-based OS. It's too vast. It would take a lifetime to study the whole source tree. Whereas Symbian was built by a tiny team in a few years, in a then-new state-of-the-art language, and it scaled from a single-CPU machine with 1 core in the double-digit MHz and a few megabytes of RAM, and a decade later, it was still competitive against machines with multiple gigahertz-class cores and hardware 3D processors running a truecolour GUI, using a desktop OS sized in the gigabytes developed by teams of hundreds of thousands of coders. That is a remarkable achievement. It's remarkable not that it died, but that it lasted so long and held up so well.
- rospaya 4y ago
  > One of the things that crippled Symbian in the market was the range of UIs, all incompatible I disagree. All of them were used on different devices, with S60 being the most popular and used on most phones, just regular market differentiation.
  - lproven 4y ago
    Well, of course, you are free to do so, but it was a widely-held opinion at the time. For example: https://www.theregister.com/2011/01/12/symbian_history_part_three_charles_davies_interview/ https://www.theregister.com/2011/01/12/symbian_history_part_... (From my employers, but not by me and before I worked there.) This whole series is well worth a read.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lproven 4y ago

Fair enough! I defer to your superior wisdom. So, four years earlier, not five. :-) I have seen comments from people who worked at Accenture in the last days of Symbian, about the difficulty of putting together the build system today. Apparently bits need a specific MS C++ compiler that only runs on WinXP. I think it would be wonderful to see this resurrected and ported to the RasPi or something. Symbian was capable of SMP, and there were a lot of 3rd party apps back in the day. One of the things that crippled Symbian in the market was the range of UIs, all incompatible. I owned devices running Series 90 (Nokia 7710), Series 60 (E90 Communicator), and UIQ (Sony-Ericsson P910i). There was also Series 80 (earlier Communicators), and MOAP and OPP in Japan only. AIUI all needed different programming tools and apps from one couldn't run on the other. Frankly, none of that matters any more. Whatever is in this FOSS release and can be used with modern FOSS tooling is all that matters. Nobody needs early-noughties phone apps on a RasPi. Just something that can be used on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard. I suspect a few old Psion and Symbian enthusiasts would appear and enjoy modernising their own apps to get them working again. It's not that long ago. EPOC32 and Symbian were great OSes to use: fast as hell, stable, and low-resource. On a RasPi 4 I think it'd stomp all over Linux, and it's vastly more modern than RISC OS. C++ has come a long way, too, since Psion chose it. The rough edges have been smoothed away.

girvo 4y ago
I loved UIQ3. My M600i is still my second-favourite smartphone, only overtaken by the Nokia N9 running Maemo/Meego
- lproven 4y ago
  I had 3 different Symbian devices with different UIs. All of them were good. I'm not arguing about the pros and cons of any particular UI. The problem was that there were about half a dozen different Symbian UIs, and the devices were totally incompatible. You couldn't run an app from one UI on another device with the same OS version but a different UI. Apps even had to be developed with different toolchains. Some GUI toolkits were entirely proprietary, some used Qt, some used Java. Apps weren't even portable between UIs! That was disastrous. Under the skin, Symbian was quite remarkably good in some ways. For instance it was the only phone OS where the main CPU could also run the GSM comms stack: its realtime support and multitasking made this viable. Every other smartphone dedicates a separate, loosely-couple CPU with its own OS to running the comms. Symbian devices with say a 16MHz ARM and 8MB of RAM were entirely usable. That is unachievable with any UNIX-based smartphone OS. No, it doesn't matter any more in efficiency terms, when a $5 computer has a gig of RAM and 4 cores. (I am thinking of the Raspberry Pi Zero W here, for clarity.) But think of attack surfaces. Think of size of stack to be ported to a new platform. Think of the amount of code to learn before making changes. Think of amount of code to verify. Think of the rebuild time. Think of team sizes. Think of there being any chance that a small team can study and learn the entire codebase. This is meaningfully impossible with any modern xNix-based OS. It's too vast. It would take a lifetime to study the whole source tree. Whereas Symbian was built by a tiny team in a few years, in a then-new state-of-the-art language, and it scaled from a single-CPU machine with 1 core in the double-digit MHz and a few megabytes of RAM, and a decade later, it was still competitive against machines with multiple gigahertz-class cores and hardware 3D processors running a truecolour GUI, using a desktop OS sized in the gigabytes developed by teams of hundreds of thousands of coders. That is a remarkable achievement. It's remarkable not that it died, but that it lasted so long and held up so well.
rospaya 4y ago
> One of the things that crippled Symbian in the market was the range of UIs, all incompatible I disagree. All of them were used on different devices, with S60 being the most popular and used on most phones, just regular market differentiation.
- lproven 4y ago
  Well, of course, you are free to do so, but it was a widely-held opinion at the time. For example: https://www.theregister.com/2011/01/12/symbian_history_part_three_charles_davies_interview/ https://www.theregister.com/2011/01/12/symbian_history_part_... (From my employers, but not by me and before I worked there.) This whole series is well worth a read.