5 ms·

The formation and early years of Symbian: Dark Star (2010)

27 points by alraj 3y ago

lproven 3y ago
Single-page version: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/11/23/symbian_history_part_one_dark_star/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/11/23/symbian_history... (This works for all Reg URLs: insert `Print/` into the URL after the base domain. It is case-sensitive.)
alraj 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20231018213314/https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/23/symbian_history_part_one_dark_star/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231018213314/https://www.there...
- lproven 3y ago
  Not sure that's needed. The Reg isn't going anywhere for now.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Nokia had a huge potential. Too bad it was ruined. It would have been nice to have an EU alternative to US owned Android and iOS. That could lead to a better software ecosystem in EU.
- pavlov 3y ago
  In theory Symbian had huge potential as a vendor-independent smartphone OS. There was a couple of years in the early 2000s when it was used by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola. By all rights it should have occupied the position that Android eventually did. But Symbian’s fatal flaw was that it was too early to everything. The software design was based on mid-1990s assumptions of what smartphones might need to do and what resources they’d have available. Everything started from a constrained embedded mindset. Meanwhile Apple built their mobile OS by scaling down their desktop OS which had originally been a high-end workstation OS. The phone guys couldn’t understand that was even possible. The Symbian business model was similarly captive to the past. Open source wasn’t a serious thing when Nokia, Ericsson and Psion set up the Symbian corporation originally in the 1990s. So everything was a complicated licensing game. Worse, the vendors tried to outdo each other by creating incompatible but similar implementations of fundamental UX, so there wasn’t even a single Symbian for developers to target. This practically doomed it as an apps platform at a critical time.
  - rstuart4133 3y ago
    > In theory Symbian had huge potential as a vendor-independent smartphone OS. Did you try to develop for Symbian? It's a very painful memory of mine. It seemed to be highly optimised for a very memory constrained environment. Granted the phones it ran on were very memory constrained, but ... shudder. Worse, in a few years it memory would not be so much of an issue and all those optimisations would turn into shackles.
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    Nokia wasn't only about Symbian. They had Maemo, too. And at the time it was better than Android.
    - memsom 3y ago
      Symbian actually had a negative effect - it held back Maemo internally and that and the internal politics surrounding the Symbian group asserting their dominance at the time ultimately hurt way more in the long run.
  - Gravityloss 3y ago
    Aalto University (called TKK at the time) had a lot of influence from Nokia naturally (HQ is about a kilometer away), and many people trained in Symbian stuff. You could hear from fellow students really damning comments how bad it was to develop anything for it.
    - distances 3y ago
      I took a university course in mobile development (Symbian and Java ME). My main takeaway indeed was that I will definitely not become a mobile developer. In the end I did though, but only after Qt and later Android became the main mobile dev platforms. Such a night and day developer experience compared to native Symbian development.
    - OnlyMortal 3y ago
      The devs at Symbian used a version of CodeWarrior - on Windows. I believe they used the GNU compiler before that.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  > Nokia had a huge potential More than just potential. Nokia was a hugely successful mobile phone manufacturer. They still occupy the top two most sold handsets ever, beating even Apple. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_... Like a lot of things in IT, technology and trends move on and it’s not easy for old empires to adapt and stay relevant.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    I'd gladly buy and use a Nokia 1110 if it worked on modern wireless networks. I'd only bring the iPhone on long trips when I knew I wanted GPS and a camera.
- gumby 3y ago
  > It would have been nice to have an EU alternative to US owned Android and iOS It’s really a squandered opportunity. It’s hard to remember how primitive the US wireless ecosystem was (expensive, slow, metered, no data support) prior to the release of the iphone. Texting was considered exciting and novel in 2000! Meanwhile my PHS Keitai and Nokia GPS covered me elsewhere with messaging, data, images and clean handoff and such unimaginable on my crappy Motorola AMPS phone (I was on the road a lot back then)
fidotron 3y ago
Symbian was always an utter train wreck. All you have to mention is Active Object and watch a whole generation of european software devs fall around in pain, including many Symbian devs themselves. The problem was always too much money (especially on the Nokia side) and not enough user focus. In the Nokia case that meant Series 60, which was where Nokia indulged their most extreme design oddities, while the non Symbian based Series 40 was actually severely good. (North American S40 devices were excessively modified by local operators though, so you would have no idea these things were actually usable if that is all you ever experienced). If anyone made a decent Symbian device (and supposedly someone in Japan did, of course) I never saw it. The funny thing is Android launched in an even worse state, but they managed to iterate on it far more effectively.
