Submitted by “Under an initiative sponsored by the European Commission, the Symbian platform was this week endorsed by the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative and specifically identified as a unique technology that is a vital focus for European-centric mobile software development. As a result, a total investment of over EUR 22 million has been committed to the development of next generation technologies for the Symbian platform. This development project is being led by the Symbian Foundation as part of a consortium of major European technology organisations. The consortium is made up of 24 organisations from 8 European countries, comprising major mobile device manufacturers, hardware and service integration professional services, major consumer electronics companies, mobile network operators, application developers, universities and research institutions.”
Is this an example of technology socialism?
Or necrophilia.
Made my week.
No, it’s called public research. It’s the basis of the most of the technology we have today. The principle ? Make a R&D investment that is only valid when thinking more than 5 years forward. Most companies can’t get that logic, so we give that task to governments ^^
The symbian kernel is intrinsically much more well-suited to mobile devices than Linux or BSD. The current problems with SymbianOS on phones are mostly in the user-space. So fixing that user-space is much more sensible in the end than switching to some Linux distro and requiring 1 GHz processors to be bundled in phones so that it runs relatively smoothly. But it’s a harder path…
Do you think the 1Ghz processor is busy running the kernel? Your logic is completely upside down. The kernel doesn’t matter all that much as long as it provides proper access to hardware features. Sure, it may make a few percent difference in overhead here and there but that’s about it. There’s a reason google chose to build the android userland from ground up not the kernel and mac/ios are doing fine with the rather outdated kernel. So, yeah, it’s a proper necrophilia.
Addition:
Also, “The symbian kernel is intrinsically much more well-suited to mobile devices” is non-sense. It’s the other way around. Because the applications and hardware which needed to be supported were fairly limited, symbian could get away with its own limited custom kernel. There’s no valid market drive behind it anymore. Pouring blind money into it will only make the whole process more horrifying/amusing to look at.
Edited 2010-11-03 14:58 UTC
What are the limitations of Symbian?
The “mobile linux” on the other hand is a mess: Google had to fork the kernel, and embedded linux variants are so difficult to come by that Intel had to set up and fund the Yocto project (http://www.osnews.com/story/23963/Intel_Announces_The_Yocto_Project) to try to clear the field. Also, yes, linux is badly optimised for this type of use: it sips juice all the time with constant calls and, still, after many years of difficult efforts, lacks efficient, reliable, convincing real-time abilities that would allow for a perfectly responsive interface on limited hardware (…heck, even on desktop, linux has responsivity problems).
Google doesn’t need to fork the kernel, they just have to learn to work together (better).
Well, Windows 95 ran quite smoothly on 200MHz PIIs with 128 MB RAM while Windows XP SP1 (with all visual effects disabled) had some serious responsiveness problems on a 1.2 GHz Athlon XP with 512 MB RAM. So yes, I’d say that the kernel *does* matter.
It doesn’t have to be about overhead, though. Badly done scheduling is all it takes to require monster hardware for smooth operation. If tasks that must meet deadlines can’t be managed in a RT fashion and get crushed by power-intensive processes, you get sluggish performance (and garbled audio recording). Sadly, Linux, even with RT patches and process priorities optimized at hand, is still quite bad in this regard, while Symbian was built with RT performance in mind from the start and only waits for some user-space cleanup to get its former snappy performance on relatively slow hardware back.
Poor scheduling is also the key to power waste. Most symbian phones can last a week on battery under medium use, while Android/iOS phones generally ask for a charge every two days. Screen size and faster processor alone can’t justify such a difference alone. Again, scheduling does matter : are non-critical background tasks frozen when the phone is not in use in order to save battery ? Is software allowed to poll wireless every minute when the phone is sleeping ? In which case do we stop underclocking the CPU in order to get things done faster at the cost of higher power consumption ? And things like that…
There’s a reason why when my laptop runs on Windows 7 it remains as cold as when off and nearly silent (except when keeping around a web page including a Flash applet), whereas on some Linux distros I have the feeling that I sit near an A380 taking off and temperature rises noticeably. Granted, it’s a combination of kernel-level and high-level components, but they both have a role to play.
I don’t personally think that requiring iPhone 3GS-class hardware to finally get a smooth UI can be considered “doing fine” as far as kernel performance is concerned.
How exactly is the Symbian kernel lacking when it comes to achieving its goal of powering mobile phones ? I mean, I can tell you a number of reasons why Linux is not very well-suited for that purpose, but the Symbian kernel is everything one could want on a phone :
-Micro-kernel, but with good RT performance.
