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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 so

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)

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)