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I disagree about the "Apple nazis".
Symbian Signed is such a major pain in the arse, compared to that Apple's solution is the second coming. And I'm an intern working as an S60 developer.

SS costs way more directly:
- Getting and maintaining the publisher ID and the UIDs
- Paying ~$300 for every signing to the test houses
- (Express Signed might ease that a little if you're in luck)

And indirectly:
- Adhering to the criteria
- Messing with the test houses
- Waiting for the approval can get really long

What do you get for all this work?
A signed package. Good luck taking it to the market.

Don't worry about missing the boat here.
S60 is a f'in mess anyway.

Not only that, but their Symbian C++ dialect is completely brain dead as well.

I already gave up on it. Sure they are improving the situation, but it still feels worse than using a MS-DOS C++ compiler!

If you compare the productivity one has with Apple or Google's platform, is also easy to see why not so many software houses develop for S60 any longer.

They completely f**ck it up when they introduced the version 3.0. Everyone was expecting that the new version would finally provide a proper C++ environment, but no. They only changed the APIs and introduced the signed process.

Oh well.

There is always Maemo. With the next version, they are opening all the binary blobs formerly closed in version 4 and previous. It may avoid the very real possibility of a fork and will allow a few long outstanding "features" to be fixed.

...on the new tablets only. Fremantle runs on OMAP3, doesn't it?

I'm more interested in when Qt will take over and deprecate the whole S60 chaos. Wishful thinking, ain't it?

they are porting Qt to s60 and symbian. So they still plan on using it. symbian is still a great phone os, it's just userspace and the c++ dialect that sucks.

Bear in mind that there is a posix compatibility lib for s60 (which the Qt people are also using for their port).

No, the kernel space sucks as well. Symbian fell for the microkernel trap, and actually uses a server for file access (!). Just the fact that they chose the MS-DOS model for their user-visible file system parts (with drive letters and other goodness) at the time when unix model was already well known underlines the need for the operating systems' long overdue extinction.

What's good about Symbian is the fact that it makes everything so hard, which leads to more billable developer hours. Kinda like that old C++ hidden motive joke, except it's not a joke this time...

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm

The problem saying half a truth is that you may also saying half a lie.

You must sign an application depending of what you want the application to do. There are a lot of applications that do not need to be signed and you don't have to pay nothing to Symbian or a certification house.

Also, if you want/must certificate, you have a set of conditions you must comply, not some vague ideas.

I think the situation is much better than with Apple in this subject (there are other questions in which Symbian must learn from Apple) in which Apple can block you for completely arbitrary reasons that you discover when you are not allowed to publish your application.

Half-truths? From Apple apologists? Say it ain't so!

You're right, sorry about that. You don't have to sign games and to-do lists
However, I'm far from being an Apple fanatic. Rather a masochistic bastard.

I've worked on three bigger projects up to now, all of them needed higher capabilities, no way around that. Even for launching that friggin' browser standalone (and that's not even documented).

Another simple example: the Location Framework. Come on.
Don't tell me it's user grantable in Feature Pack 2.
It is, but that doesn't help us trying to support all the phones out there.

The criteria are clear if you're developing a simple application, and if I weren't bound by an NDA, I could tell you stories where it gets so messy, even the guys at Symbian Signed hesitated trying to help me.
And it wasn't my fault, nor the language barrier.

Edited 2009-02-06 21:19 UTC

I've also done Symbian Signed apps and I agree with you that it has its problems. Maybe I've been lucky or te applications that I've worked on were less complicated than yours but it seems that my experiences (not without problems) have not been as expensive or traumatic as yours.

In the other hand, with Apple, I'm not allowed to write one of the applications (also related with GPS) because Apple does not want. I think that this is worse that the Symbian pre-FP2 status
And in another one an Apple representative told me that he thought the user interface was not going to be approved. It seems that they are the only that can decide how an application can behave.

>Regarding the language support, you have the Asian model therefore no Greek,

You missed my point in that sentence. In this Asian version, there is northern european support (and some characters that look like Turkish), not just plain english. There are a variety of accented characters available, most asian phones don't have support for such characters. So my problem is, that they added all that support, but they didn't also add Greek. Either support most of Europe or don't.

>but even then you can use a tool to flash whatever firmware you want.

No, this is not possible with the S60 5.0 firmwares. The freeware utility that changes the product code does not work.

Edited 2009-02-06 19:57 UTC

I don't undestand why you expect a language spoken by 20m people to be supported in the Asian version.

Regarding the flashing procedure, phoenix supports 5800 and you can flash the phone with the firmware/variant you want.

Anyway, my reply was mainly concentrated in your other findings and not the ones above.

If you are talking about how "easy" is to use your fingers, then you have never used a iPod or iPhone or Android phone (and soon the Palm Pre). The 5800 is terrible in finger usability compared to the above products.

Hehe, I have an iphone 3g, a se x1, a 5800, a n800 and in general about a dozen touch screen devices.

I will agree that the iphone is a step higher in usability because of the capacitive screen but have you tried using it with gloves on?

Maybe you tested an early 5800 but the one I have certainly is very usable just by using your fingers.

No, it's not an early build. It's just not as usable as the iphone in touchscreen support. There is no multitouch. And most importantly, I can't "fling", I have to use the thin scrollbar. And the full screen keyboard is a disgrace. It expects thin nails to type correctly, while in the iphone i can use the tip of my finger and it gets it right.

Sorry, but I won't change on this. The 5800 touchscreen support is very sub par compared to the iphone/ipod.

Its easy to use with just fingers, I did have some problems the first day but since that, I use my fingers all the time except when I use Opera.
Resistive and Capacitive both has there strengths and weakness

Resistive:
+It response to what ever you poke it with
-transparency

Capacitive
+transparency
-only responds only to fingers
-typos are easy

I know many who would like to use a stylus with there Ipod or Iphone. I was not that impressed by the Iphone its kinda slow and old tech. But I did get a Ipod Touch but I tend to get tons of typos that I don't get on the 5800. Android and pre is the only thing I have not used yet. I would say that Samsung or HTC/SE Windows mobile phones has the worst finger usability, they tend to ignore most movements that I do on the screen.

Sorry, but in this day and age, I expect nothing less than a capasitive LCD. And typos are not easy, I type very fast and accurately with my iPhone and iPod Touch.

I have done the same and I had mine for 5 weeks. The stylus is good to have with Opera mini its the only app I use the stylus for.

I like the UI but it could use some more polishing, but not much.

And there seems to be a lot of interesting software out there some at Nokias 5800 pages and s60 and mosh just for the 5800 XM.

As value for money (312 € in Finland) it gets a 9.5+, and it got better sound and screen the rest. And the battery life is great it last around a week.