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> Symbian was as far as I know the last mass market open phone platform for developers. Have you actually used it or developed anything for Symbian? It was ne

by reisse 1y ago

> Symbian was as far as I know the last mass market open phone platform for developers. Have you actually used it or developed anything for Symbian? It was neither "open" nor "for developers". Some of the sources were available, but unlike Android, you couldn't rebuild the OS from scratch and load onto your device. You couldn't just build and run your own apps. You had to obtain certificates from phone manufacturer (Nokia) and sign them. Thankfully the security system had so many holes it wasn't a big obstacle. J2ME was a second-class citizen, only to support a lot of existing J2ME apps from feature phones. Qt was way too heavy for the devices of that time. Qt apps easily consumed 40-50 MB of 128 MB RAM, while C++ ones that used native APIs could fit in 5-10 MB. But the native API sucked. It was in a bespoke dialect of C++, riddled with a lot of generational legacy. "A lot of other frameworks" you mention were mostly stuff used by some single developer for their own apps, to workaround all the Symbian quirks. Idk, I don't understand people trying to whitewash Symbian. It didn't die because of someone turning evil, Microsoft acquisitions, whatever. Ultimately it died because it was unacceptably bad for a modern phone OS. Been there, used it, don't want to, good riddance. MeeGo, though, is an entirely different beast...

sunshine-o 1y ago
> Ultimately it died because it was unacceptably bad for a modern phone OS. We have to remember nothing was "modern" at that time (around 2008) My phone had a single 369 MHz CPU with 128 MB of RAM. That's about my ESP32 based smart plug. People were running Windows XP. Linux and open source were still kind of fringe. The fact I could run Skype perfectly on it and develop app easily using Java was amazing at the time. Talking about unacceptable, remember the first generations of HTC Android phones? that was really bad.
- reisse 1y ago
  > We have to remember nothing was "modern" at that time (around 2008) Sorry, your memory is wrong. I've owned Nokia 5800 back then (2009 or 2010, don't remember exactly), and had a chance to compare it side to side with HTC G1 and iPhone 3G. It felt dated. Many apps were not designed with touchscreen in mind, the standard UI was "list with two buttons on the bottom", grandfathered from phones with keyboards. Resistive touchscreen didn't help either. Then, the mobile hardware was making quantum leaps each year. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it felt every next iPhone or Android phone was twice as fast as the previous generation. And Symbian was stuck on a basically single hardware platform, with a single supported chip and a single weird display resolution (640x360). Symbian^3 was a step in the right direction (at least they managed to rebuild the kernel for the different chip!), but the legacy was too heavy, and the competitors were moving much faster than Nokia. Like, the last Symbian flagship (Nokia 808) still had that 640x360 resolution on 4 inches. At that time, iPhone had HiDPI displays for two years!
  - sunshine-o 1y ago
    Sure, simple misunderstanding we are not talking about the same thing. I never had those early touchscreen ones. I kept the blackberry format E series ones with a real qwerty keyboard as long as I could. The last productive phones, after that it was all infinite scrolling touchscreen zombie apocalypse.

by reisse 1y ago

sunshine-o 1y ago

> Ultimately it died because it was unacceptably bad for a modern phone OS. We have to remember nothing was "modern" at that time (around 2008) My phone had a single 369 MHz CPU with 128 MB of RAM. That's about my ESP32 based smart plug. People were running Windows XP. Linux and open source were still kind of fringe. The fact I could run Skype perfectly on it and develop app easily using Java was amazing at the time. Talking about unacceptable, remember the first generations of HTC Android phones? that was really bad.

reisse 1y ago
> We have to remember nothing was "modern" at that time (around 2008) Sorry, your memory is wrong. I've owned Nokia 5800 back then (2009 or 2010, don't remember exactly), and had a chance to compare it side to side with HTC G1 and iPhone 3G. It felt dated. Many apps were not designed with touchscreen in mind, the standard UI was "list with two buttons on the bottom", grandfathered from phones with keyboards. Resistive touchscreen didn't help either. Then, the mobile hardware was making quantum leaps each year. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it felt every next iPhone or Android phone was twice as fast as the previous generation. And Symbian was stuck on a basically single hardware platform, with a single supported chip and a single weird display resolution (640x360). Symbian^3 was a step in the right direction (at least they managed to rebuild the kernel for the different chip!), but the legacy was too heavy, and the competitors were moving much faster than Nokia. Like, the last Symbian flagship (Nokia 808) still had that 640x360 resolution on 4 inches. At that time, iPhone had HiDPI displays for two years!
- sunshine-o 1y ago
  Sure, simple misunderstanding we are not talking about the same thing. I never had those early touchscreen ones. I kept the blackberry format E series ones with a real qwerty keyboard as long as I could. The last productive phones, after that it was all infinite scrolling touchscreen zombie apocalypse.