- lproven 3y ago
  > If anyone made a decent Symbian device My personal favourite was my E90 Communicator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E90_Communicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E90_Communicator In terms of hardware form factor was the best smartphone I have ever owed. What was good about it: – Metal case, metal hinge, rock-solid clamshell design – But small enough to use closed as a candybar phone with T9 text input; – Good 1-handed and two-handed operation; – Able to view A4 width PDFs at readable size on internal screen; – Fast accurate thumb typing on internal QWERTY keyboard; – Data port plus charging port plus headphone socket. It wasn't perfect. The external numeric keypad needed better spacing, like a 6310i keypad. The internal QWERTY one the same. It needed USB instead of a Nokia port, and a standard-sized headphone jack. It needed an internal touchscreen. It needed more RAM and speed and battery. But the gestalt, the whole, was better than any Apple minimalist thing. Second favourite: Nokia 7710. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 My first true smartphone. What was good about it: – Landscape touchscreen smartphone, with a design that made that the primary orientation, although perfectly usable one-handed in landscape; – Usable physical buttons for up/down/left/right/select in one hand, call/cancel/hangup in the other hand. So, usable in gloves or without access to stylus and fingertips, with tactile feedback, with both hands. Meaning also ideal for gamers; – Removable battery; – Last device with the Psion EIKON UI. Third favourite: Sony Ericsson P910 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P910 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P910 Very much oriented to touchscreen operation like an iPhone or something. What was good about it: – Familiar and accessible to non-techies; – With a handy physical T9 keypad, covering part of the screen; – Flipped down to reveal a bigger screen and tiny QWERTY keyboard. Not much use but clever.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
I worked at Nokia Research and later Nokia Maps between 2005 and 2012. During that time they went from having just launched a few Symbian devices a few years before I joined in 2002 to basically selling out to MS shortly after I left. The whole Apple and Android thing did not catch Nokia by surprise. It was well aware what was happening. The problem wasn't awareness but a generally dismissive attitude of what was happening outside of Nokia. All this was discussed at length internally. If you look at the history of Symbian, you can see that it overlaps with the history of Linux. Linux emerged as a hobby project in the early nineties. By 1998 there were some companies building embedded products with it. 1999 saw the likes of IBM pumping billions in Linux and things were really taking off. By the time the first Symbian devices hit the market, there had been a few attempts at Linux on mobile already. Around the time Nokia got serious about shipping S60 in volume (around 2005/2006 with a broader range of devices), Google bought Android and started working on getting that to market. Rumors about Apple doing something in this space were also getting pretty substantial around that time. The critical mistake that Nokia made was dismissing Linux early on in favor of Symbian, a technically obsolete, 32 bit OS that would struggle catching up right until the end. Not all of Nokia of course. Just the senior management. Nokia did actually launch a linux based internet tablet in 2005 (the N770). The only thing stopping a phone project based on that was management. They pushed back on that until 2010. By which time they were loosing the phone market to Apple and Google in a big way. They lost about five-six years chasing their tails trying to push Symbian + S60 as the competitive phone OS it never was. By 2011, windows phone was a thing. by 2013 MS took over the phone division and they pulled the plug on the whole business unit in 2014. Between 1998 and 2005, mobile Linux started happening and Symbian was struggling to compete. Nokia had no touch screen UI for it. Well, it did (S90) but they killed that only to resurrect a new touch screen capable platform on top of S60 a few years later in response to the iphone, which launched in 2007 followed by Android a year later. Ironically Android was depending on a lot of Linux contributions by Nokia. Nokia was actually one of the top contributors. And Google made full use of that. Early Android booted on the N800 before there were any Nexus phones to play with. That's how similar the kernels were between Android and Maemo/Meego.
elzbardico 3y ago
One thing is common on those stories from the 90's, Bill Gates was a fucking toxic sociopathic spoiled child. I sincerely hope he really matured and it is not just putting out a civilized facade nowadays.
- lproven 3y ago
  I have seen not one iota of evidence that he has. Notably, the charitable foundation. It is well established now and has whitewashed his reputation but note: 1. It only spends enough of the profits on Gates' and Warren Buffet's wealth that they don't pay tax on what's left. 2. Its owners refuse to even try ethical investment, which would do more good than the B&MGF itself's spending. Citation for both: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jan-07-na-gatesx07-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jan-07-na-gates... 3. Once he was well out of it & MS, his wife upped and left him, and it was then revealed he's a serial creep, with decades of squalid behaviour around MS staff.

