Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 24th Sep 2010 23:20 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless Well, this certainly isn't particularly surprising. The rising popularity of Android leaves more victims in its wake than just Windows Mobile. Sony Ericsson, one of the major manufacturers of Symbian phones (other than Nokia) has just announced it will pretty much abandon the platform to focus entirely on Android - leaving Nokia as the sole person cheering for team Symbian.
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Was to be expected
by moondevil on Sun 26th Sep 2010 06:12 UTC
moondevil
Member since:
2005-07-08

Regardless of the improvements Symbian has done in the last months to their operating system, if you want to directly target the platform, you still need to use the C++ dialect they have.

With all its quirks.

http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Apps:Fundamentals_of_Sy...

Now compare this with the ease of the development of iOS, Linux or Bada. No wonder developers are leaving the platform.

Sure Open C/C++ and Qt do help minimize the pain, but you cannot target all handsets with them, and for some stuff you still need to go down to Symbian C++ anyway.

The funny thing is that the developer community was expecting that Symbiam would provide proper C++ support when the S60 3rd edition was introduced. The main reason being that they were breaking the operating system ABI, so the hope was there.

But no, the ABI was broken to introduce the DRM management features of having to sign API calls depending on the application capabilities in use.

Symbian^3 is going to be out real soon, and Symbian^5 is around the corner, and guess what Symbian C++ is still there.

So no wonder the companies move to operating systems that are more easy to develop for.

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