-Designed with wireless communication in mind down to its core client-server architecture.
-Deeply-enforced, rich security model.
-Excellent power-saving features.
-…
So, what’s the issue ?
Edited 2010-11-03 19:01 UTC
The Linux main kernel project leaders think using the same scheduler for large clusters to small devices might be the trick.
It might be possible, but in that case it needs good tuning options.
Yup… I’ve heard that there has been a linux hacker working on making linux more responsive by tweaking it at scheduler level, but that he subsequently left out of discouragement…
EDIT : Found him ! His name was Con Kolivas. http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm
Edited 2010-11-03 20:47 UTC
He is working on it again, but he won’t be working on getting it into mainline.
More like communism. I’m sick and tired of EU hiring academic fools without any real world experience on major places. This would been great news 5 years ago but now it’s just waste of money. I guess grand plan is to employ those people that Nokia is kicking out from symbian division. It really shows how much Nokia appreciate there experience by not trying to relocate them. Pure leftwing stupidity on it’s best. They probaply spend next few years doing crappy software that noone will use. Well done EU!
I have a question for you from the communist world : do you really think that atomic energy would have been possible without some “academic fools without any real world experience” like Marie Curie working on it ? Do you really think that companies would have spent a single cent and offered a single square meter of lab for studying dull pechblende rocks, in their world of shareholders and their cult of economic growth ?
Edited 2010-11-03 09:53 UTC
Comparing this to academic study against wasting money to abandoned platform is crazy. Supporting existing product on goverment money is waste if it doesn’t value of generating jobs and welfare, both which are false in this case. Theoritical study is totally different compared to this and is largely sponsored private sector since it seen as value. This offers no value to any other than maybe Nokia and even they aren’t intrested on Symbian. Tell me what profit in terms of welfare, jobs or tax income does this offer? None I say. It’s typical euro socialist-communist crap that is based on “good fellow” deals that aim to aid only few.
Typical euro social-communist scheme goes like this A) Sponsor product that brings jobs or income to people near you using goverment money B) Watch product to fail against non-sponsored product in market C) Pump more money to delay total failure, loss of jobs and most importantly loss of your public face D) Keep pumping money until you are far away and let shit hit fan. I know this because this is typical Finnish system.
It’s funding research in open-source OSs, just like the funds given to minix earlier. It brings the same kind of potential long-term benefits to anyone : better future operating systems. How is it different ?
I mean… Without wanting to start a holy war, Linux and BSD are just unambitious clones of AT&T Unix made by CS teachers and students who didn’t want to pay its large cost. Same monolithic structure, same focus on text files, same user/admin security model… Symbian, on the other hand, is a microkernel real-time OS with some real work on security and power management. It’s much more ambitious and interesting, so it’s only natural to fund it…
Edited 2010-11-03 13:11 UTC
Please take your politics elsewhere. This is blatant flame bait. People have literally killed each other over capitalism vs socialism vs communism. No need to bring that kind of shit here. Just stick to the facts. Don’t bring your socialo-politico-economico-religious opinions that nobody cares about here please.
I’d like to add, as a French reader, that a country and its government are here, using citizens’ bills and taxes, to make everyone living in good condition, even the average salary men that do not own a firm and the CEO’s wages coming along with it. Please do not put the words “socialism” and “communism” in the same bag : communism doesn’t ‘allows’ getting rich, while socialism is mostly like capitalism, without its rudeness and ‘anarchy’ methodology (only the stronger, here the richer, will survive, despite common sense)
I find pretty good a community to help a technology that could provide services to the citizens to be saved from decay, especially if this technology is… technologically advanced (not sure about the wiseness to make DOS or similar based system surviving) Or are you the one that would let die disabled people and children due to their lack of… effectiveness, while they still can provide various sort of services (if not being just human beings) ?
OK, that might sounds strange to compare technology with humans, yet technology has been settled up by humans, FOR humans’ usage. And I can assure you technology is good if used wisely (embedded systems, such automotive dashboards, medical care systems, and so on) And, what a strange coincidence, Symbian can target these, while being mostly used in the cell phone array. Symbian is a pretty good OS written from scratch up, and offers a really good viability, if not financially, at least technologically.