27 points by alraj 3y ago

Single-page version: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/11/23/symbian_history_part_one_dark_star/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/11/23/symbian_history... (This works for all Reg URLs: insert `Print/` into the URL after the base domain. It is case-sensitive.)

alraj 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20231018213314/https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/23/symbian_history_part_one_dark_star/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231018213314/https://www.there...

lproven 3y ago
Not sure that's needed. The Reg isn't going anywhere for now.

DeathArrow 3y ago

Nokia had a huge potential. Too bad it was ruined. It would have been nice to have an EU alternative to US owned Android and iOS. That could lead to a better software ecosystem in EU.

pavlov 3y ago
In theory Symbian had huge potential as a vendor-independent smartphone OS. There was a couple of years in the early 2000s when it was used by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola. By all rights it should have occupied the position that Android eventually did. But Symbian’s fatal flaw was that it was too early to everything. The software design was based on mid-1990s assumptions of what smartphones might need to do and what resources they’d have available. Everything started from a constrained embedded mindset. Meanwhile Apple built their mobile OS by scaling down their desktop OS which had originally been a high-end workstation OS. The phone guys couldn’t understand that was even possible. The Symbian business model was similarly captive to the past. Open source wasn’t a serious thing when Nokia, Ericsson and Psion set up the Symbian corporation originally in the 1990s. So everything was a complicated licensing game. Worse, the vendors tried to outdo each other by creating incompatible but similar implementations of fundamental UX, so there wasn’t even a single Symbian for developers to target. This practically doomed it as an apps platform at a critical time.
- rstuart4133 3y ago
  > In theory Symbian had huge potential as a vendor-independent smartphone OS. Did you try to develop for Symbian? It's a very painful memory of mine. It seemed to be highly optimised for a very memory constrained environment. Granted the phones it ran on were very memory constrained, but ... shudder. Worse, in a few years it memory would not be so much of an issue and all those optimisations would turn into shackles.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  Nokia wasn't only about Symbian. They had Maemo, too. And at the time it was better than Android.
  - memsom 3y ago
    Symbian actually had a negative effect - it held back Maemo internally and that and the internal politics surrounding the Symbian group asserting their dominance at the time ultimately hurt way more in the long run.
- Gravityloss 3y ago
  Aalto University (called TKK at the time) had a lot of influence from Nokia naturally (HQ is about a kilometer away), and many people trained in Symbian stuff. You could hear from fellow students really damning comments how bad it was to develop anything for it.
  - distances 3y ago
    I took a university course in mobile development (Symbian and Java ME). My main takeaway indeed was that I will definitely not become a mobile developer. In the end I did though, but only after Qt and later Android became the main mobile dev platforms. Such a night and day developer experience compared to native Symbian development.
  - OnlyMortal 3y ago
    The devs at Symbian used a version of CodeWarrior - on Windows. I believe they used the GNU compiler before that.
hnlmorg 3y ago
> Nokia had a huge potential More than just potential. Nokia was a hugely successful mobile phone manufacturer. They still occupy the top two most sold handsets ever, beating even Apple. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_... Like a lot of things in IT, technology and trends move on and it’s not easy for old empires to adapt and stay relevant.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  I'd gladly buy and use a Nokia 1110 if it worked on modern wireless networks. I'd only bring the iPhone on long trips when I knew I wanted GPS and a camera.
gumby 3y ago
> It would have been nice to have an EU alternative to US owned Android and iOS It’s really a squandered opportunity. It’s hard to remember how primitive the US wireless ecosystem was (expensive, slow, metered, no data support) prior to the release of the iphone. Texting was considered exciting and novel in 2000! Meanwhile my PHS Keitai and Nokia GPS covered me elsewhere with messaging, data, images and clean handoff and such unimaginable on my crappy Motorola AMPS phone (I was on the road a lot back then)

fidotron 3y ago

Symbian was always an utter train wreck. All you have to mention is Active Object and watch a whole generation of european software devs fall around in pain, including many Symbian devs themselves. The problem was always too much money (especially on the Nokia side) and not enough user focus. In the Nokia case that meant Series 60, which was where Nokia indulged their most extreme design oddities, while the non Symbian based Series 40 was actually severely good. (North American S40 devices were excessively modified by local operators though, so you would have no idea these things were actually usable if that is all you ever experienced). If anyone made a decent Symbian device (and supposedly someone in Japan did, of course) I never saw it. The funny thing is Android launched in an even worse state, but they managed to iterate on it far more effectively.

