[General] Fwd: Symbian Goes Open Source - Courtesy of Nokia

[bashar abdullah]

*"What is so bad about Symbian? I see a lot of people complaining about it,
but no one can tell me in concrete terms that these are the problems I have
with *Symbian* -- and not with S60/S80/UIQ."*

I haven't tried it my self, but the people I talked to all spoke of Symbian
programming as hell, especially in terms of Bluetooth programming. On the
other hand, the Android does seem to have a better API for that from what I
heard and the quick look I had on it.
Maybe that's why they complain about it.

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Burhan Khalid <burhan at kuwaitnet.net> wrote:

> Majed B. wrote:
>
>> Honestly, I don't see this as a big threat. Symbian has been round for
>> a long time (10 years?) and it wasn't as good as it should have nor as
>> expected.
>>
>> With Android, the framework is unified, so one program should work on
>> all devices, unless it uses hardware specific to a certain device
>> (e.g., accelerometer), which is not the case for Symbian, where
>> developers had to write the same program for multiple platforms (S60,
>> S80).
>>
>
> By the way, there is only one platform -- its called Symbian. The
> S60/S80/UIQ are GUI built on top of Symbian (the Operating System). You can
> think of it as Symbian = Linux, S60 = Gnome, UIQ = KDE.
>
> What is so bad about Symbian? I see a lot of people complaining about it,
> but no one can tell me in concrete terms that these are the problems I have
> with *Symbian* -- and not with S60/S80/UIQ.
>
>  Symbian would have had a shot, maybe, if it was open-source 5 years
>> back. Enough time for the community to gather and fix this complicated
>> OS. I think Nokia did its stunt in an effort to stay on the top of the
>> mobile industry, since it's the main user of Symbian, as others are
>> shifting to Linux (e.g., Motorola).
>>
>
> Again -- not sure where you get your numbers from. Symbian is the most
> popular mobile operating system by a very large margin. Nokia is not the
> only user of Symbian. SE and Motorola both use Symbian, so does Samsung.
>
>  Android seem to be having some delays over hardware issues from device
>> manufacturers, so enthusiasm is cooling down for now, but Symbian is
>> dying (in my opinion) much faster than Android's cool-down.
>>
>
> I doubt this very much. What makes you think Symbian is dead? The biggest
> threat to a mobile OS is the device, and since Android doesn't have one yet
> -- mainly because the platform is not finalized yet, I think its very
> premature to declare Symbian dead -- lest you sound like a fanboy.
>
>  I'm guessing within 3 years, Symbian will be dead, and Nokia will have
>> some really tough time in sales, unless some miracle happens!
>>
>
> Wow. Seriously? The largest mobile phone developer in the world ... with
> the largest market share, will be dead in 3 years, based on the threat from
> a operating system that hasn't been finalized, nor has it been in the
> market?
>
>
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