Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 4th Sep 2007 22:59 UTC
Hi-Mobile.net sent us in one of the most down-to-earth, powerful and yet no frills, smartphone Nokia ever released, the 6120 Classic. Read on for our review of the SymbianOS S60 v3.1-based smartphone.
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Member since:2005-07-17
To run your own homebrew software you have to get certified or your phone will refuse to run them. There's also Python for S60, see http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/pythonfors60/index.html
Member since:2005-07-20
Member since:2006-04-05
About Symbian, how "hacker-friendly" is Symbian? I've been looking for a phone that I can write my own software for easily, and being held back by the software as little as possible (ie: not iPhone).
Get. An. iPhone.
The hacking-unfriendliness of the iPhone is completely overrated. If you actually intend to do *any* kind of hacking, you'll have to get your hands dirty anyway.
The Symbian development tools suck. No half-words. Carbide is just ridiculous. CodeWarrior will set you back a considerable amount of cash. Visual Studio plus Symbian SDK is OK, almost decent, but still not decent. But that's on a IDE level. API-level, you've got to be kidding me by not going iPhone. Look at what the guys already accomplished by using AJAX. Look at what the guys already accomplished by not using AJAX and going straight to the jailbreak/UIKit process.
Not to mention how Nokia always ships a couple of revisions behind SymbianOS, and only recently SymbianOS began supporting memory paging (which, I suspect, is the reason why Eugenia didn't run out of RAM when browsing sites that usually put the S60 browser to shame). And Nokia *never*, ever, released a new OS to use on an "older" phone. I, a Nokia E70 owner, am stuck with a broken 3.0 firmware, and that's because I forced my phone to report being of a different region that it actually is. And yes, I'm putting up with the crazied keyboard layout, because the 2.0 firmware is unbearable.
Consider that Apple isn't focusing on an entire line of phones; only the iPhone (and I hope that this won't change in today's announcement; but we'll know what happens in the next 3h). Whatever Apple does, I won't change my stance: programming using the Cocoa APIs is incomparable to S60/UIQ/Symbian in general. The Symbian Signed stuff sucks to untold extremes. Homebrew has been extremely limited by it, and lo and behold, it hasn't prevented any kind of cracking at all -- not even limited it! --, because almost every vendor is locked to the same lowest common denominator of plain "self-signed dev certificates". Which defeats the whole purpose.
Symbian's trusted levels are all about media DRM, which completely failed to materialise. There's the occasional rambling on Nokia music stores, but has anyone ever cared about it at all?
And we already have Apple committed to releasing real software improvements in a timely fashion. They even changed their usual accounting process to deal with this. Apple-blessed native software development is only a matter of time now, as the demand is clearly there and Apple hasn't risen from the ashes by not listening to their customers and developers. They even softened their position regarding un-supporting Carbon64 after a number of developers expressed their concerns.
IMH, but first-hand opinion, your safest bet is anything but Symbian-related stuff. Go Windows Mobile if you will, but not Symbian. And I strongly suggest you to go iPhone, money permitting.
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Member since:
2006-11-02
About Symbian, how "hacker-friendly" is Symbian? I've been looking for a phone that I can write my own software for easily, and being held back by the software as little as possible (ie: not iPhone).