Buried deep within Nokia's press release about its financial results, there's a line that pretty much signals the end of one of the most popular and successful mobile operating systems in history. With Nokia retiring its use, Symbian is no more.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Perhaps Thom could grab some inexpensive recent handset running the last version, Nokia Belle feature pack 2, and do a goodbye review?
(right after that long overdue RISC OS review? ;p )
Edited 2013-01-25 14:44 UTC
Member since:2005-06-29
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Member since:2009-08-21
Latest incarnations of Symbian are really nice to use indeed, well-designed Qt apps are a pleasure to use and the UI is quite consistent if you exclude some third-party oddballs. I use an 808 as my primary phone and I'm enjoying it very much, its camera being a notable plus.
So BB10 remains the only non-discontinued mobile OS to offer true multitasking accessible through a non-broken UI.
I still hope someone can make something out of the available source code - so that we may see a new effort rise from the ashes of Nokia's past. Seeing a realtime microkernel based OS disappearing like this is too sad.
Member since:2010-06-01
Member since:2008-09-21
Member since:2007-11-11
The "burning platform memo" was NOT what killed Symbian mismanagement at Nokia for too many years is what killed Symbian.
Everybody likes to blame Elop for Nokia when if you look at where the company was when he was brought on board it was a mess, just a giant mangled mess. They had not one, not two, but THREE different OSes NONE of which was in ANY shape to compete with iOS and Android, you had Symbian, you had the MeeGo which had serious memory leaks and networking issues, and then you had the Java based thing.
So if you want to know why Symbian never really kept up just look at the board of Nokia, they let everything go off the rails and by the time they got off their behind and made a call the boat was already sinking. All Elop could do is throw a Hail Mary pass and hope it would be a hit because there wasn't a plan B, Neither Symbian or MeeGo had a prayer against iOS.
Man...who would have thought when Jobs came back in 97 and had to make a deal with Gates just to keep the developers from bailing that he would end up making Apple the 800 pound gorilla that even MSFT fears and which can knock out old guard like Nokia without even breaking a sweat.
Member since:2008-09-21
You mean like Samsung has Android, Bada and Tizen?
It can't become more bullshit then that. Come on. Many N9 owners will call you a troll on that. Be at least so kind to give a source. You can not? Aha.
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Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
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"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues."
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently."In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies."The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.
Member since:
2005-07-08
Actually the last UI version was quite pleasant to use.
Although Symbian C++ was a braindead dialect of C++, coupled with a Frankenstein toolchain, Nokia was getting its act together with PIPS and Qt.
But it was too late to attract developers and the burning platform memo was the death sentence.