Well, that escalated quickly. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, but I think Nokia has just revealed that Symbian is dead – dead as in, no more development. In a comment on a feature request for Symbian in Nokia’s bug tracker, the company writes: “Thank you for your improvement ideas, thus Symbian is in maintenance mode and no new features will be implement without extremely good reason (business case). We have written down your ideas for future development if there is a chance that new features will be released.” This means Symbian Belle FP2 is the last Symbian version. Odd, because Symbian devices are still being sold.
It’s that trojan horse! He has orders to drive Nokia down, just like Richard “Microsoft Mole” Belluzzo did before him drove SGI down.
Ah yes, because in your fantasy-land you’re unable to accept that the present situation of Nokia didn’t come from, say, the saboteur Canadian – but is the result of wide-scale company dynamics present & quite visible for around half a decade, by now (indeed, it was largely brought by their dysfunctional internal R&D efforts, including those WRT operating systems)
And apparently you also can’t see, after all this time, that SGI was brought down by the rise of powerful consumer GPUs and Linux workstations.
Edited 2012-10-23 00:03 UTC
Why waste money on Symbian – a platform with no future? The future is WP8.
The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.
Have you seen the current Symbian phones? The hardware is five years out of date yet the prices are similar to decent Android phones.
You do realize that I was commenting on WP8 being the future, not Symbian being obsolete, right?
Well, i thought that this “bright” was a reference to that famous white bright light that everybody sees when nearing death.
So a slow, reversible decline was turned into a swift death.
So sad. I won’t list the reasons why I think Symbian still represents a valid technological alternative to other mobile OS’s, yet I find it hard to accept that a real-time OS with Qt support is going to die this way. Will its source code forever sleep in some digital shrine, completely useless to mankind – or will it be eventually released?
Sometimes I wonder how things would have worked out if there had been two competing companies, one pushing Symbian hard and the other restlessly developing MeeGo – maybe both OS’s would still be around and innovating.
Wasn’t it already released? I thought it was open sourced a while ago, only to be closed up again.
The development was closed, but once the code is opened it’s a “cat out of the bag” thing of course: http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbiandump http://code.google.com/p/symbian-incubation-projects/ – so go ahead and grab it, if you can make sense of it and/or if you care (oh yeah, nobody really cared overall, NVM if it was open…)
Have you ever developed for Symbian?
I would say it is everything but innovating, in what concerns developers.
Symbian C++ and the 1001 ways to use certain APIs won’t be missed.
Qt was only available in specific handsets.
Edited 2012-10-16 04:44 UTC
Even when it was, it didn’t exactly fit. Apps didn’t behave quite right, nor did it communicate with some of the lower-level Symbian APIs used by certain software. QT’s integration into Symbian was half-done, and that’s being generous.
“Reversible decline” is just a wishful thinking of… people who didn’t really follow what was going on with Symbian. Because, for example, you don’t seem to realize even that Symbian source has been released (go ahead and grab that “valid technological alternative […] a real-time OS with Qt support”: http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbiandump http://code.google.com/p/symbian-incubation-projects/ )
Windows Phone will save Nokia. The next version.
You mean WP9 don’t you
This is nothing new.
Giving the responsibility of Symbian development to Accenture was the typical way from Nokia to outsource legacy projects, most likely to an Indian or Chinese site from Accenture.
Not only this was basically announced a ~year ago, when Symbian development was given to Accenture…
…also, “maintenance mode” was sort of standard for Symbian devices – they got features that came with it, updates brought important-enough bug fixes; only with the last generation of Symbian phones it really changed.
So, this not-news is not too far from “no new Symbian phones” – which wouldn’t surprise anybody.
So they stopped developing Symbian. Am I cynical in believing that they are still producing Symbian phones even though they have killed the OS?
So they stopped developing Symbian. Am I cynical in believing that they are still producing Symbian phones even though they have killed the OS?
They still make the 808 Pureview plus many low-end phones.
IMO Symbian should have died with the legendary S60v3 (keypad) and UIQ (touchscreen). Keeping Symbian alive (and putting the S60 branch through a horrible plastic surgery to become a touchscreen OS, that resulted in the disgrace known as S60v5, because UIQ was owned by Sony Ericcson) started out of necessity, because Meego wasn’t ready to be put in the chassis of the N97 and then the N9. The N9 run Symbian^3, a fusion of S60v5 and UIQ, which was better than the S60v5 the N97 run, but it still wasn’t competitive. Then, when the WP8 deal happened, and Nokia finally had something to put int their high-end phones, Nokia wanted to keep Symbian^3 alive in order to have something to put in low-end phones. Too bad developers don’t think that way. They won’t code for a platform designed to be sold in low-end phones.
Unless someone had managed to pull techno-wizardy and make Symbian run Android apps, on the same speed as same-spec low-end Android, Symbian was dead, and there was no kind of marketing wizardy that could save it. Android killed Symbian, period.
MeeGo could have been a nice platform, but it took too late to arrive, and it was too late for Nokia to build an ecosystem. So they went with Windows Phone and let MS do the heavy lifting of building the “third ecosystem”.
Edited 2012-10-16 10:26 UTC
Symbian was pain to use:
– Use of C++ contructors not allowed
– Three different types of strings
– Use of ARM TRAPs bundled with magic macros, instead of more sane error handling
– A braindead toolchain based in batch files, Perl scripts and auto-generated Makefiles
– Coding conventions that made Hungarian notation feel nice
Overall it was more pleasant to develop software for MS-DOS than for Symbian!
