4 ms·

For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme. Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a

by pavlov 2y ago

For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme. Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson). The other day I was rummaging around papers in the attic, and found a black and white printout of an internal Nokia presentation from 2001 outlining their smartphone and mobile data strategy. It was striking how well they anticipated what users might want in the smartphone, but completely failed to project the technological milestones that might make those dreams realizable. The 2001 outlook was entirely obsessed with the limits of bandwidth and what mobile operators would allow on their network (i.e. how Nokia could enable operators to get a cut on all the content viewed by users). Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on. Apple was able to project the point where their desktop operating system (itself formerly a late-1980s workstation OS) could fit into mobile, and they also had the design capability to ruthlessly cut features to make that work. Nokia dabbled in all directions: bottom-up with Symbian, top-down with Maemo/Meego, but no commitment and no guiding vision except the managerial focus on cutting costs by putting the same old components a bit more cheaply into a growing range of colorful plastics.

veeti 2y ago
"Pocket Terminal 2002": https://imgur.com/gallery/pocket-terminal-2002-r2sq4i0 https://imgur.com/gallery/pocket-terminal-2002-r2sq4i0
kmac_ 2y ago
Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were clear and logical, the code made sense, and the system was familiar. And then the App Store arrived with all the implications, such as a sudden mass market and less-obvious features like crash reports with stack traces from users. Apple was on an entirely different level than Nokia, and literally not a single developer wanted to touch Symbian anymore. It was effectively dead, even with millions of devices still in use, but it was obvious. Today I see a similar story unfolding, much more slowly, but the same thing is happening with Microsoft Windows.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  I was in Espoo HQ, the week after the burning platform memo, which killed most developer love that was worked on during the previous years building up to Qt and PIPS. Everyone I talked to wasn't that happy with management.
  - ganzuul 2y ago
    Meanwhile marketing made sure everything looked fine on the outside, still recruiting app developers to the platform they were planning on abandoning. Wasted 2 years on that bitter, bitter lesson followed by prolonged depression.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Sorry about that, I was on the Networks unit, still I could follow most of the Mobile stuff from inside. After the Metrowerks based, tooling, there were two attempts with Eclipse, the first wasn't that great and I no longer remember the name, the second one was Carbide. Which is when then eventually acquired Qt, introduced PIPS to ease the pain, and started to make Symbian C++ dialect more friendlier, and closer to common programming without those strange two phase constructors, handles, and special suffix names on member functions. So the community was starting to see the light of transition that was several years in the making, and out of the sudden, that "we are going Windows Phone 7" on a company that was UNIX first for several years. When I joined, all network software was originally targeting HP-UX, for example. So there wasn't much Microsoft love on the corridors.
- distances 2y ago
  That's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in the last years. Especially QML for the UI parts was well ahead of the competition, giving declarative and hardware accelerated UIs with great dev convenience.
  - toyg 2y ago
twoodfin 2y ago
Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on. From what I learned in Losing the Signal, a great history of RIM/Blackberry, their engineering leadership had the same obsession. They were convinced the iPhone would crash any network it was on. To be fair, Cingular/AT&T had plenty of teething troubles, but the product was so compelling and popular, the market for bandwidth adjusted.

by pavlov 2y ago

veeti 2y ago

"Pocket Terminal 2002": https://imgur.com/gallery/pocket-terminal-2002-r2sq4i0 https://imgur.com/gallery/pocket-terminal-2002-r2sq4i0

kmac_ 2y ago

Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were clear and logical, the code made sense, and the system was familiar. And then the App Store arrived with all the implications, such as a sudden mass market and less-obvious features like crash reports with stack traces from users. Apple was on an entirely different level than Nokia, and literally not a single developer wanted to touch Symbian anymore. It was effectively dead, even with millions of devices still in use, but it was obvious. Today I see a similar story unfolding, much more slowly, but the same thing is happening with Microsoft Windows.

pjmlp 2y ago
I was in Espoo HQ, the week after the burning platform memo, which killed most developer love that was worked on during the previous years building up to Qt and PIPS. Everyone I talked to wasn't that happy with management.
- ganzuul 2y ago
  Meanwhile marketing made sure everything looked fine on the outside, still recruiting app developers to the platform they were planning on abandoning. Wasted 2 years on that bitter, bitter lesson followed by prolonged depression.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Sorry about that, I was on the Networks unit, still I could follow most of the Mobile stuff from inside. After the Metrowerks based, tooling, there were two attempts with Eclipse, the first wasn't that great and I no longer remember the name, the second one was Carbide. Which is when then eventually acquired Qt, introduced PIPS to ease the pain, and started to make Symbian C++ dialect more friendlier, and closer to common programming without those strange two phase constructors, handles, and special suffix names on member functions. So the community was starting to see the light of transition that was several years in the making, and out of the sudden, that "we are going Windows Phone 7" on a company that was UNIX first for several years. When I joined, all network software was originally targeting HP-UX, for example. So there wasn't much Microsoft love on the corridors.
distances 2y ago
That's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in the last years. Especially QML for the UI parts was well ahead of the competition, giving declarative and hardware accelerated UIs with great dev convenience.
- toyg 2y ago

twoodfin 2y ago

Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on. From what I learned in Losing the Signal, a great history of RIM/Blackberry, their engineering leadership had the same obsession. They were convinced the iPhone would crash any network it was on. To be fair, Cingular/AT&T had plenty of teething troubles, but the product was so compelling and popular, the market for bandwidth adjusted.