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I agree.
I think the major issue with Symbian was that they never managed to bring the OS API up to date.
PIPS and QT were a nice addition but you still needed to get dirty with Symbian C++ and the horrible toolchain.
This was one of the reasons that many developers jumped to other platforms.
Back in the day I had hopped that when the ABI was broken, the API would be improved. Instead they introduced API level controls with certificates and DRM.
The major issue for developers maybe. If Symbian had had a fighting chance of battling the iPhone, it wouldn't have mattered--apps would be developed for it one way or another. But sadly the UI in general--both the frameworks and the OS itself--simply couldn't compare to the iPhone's slickness, so the consumer demand wasn't there, so the developers ignored it....
They don't need hardware which is more power hungry than iPhone or the tons of Android phones out there. They need roughly the same hardware.
And I'm sure that Nokia will tailor the hardware and software to be as power savy as it gets. That's why I love my Nokia phones, beside making quality hardware that can be used for years, the battery lasts a lot comparing to other phone brands.
They don't need hardware which is more power hungry than iPhone or the tons of Android phones out there. They need roughly the same hardware.
This is the kind of hardware which I called very fast and power-hungry. As compared to usual Nokia hardware, I mean, which tends to be a bit underpowered for Symbian already, but also have crazily long battery lives as a compensation.
Eseries used to do their job nicely with only ~350MHz ARMv6 chips at hand, as an example. I don't think this will work anymore if Nokia shift focus on lots of smooth eye candy and want larger, higher-resolution screens.
Yeah
Past Nokia cells have been very good for me, too. I'm worried about the future, though. Everyone seems to go to heavy OSs that are close to desktop ones, and put faster hardware in phones to run them. As batteries rarely get more capacity (I don't know for how many years phones have dealt with a few Wh in their batteries, but I think it's safe to say that an order of magnitude improvement is not coming soon), and CPU efficiency is already very high in the mobile world and does not get much higher, I see low battery lives becoming a fatality, and mid-end phones becoming increasingly sluggish. I think Samsung's decision to have the bada OS use two different kernels depending on which hardware it runs on is best in the long run. RTOSs are best for low- and mid-end phones with not so much processing power. Heavier kernels with much less snappy event handling, like Linux, should only be used on high-end devices (that have, like, 1GHz processors), where other priorities mandate their use.
Edited 2011-05-25 13:40 UTC





Member since:
2010-03-08
The thing is, this worked with Symbian, because Symbian was designed for mobile and embedded devices in the first place. But since Nokia apparently now wants to go "the wow starts now", and get into Microsoft OSs on one side and Linux with lots of GPU-accelerated eye candy on another side, they'll also have to put very fast and power-hungry hardware before things work smoothly, whether they like it or not.
Edited 2011-05-25 09:55 UTC