Ahead of schedule, the Symbian Foundation has released the source code to Symbian's EKA2 real-time, multitasking, SMP microkernel, under the Eclipse Public License. It comes with a complete development kit, free of charge. The Foundation's plan is to open up the entire platform, and this is of course a very important milestone in that process.
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Member since:2009-02-07
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.
Member since:2008-12-26
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).
Member since:2009-10-24
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.
Member since:
2005-07-06
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