Today we want to focus on what came next, Symbian Anna, which arrived a year after the launch of Symbian^3 (Symbian^2 launched only in Japan). Anna was unveiled in early 2011 alongside the Nokia X7 and Nokia E6. The E6 was a bar phone with a QWERTY keyboard (and a 2.45″ touch display), but the X7 was all touch (4.0″ display).
Even better, owners of certain older Nokias would receive Anna as an update, that was the case for the Nokia N8 and E7. The Nokia C7 and C6-01 got it too.
I have a few Symbian Anna and Belle (its successor) devices, and they’re not exactly great. The software is slow, cumbersome, clunky, and unpleasant to use, and simply no competition for the iPhone and Android, even at the time they came out. They’re fun novelties to play with now, but I genuinely feel sorry for the people who bought into these things back when they were new, thinking they’d get something on the level of the iPhone or Android.
I still miss my Psions. I could never warm to the Nokia Symbians, EPOC was like a local optimum of OS evolution. B/W, not connected (without explicit efffort) and keyboard based, but perfectly formed at all that. The beautiful Revo broke Psion with is flawed power system.
Where’s the link Thom?
I loved Nokia phones but I think Symbian may have been the weakest link.
I briefly looked at what it would take to develop an app on Symbian and quickly gave up.
Forgot to put a link to the article.
So, Thom is able to edit the article, but we’re not able to edit our comments.
Great.
I never got a chance to use a Nokia phone with Anna/Belle, but I did have a Nokia 5230 Nuron with Series 60 5th edition and it was pretty horrible as a touch device. It was clear that Nokia had no idea what they were doing bringing a non-touch OS to touchscreens. I was of two minds about the phone when I had it; I loved the physical design of it and it felt great in the hand, but actually using it was frustrating and turned me off of Symbian altogether.
Heh, this is where Symbian’s internal politics come into play: Symbian was originally meant to support 6 different form-factors (UIs), which were soon trimmed down into 3 (keypad, touchscreen, Communicator). Nokia would of course own the Communicator form-factor (since it was their form-factor, protected by patents and all) but there was disagreement among handset vendors on who would own the other two (or if they collectively owned them how the phones of each manufacturer would be different from each other). Long story short, Nokia ended up owning the keypad UI (S60) and some years later Sony Ericsson and Motorola ended up owning the touchscreen UI (UIQ).
This led to some bizarre directions, such as Motorola converting UIQ to a keypad UI for use in the Motorola RIZR (back when slider phones were all the rage), and sometime later Nokia converting S60 to a touchscreen UI so their Nokia 5800 brick could pretend to compete with the iPhone. Yes, the Nokia 5800 was the first S60v5 phone, complete with the awful 640×360 resolution that became the hardcoded resolution for all S60v5 and Symbian^3 phones thereafter (because apparently Nokia failed to learn from the S60v1/v2 and S60v3 experience than hardcoded resolutions are bad, bad, bad).
And when Sony Ericsson wanted to move to finger-driven touchscreen phones, they didn’t adapt UIQ because they were done investing in Symbian, so they went with Nokia’s Symbian S60v5 instead, before bailing out to Android completely and letting Nokia fight with the franken-OS that was S60v5 and its descendants.
Basically, Nokia thought Symbian S60 was some kind of valuable IP worth protecting in an age when everyone else was bailing to Android.
than hardcoded resolutions = that hardcoded resolutions (sorry)
Also, if you want to learn more about Symbian’s UI bizzarenes, there is a good article on The Register:
https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/29/symbian_history_part_two_ui_wars/
That is fascinating, I had no idea about any of that history! Thank you. 🙂
I remember using that a long time ago. N8 was actually my first smartphone. The web browser was horrible, any sane person replaced it ASAP with Opera Mobile or Mini (the former one was more compatible and a “real” browser whereas the latter one was often faster and used less data). Ovi Maps were gangster in the day – available for free with turn-by-turn directions and offline downloads. Only problem was that 3G+GPS+Maps were causing significant throttling. Still, it was a pretty nice thing to have when travelling in Europe before roaming started to include reasonable amount of data. The whole thing was something you could call a “true computer” – it was possible not only to connect it to a TV (with included mini HDMI dongle), but also hook up external storage (yes, the adapter was included as well). There was even mouse pointer support.
Belle update released a couple of months later was more significant in terms of UI. More visual changes and the whole thing looked noticeably more modern. One particular memory that I have with these updates was using Phoenix software for upgrading the OS. My operator, Orange Poland, was being late with the Belle update (not sure if they’ve ever actually released it) so I had to flash the phone.
My Nokia N70 shipped with Opera Mini pre-installed from Nokia, this tells you everything you need to know about the quality of Nokia’s own browser.
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/300141/Nokia-N70.html?page=17#manual
But Opera Mini was surprisingly useable considering the phone’s CPU and the awful 176×208 screen resolution it had to work with (same resolution as the Nokia 7650 released back in 2002, aka the first S60 phone, ahh… the compromises we had to make back then to have a keypad phone capable of native apps).
Oh lord, the Symbian browser would crash constantly.
No need to feel sorry for us Nokia users! We had some good times! I loved the hardware designs, but software was always Nokia’s Achilles heel. Oh, and internal storage: They always compromised on storage. But, hey, this was a time when ‘the other’ OSes where still figuring out copy and paste!