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Unlike Nokia phones, there are some "cooked ROMs" for the i8910HD already. I think it's because of the more openly available bootloader and flashing tools.

See here for an example: http://bit.ly/2aC2WQ

Edited 2009-10-23 20:04 UTC

These ROMs are merely mods. I would like to add a better keyboard and a missing mini qwerty implementation. Without the drivers released it would be very hard for custom firmwares to work reliably on the device.

Hell freezes over when Nokia and Samsung release their telephony layer and other drivers.

Hi there,

Feel free to come over to http://developer.symbian.org in the forums and tell us why we suck as we are listening to people in setting our roadmaps. We are open in process as well as open in code.

Ian McDonald, Head of IT, Symbian Foundation

Yeah and pigs fly. Seriously Symbian OS is probaply one of the worst around, it's memory management has been joke for ages since any program can crash whole phone like Windows 95. It was one of the poorliest documented for long time, probaply still is, so coders hit walls all time and made crap.

It has been mostly designed and coded by company that had experience on rubber boots before starting it and it shows. The plain fact is that Symbian OS is relic that even Nokia is planning to let go in future since they just can't get it work on modern smartphones. This is why Maemo will be future OS of Nokia smartphones ones it matures bit more.

I see this move more an outcry for better support, they want to see if enough people are intrested on moving Symbian OS since they aren't. Oh and before you call me fanboy of some other group I own almost 10 Nokia phones and they are probaply best phones in world for texting and calling but doing anything modern is just masochistic.

I don't have any problem with Symbian, it works well and its fast even do I multi-task a lot, and no program has ever crashed.

But its good that they move to Maemo 5 and 6, its more powerful and modern. I would say that Maemo is pretty mature the first version came out 2005.
I will buy probably the N900 as my next phone, as I have seen it in action.

And the J2ME is useless it already support real Java.

Right, but what you call the real java (J2SE I suppose) does not support mobile features like SMS, bluetooth, GSM, 3G, touchscreens and so on. J2ME is what you want on a mobile.

I don't think they use Java for those functions, in high-end segment. Java is just for apps.

They use Jalimo JVM and probably J2SE

I didn't mean that they use J2ME for sending SMS. I meand that J2ME apps can send SMS. You can't send SMS with J2SE. You could add all the J2ME libraries into J2SE but then J2SE would become J2ME. With J2ME, you can send SMS, use bluetooth and do everything you need on a mobile. With J2SE, you can't.

Have you checked on Android yet?

It's a modern Java environment with telephony APIs all around, without being as retarded as Java ME. I dare say even Symbian's only advantage over it is that the apps are running natively.

I don't get it. What is so wrong about J2ME? People keep bad mouthing J2ME but I've seen no argument against it yet. J2ME is java with mobile dedicated libraries. It's a standard set of libraries with MIDP profiles. The main advantage of J2ME over J2SE is that you are guaranteed to have access to the libraries you need on the mobile on most systems and hardware. You can't argue that is is less modern than J2SE, it was created years after J2SE. Also, running applications natively is a bad idea on the mobile phone in my opinion. First off, ARM processors implement jazelle so java is run in hardware. Java is secure as it makes sure your application does not crash the phone or do nasty things your don't want it to do. I really don't see what you can't do with java that you can do natively.

Anyway, Android is really nice and I like it, but it has the same problem as Maemo: it doesn't scale to small devices (yet). It's nice for touchscreen phones for people who need a PDA and a GPS, but for 99% of the people who want something that they can put in their pocket along with their keys, something small and reliable that can make phone calls, send SMS, take pictures and run apps, for those people Android is still not ready.

This statement is just dumb. Symbian was based on EPOC, which was developed by Psion, a highly innovative and forward-thinking mobile device manufacturer. At the time EPOC came out (1997), the 32-bit, multi-threaded, object-oriented platform it offered was cutting edge. Also, Nokia had had years of experience making some of the best, most useable mobile phones out there before they started working on Symbian (with help from Psion).



Of course you are right, as EPOC32's history goes back to 1997, but then by that measure the current versions of Linux, Windows and Mac OS X are even bigger relics, since the origins of their codebases are all significantly older. The best comparison to Symbian is Windows Mobile, as the first version of Windows CE was released at around the same time as the first version of EPOC32.

Admittedly both Symbian and Windows Mobile are hampered by the fact that they were designed at a time when 1GHz CPUs, powerful 3D graphics, gobs of memory, and multitouch on a mobile device were unthinkable. So of course they have a disadvantage in some respects. However, I don't think this means they are beyond hope, especially as in the case of Symbian, Qt will become the top-level API.

Edited 2009-10-24 08:57 UTC

Nokia has been involved in telecommunication since the 60-70's, and their past as conglomerate is irrelevant as most large companies in Finland has during most of the 90's been a conglomerate.

I find Symbian to be pretty cutting edge still today, and much of the short comings will be dealt with in next release.

I don't care about RAM, graphics, memory or multitouch, but Symbian did suffer a lot because of the "if it's not broken, don't fix it attitude", that left us with a crappy development environment and libraries.

I think almost every developer feels a sense of "yuck" when having to work with Symbian, at least for initial 4 years. After that, it's a smoother ride, as you'll have developed a certain cynical apathy that takes off some of the edge.

That being said, Qt will fix most of that. Now they just need to remove the slow emulator (as opposed to Maemo, where you can just run the whole thing on Linux inside scratchbox & xephyr).

I'm not an expert in this area - there are lots of experts on forums at http://developer.symbian.org but we are working hard on improving the developer experience.

You can use almost standard C++ now and QEMU for debugging. See:
http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Open_C_and_Open_C%2...
http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/SYBORG/QEMU

Keep watching our site as there is a whole lot of stuff coming in the next week as we have our main announcements at SEE 09 trade show.

Debugging what, exactly?

How is QEMU going to help us, current S60 developers, working on today's phones?

Right, it's not perfect, but which OS is better than Symbian for mobiles right now? Don't tell me Maemo. Maemo is promizing and I really like it, but it's not as mature and feature full as Symbian RIGHT NOW. The UI is not designed for and not usable on small screens right now. It does not scale well, although I'm pretty sure it will. It's nice for big smart phones though, but most people want their mobile device to be small.

Edited 2009-10-24 10:55 UTC