And that would be a real shame to let this disappear just for the sake of capitalism, or being bought by a stronger company just to be closed-sourced again and put off the lights for it not to overshadow some other product (having Sun’s products in mind)
Just quit that “commies” fantasy, we’re not animals, we don’t have to live on urban legends anymore (we’re connected to the net, gossips and hoaxes haven’t true founding) to please the capitalism’s cult…
Kochise
Beats hiring industry lobbyists.
No, more like the idea of ‘French champions’ policy being extended to the EU Parliament. With that being said, lets not try to kid ourselves that the United States don’t do a similar thing – companies rescued by ‘convenient’ contracts being won (WorldCom goes into chapter 11 and spontaneously wins a US government contract! of course *THAT* isn’t a bail out *rolls eyes*) or no-compete contracts when it comes to supplying the Pentagon. So yes, all countries to some degree follow such policies – does it make it right? no but at the same time it isn’t something like an ‘EU only’ thing.
Let’s see what happens now.
As someone who owns a Nokia phone with Symbian installed, I’m not really sure if I should be applauding or dismayed.
I’m satisfied with Symbian because my needs are simple. My cheap phone is just a phone, not an Internet device. Symbian provides me with phone and text messaging plus a nice small suite of useful applets (calculator, calendar, FM radio, etc). The phone even has a built-in flashlight (why don’t all phones have that?).
If I really want an Internet device or watch MP4 movies, then I’d have to upgrade. But doesn’t Android, and possibly Meego, do pretty much everything that this Symbian consortium wants to implement? Is the European Commission’s sudden interest in boosting a closed-source system like Symbian really going to benefit companies (other than Nokia) or end-users? I’m not so sure.
EC policy around technology is horribly infected with NIH syndrome (not invented here).
The Symbian platform is open source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_platform
And has pretty much been dropped by everyone except Nokia.
Open, but single vendor.
At some point, Android was single vendor, as well as Meego no matter the number of contributors. Apple’s OS is single vendor.
Thanks, I stand corrected.
But I still think that Android (or maybe Meego) makes more sense. Trying to upgrade Symbian looks like a duplication of effort. Symbian’s main value for me, right now, is that it’s fine for a simple low-end phone where Android would be overkill.
I guess the EC has too much money to burn.
Edited 2010-11-03 06:55 UTC
“Trying to upgrade Symbian looks like a duplication of effort.”
That pretty much defines capitalism, doesn’t it? Android was a duplication of effort with the iPhone, which was a duplication of effort with Palm, which was a duplication of effort with WinCE, which was a duplication of effort with Communicator, which was a duplication of effort with Simon. Yet the market advanced step by step with better products to the smartphones we know and love today. (Well, maybe not with WinCE… 😀 )
The Soviet model was “Pick the best option, and invest everything in it” – i.e., avoid any duplication of effort. But that model failed, because you don’t know the best option until the market decides. So the market invests in several options – duplicate options – and consumers vote with their pocketbook.
Whether a government should be giving tax money to one competitor is a different, perhaps better, question. I’ll avoid it, though, as I’ve had enough politics for a while.
Except this: I greatly appreciate your “I stand corrected” comment, and hope our surviving politicians both red and blue have the same integrity.
So… duplication of effort is a bad thing? Should we have all stuck with IE in 2003? After all, never-really-blossomed Opera was fighting the dying Netscape and the almighty IE. Firefox was just a project idea in a few people’s mind. According to you logic, Chrome would have never existed as it duplicated Webkit on Mac and Windows.
Why does the teenage Android make more sense than the venerable Symbian? the age? the hair color? the boobs? or the overall “sexiness”?
Obviously, you have a preference for Android and think Symbian should be left to die. Others disagree. And I do as the general sentiment on this site has been that diversity is good, in browsers, desktop OSes, etc. Why wouldn’t it be so with mobile OSes? Symbian works very well on my 30 months old Nokia 6110 navigator and provides me with a full week autonomy in standby, a good native browser, Opera Mini, and a fully functional SIM-less and standalone GPS navigator with voice guiding and no lags at all including when alerting me about gas station, ATMs or speed radars. I don’t do social networking so… I’m still wondering why I decided to get the Android-powered HTC Desire six weeks ago, a power (performance-wise) beast that barely lasts 1.5 day (battery life-wise) without being used! The most recent Copilot offers no feature that the software on the other phone doesn’t have. Overall, I am underimpressed with Android. And maybe that I would have been more satisfied with a Symbian-based tactile phone if my carrier offered such a phone at the time of my purchase.
So what is your love for Android and disdain for Symbian about?