lproven 3y ago
> If anyone made a decent Symbian device My personal favourite was my E90 Communicator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E90_Communicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E90_Communicator In terms of hardware form factor was the best smartphone I have ever owed. What was good about it: – Metal case, metal hinge, rock-solid clamshell design – But small enough to use closed as a candybar phone with T9 text input; – Good 1-handed and two-handed operation; – Able to view A4 width PDFs at readable size on internal screen; – Fast accurate thumb typing on internal QWERTY keyboard; – Data port plus charging port plus headphone socket. It wasn't perfect. The external numeric keypad needed better spacing, like a 6310i keypad. The internal QWERTY one the same. It needed USB instead of a Nokia port, and a standard-sized headphone jack. It needed an internal touchscreen. It needed more RAM and speed and battery. But the gestalt, the whole, was better than any Apple minimalist thing. Second favourite: Nokia 7710. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 My first true smartphone. What was good about it: – Landscape touchscreen smartphone, with a design that made that the primary orientation, although perfectly usable one-handed in landscape; – Usable physical buttons for up/down/left/right/select in one hand, call/cancel/hangup in the other hand. So, usable in gloves or without access to stylus and fingertips, with tactile feedback, with both hands. Meaning also ideal for gamers; – Removable battery; – Last device with the Psion EIKON UI. Third favourite: Sony Ericsson P910 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P910 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P910 Very much oriented to touchscreen operation like an iPhone or something. What was good about it: – Familiar and accessible to non-techies; – With a handy physical T9 keypad, covering part of the screen; – Flipped down to reveal a bigger screen and tiny QWERTY keyboard. Not much use but clever.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

I worked at Nokia Research and later Nokia Maps between 2005 and 2012. During that time they went from having just launched a few Symbian devices a few years before I joined in 2002 to basically selling out to MS shortly after I left. The whole Apple and Android thing did not catch Nokia by surprise. It was well aware what was happening. The problem wasn't awareness but a generally dismissive attitude of what was happening outside of Nokia. All this was discussed at length internally. If you look at the history of Symbian, you can see that it overlaps with the history of Linux. Linux emerged as a hobby project in the early nineties. By 1998 there were some companies building embedded products with it. 1999 saw the likes of IBM pumping billions in Linux and things were really taking off. By the time the first Symbian devices hit the market, there had been a few attempts at Linux on mobile already. Around the time Nokia got serious about shipping S60 in volume (around 2005/2006 with a broader range of devices), Google bought Android and started working on getting that to market. Rumors about Apple doing something in this space were also getting pretty substantial around that time. The critical mistake that Nokia made was dismissing Linux early on in favor of Symbian, a technically obsolete, 32 bit OS that would struggle catching up right until the end. Not all of Nokia of course. Just the senior management. Nokia did actually launch a linux based internet tablet in 2005 (the N770). The only thing stopping a phone project based on that was management. They pushed back on that until 2010. By which time they were loosing the phone market to Apple and Google in a big way. They lost about five-six years chasing their tails trying to push Symbian + S60 as the competitive phone OS it never was. By 2011, windows phone was a thing. by 2013 MS took over the phone division and they pulled the plug on the whole business unit in 2014. Between 1998 and 2005, mobile Linux started happening and Symbian was struggling to compete. Nokia had no touch screen UI for it. Well, it did (S90) but they killed that only to resurrect a new touch screen capable platform on top of S60 a few years later in response to the iphone, which launched in 2007 followed by Android a year later. Ironically Android was depending on a lot of Linux contributions by Nokia. Nokia was actually one of the top contributors. And Google made full use of that. Early Android booted on the N800 before there were any Nexus phones to play with. That's how similar the kernels were between Android and Maemo/Meego.

elzbardico 3y ago

One thing is common on those stories from the 90's, Bill Gates was a fucking toxic sociopathic spoiled child. I sincerely hope he really matured and it is not just putting out a civilized facade nowadays.

lproven 3y ago
I have seen not one iota of evidence that he has. Notably, the charitable foundation. It is well established now and has whitewashed his reputation but note: 1. It only spends enough of the profits on Gates' and Warren Buffet's wealth that they don't pay tax on what's left. 2. Its owners refuse to even try ethical investment, which would do more good than the B&MGF itself's spending. Citation for both: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jan-07-na-gatesx07-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jan-07-na-gates... 3. Once he was well out of it & MS, his wife upped and left him, and it was then revealed he's a serial creep, with decades of squalid behaviour around MS staff.