Of course, everyone jumped ship to more normal platforms.
The N9 doesn’t run Symbian^3. The N9 has Meego/Harmattan which is like combination of UI of next-gen Maemo and the Meego base system. And it’s a really nice smartphone. Tons of better than any existing Windows Phone, and would have been a very good competitor for iPhone.
Besides Windows Phone and iPhone are so last-gen. N9 is already next-gen device since it has no extra buttons, everything is controlled by touch based gestures (except powering on/off. Volume can be set with both buttons and gestures and both call volume, and application volume are separate).
While I understand where you were going with all that talk, I’m saying that Nokia did a horrible mistake by trusting Microsoft and even bigger mistake when they gamed all their bets with the Windows Phone only (instead of going with multiple OSes).
-Windows Phone has _less_ market share than Symbian currently has.
-Windows Phone has _less_ meaningful applications available than Symbian has.
-Windows Phone has _less_ devices available than Symbian has.
-Windows Phone has _less_ features than Symbian has.
-Windows Phone has _more_ restrictions on how you can or cannot write application for the platform.
And I want to tell people in self denial to honestly open their eyes and admit that usability in Windows Phone is even more horrible than what it is in the latest iteration of Symbian. Windows Phone _only looks_ nicer than Symbian. Windows Phone just wastes screen space for sake of aesthetic reasons. And font sizes don’t make any sense since most are either too small or way too large. Not much information can be seen on a screen due that.
If I were a developer, there’s no way I’d make investments to the Windows Phone platform. Unless Microsoft pays me before hand lump sum of money, and I’d get larger portion of the money than what they’re currently willing to share with me.
Windows Phone call experience is horrible. The Most important task of the phone doesn’t work properly in Windows Phone, and it’s not pleasant to use.
It relates around the fact that Windows Phone has no true multitasking. And does only single vibrate in vibrate mode when a call is received, and battery status isn’t continuously visible. No custom sounds for different types of notifications. No ringer profiles either.
Also all address book contact details are automatically uploaded to cloud service (which is a enormous privacy violation imho). There just isn’t local offline phone to computer sync option. And only one actual phone number per a contact can be added. You also cannot send or receive contacts as a csv file, or save contact to a SIM card.
Call history is at least 20 years behind everything else on a market, and you cannot filter calls into missed calls, received calls, dialled calls, recent calls, and so on. You cannot see call duration either. Call history doesn’t group calls by contact either. You cannot see the time of call for calls older than one day.
And all this is just a peak of the iceberg. Windows Phone is going to sink, and it will sink faster harder and louder than the Symbian… Windows Phone at the moment is only kept alive by continuous artificial respiration in form of money Microsoft and Nokia are dumbing into it.
I already know that Windows Phone 8 will be a big failure. Microsoft already killed Windows Phone user base by not allowing existing customers to run all the new stuff, and now they’re killing Windows Phone 8 before it has even shipped by not giving out SDK for the developers.
Let’s just face the fact: Windows Phone is knee deep in the dead. Long time after Windows Phone died… Symbian will still be used world wide, even if it’s not supported or developed forward by anyone.
Edited 2012-10-16 16:43 UTC
Meego in its shipping N9 form had many issues its faithful don’t want to remember… http://www.mobile-review.com/review/nokia-n9-2-en.shtml – and that’s after enormous time & R&D it took (I stumbled once on comparison of Nokia and Apple budgets from 2 or 3 years back – Symbian division alone consumed more funds than the entire R&D of Apple… Symbian never even beeing, IIRC, the primary cash-cow of Nokia)
One of the problems with N9 – it was nothing more than iPhone wannabe (also that “no buttons” silliness – imagine the thought process at Nokia as ~”OK folks, we defended buttons and ridiculed iPhone when it came out; but it’s doing great, despite having only one front button …let’s one-up them!”). But I’m afraid it will be the next Amiga myth (seems it’s cool now to clung to the stretched-ipod-nano N9 …myths about its sales numbers, and smooth experience of the OS)
If there’s a place for third mobile ecosystem – then Microsoft is very likely the only one with enough clout, influence, resourced to pull it off.
But you clearly don’t even know much about Nokia is doing – recently (under “the saboteur” Elop), S40 improved greatly, is now basically better than Symbian. And saying that Symbian has more meaningful apps than WP is a complete rubbish; the main problem with Symbian: people hardly even used it as a smartphone OS, the features were irrelevant.
so much for Elops promise for continued development up until 2014.
Nokia still produces Symbian phones, among others 808 which has basically no competition in its category.
If you mean the category of “decent on paper but missing the point one aspect of hardware, made unbearable by the OS and alienating future customers” then sure…
And Symbian being in maintenance mode is not different from how it always has been, for released devices – no more features, only bug-fixes.
Crap! I wrote N9 instead of N8. The original plan for N8 was to run MeeGo, the codename was Colombus.
I also believe WP is crap, and will only get one if the upgrade situation with Android gets really bad.
MeeGo was a kickass OS but arrived too late, and Nokia didn’t want to take a risk to create a new ecosystem so late.
Symbian was obsolete. It doesn’t do dual core and as previous people said, developing for it is hard even with the Qt additions.
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Edited 2012-10-16 17:45 UTC