Err, that’s their problem. They have reasons to spend that amount of money (which btw is close to nothing for the EC) that we don’t know. However, note that all governments and many institutions “encourage innovation and support important development areas”. What each of those words mean is up to those who make decisions. For the EC, these 22 million € are not “burning”. For the students who get to work on a doctoral thesis out of that money, if any, it won’t be squandered money either. I ran after the EC ample stipends when it was my turn… I would have enjoyed landing my hands on one of their grants.
Neither android nor meego need the money, intel and google own them after all. This is like a social worker doing his best to help and abandoned child.
This is like a social worker doing his best to help and abandoned child.
I don’t quite agree with that analogy. Atleast helping a child is a lofty goal and could save a human life.
This is more like throwing money on a dead horse and waiting for it to get up again.
MeeGo is supposed to have all applications by 1.2 in April, we’re not there yet.
Also maybe Symbian is better for some other devices or needs, what do I know.
This is quite unexpected. I would’ve understand if the EC backed some of the linux based mobile OS, but Symbian? Then again, 22 million isn’t that much.
My guess is some lobbyists have powerful friend.
0,02$
0,0144 EUR
Which is also a EU-based micro-kernel. Hasn’t the USA made similar moves to protect its technology ?
Kochise
Were they “Too Big to Fail”(TM) ?
I don’t think it’s dead (yet). Esp. since Nokia’s few recent top model phones are (still) Symbian and I bet they want to provide a decent OS as competition is getting tough. So unless in scenario where they fail to sell many of Symbian phones while Meego takes over their smartphone sales – they will continue to invest in it.
WinCE is old OS (some will say outdated) but still a platform for a new Windows Phone – so the system below isn’t that important as long as it’s reliable, fast, and able take advantage of hardware. These days the UI and application framework (will be Qt for Nokia) is what users and developers care about.
This is some strange interpretation of capitalism. I thought the market was supposed to decide on the best product.
I wonder whether the EU are contravening their own anti-competition laws. After all, they supposedly prevent EU member governments from subsidising their industries.
If Symbian is healthy it should survive in the marketplace on it’s own. The money should come from licensees.
All this is happening while the UK prime minister has been haggling to reduce the planned 6% budget increase for the European Commission – requested at a time of serious skintness across most of Europe!
Maybe in a world where there’s an infinite number of rational and fully informed consumers, and that with a market inertia close to zero. But in the real world, things don’t happen to systematically work this way and a push in one direction or another sometimes proves to be useful. After all, ads exist.
Edited 2010-11-03 10:51 UTC
Anti-competition laws are for companies. The Symbian Foundation is a non-profit organization…
drop me 1 mill plx :*
the communists share the financial burden with the capitalists:
As a result, the EC has granted €11 million towards the funding of the development projects proposed by the consortium. With matched funding (i.e. funding provided by companies in the consortium), this means a total of €22 million is being invested in the development of next generation technologies for the Symbian platform.
http://blog.symbian.org
+ 25% taxes on average which flow back = the european governments only pay 1/4, even if the project proves to be useless in the end.
would you also complain if they’d sponsor some linux-developers?
Here is a nice article that summarizes what this funding covers:
http://www.unwiredview.com/2010/11/02/explaining-symbeose-symbian-e…
Interesting to note, it is mostly low-level stuff, not user-facing stuff. So it really is about investing in the technology to fund long-term goals, and not as much in the consumer-facing platform….
One slight correction to the title: the EU is only contributing 11 Million, the SYMBEOSE consortium is contributing the other half. Also interesting to note here is that ST Ericsson is one of the SYMBEOSE members–interesting because Sony Ericsson recently announced they were dropping Symbian on their phones….
A government making strategic investments is hardly new or unique. All countries do it, the Russians paid for and eventually built the Elbrus chip, China pays for Godson, The Japanese pay for super computers, the US pours hundreds of billions into technology via supercomputers, military tech and NASA – all which goes directly or indirectly back to industry.
So the EU putting 11€ into Symbian is nothing. (BTW Symbian foundation is only getting 1.4million of this).
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As for the free market making decisions, Symbian is still the No. 1 smartphone OS, and it appears that Nokia plan on putting into a lot more phones in the future, not less.
Keeping Symbian afloat is a good idea anyway, we had a monoculture on the desktop, do you really want another one?
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As for the free market in general, the last couple of years have proven -yet again- that a completely free market is a not a very good idea.