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

Sat Jun 28 20:44:22 +03 2008

> 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.

Thank you for the clarification.
I've seen too many applications being very specific to the GUI, which made
me think it's a platform by itself.

> 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 done any development on Symbian, personally, but a couple of close
friends did, and they said the development on it is just horrible!!
Complicated and tedious.

I don't know why you would separate the platform from the GUI, when it comes
to mobile phone frameworks. I understand where you're coming from, maybe
relating it to *nix systems, where the core is separated from the GUI, but
this is a mobile platform that MUST have a GUI, otherwise it's unusable. No
user would be interested in writing commands in a shell to dial a phone
number! (except for your typical Slashdot-like geeks)

As I said, I never did development on Symbian, so I donno how the GUI is
built on top of the core. But Symbian has been around for 10 years, and
since it started till this, the GUI is crap. And that's an understatement,
too. Maybe it's just Nokia phones, but I have not seen one mobile that
didn't act funny after 6 months to 1 year of usage. Even those that have no
applications installed to them, other than the factory default, start to act
all funky & weird after a while, and require you a dreadful format! (WINDOWS
ANYBODY?)

Nokia does know how to make the GUI easy to use, which has a bit on an edge
over Sony mobiles, but the horrible experience and the weird black-outs are
just ridiculous.

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.

According to the list of Alliance members (
http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html ), Samsung, Motorola, LG
and HTC are onboard.
These are all manufacturers that are producing mobile phones that rival
Nokia, and in Kuwait, man people have already shifted to these mobiles
escaping Nokia's mobiles.

Nokia used to make great mobiles, before the whole smartphone hype started;
it was all about reliability and durability, but that faded away with the
introduction of smartphones from Nokia. Yes, it was the leader in
smartphones, but those phones just kept getting disappointing reliability
scores, giving other players to penetrate the market with better products.
*bling* *bling* and widgets aren't all what users want...

So, for 10 years, the GUI platforms of Symbian (or is it Symbian itself?)
didn't meet the reliability that users had hoped for, nor the expected
spread in terms of device-numbers globally (expected was 400 million,
current estimated = 200m --
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/24/andrew_on_symbian/page2.html)
Why would it now make any leaps that it is in the hands of Nokia, that has
lost its touch?

If you don't believe that Nokia has lost its touch with making mobile
phones, then I guess your opinion differs than mine. I've been a Nokia
communicator user since my first mobile and never used another mobile since
then. 9110, 9250 and now 9500. Flexibility and advancd options have
decreased with each release. Along with reliability of the OS.
I was waiting for the next communicator E90, anxiously for a long time, but
when it was released, I was very disappointed. I got my hands on one before
buying it, and I was shocked to the amount of change it had applied to the
system: MUCH LESS options and advanced ones, crippled usability, crippled
keyboard (always got worse!!!), and the whole thing felt like it was
designed for an idiot!!
The communicator was designed for techy [business] people (business is
optional!), yet Nokia decided it wants to expand its user base so it kept
trying to make the phone "easier" by crippling it in each newer model.

After I saw the E90, and with experience of how things went with previous
models, I decided to never buy from Nokia again, and I'm patiently waiting
for a decent Linux-based phone to be released, hopefully with the functions
that I want.

Sorry to have drifted from Symbian to Nokia, but since it's in charge of it
now, I thought it made sense to see how the new owner would play the dice,
so to speak.

> 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 haven't seen anything exciting of Android, but then again, I'm not a
GUI-fanatic or a widget-licker .. I like to have as much features as
possible and exploit as much of the hardware as possible, but if stability
and durability are screwed up, then there's no point in the device! This
applies to computers as well, and if Windows offered reliability and
stability, then users wouldn't have been so disgruntled (even when aspects
of the OS are untouchable).

I'm not advocating Android, but so far, it has most back up of leading
industry players, and its future looks bright. I've been keeping an eye on
OpenMoko (OpenMoko.com/.org) for a while, and though their goals are great,
the community and industry support aren't as good as Android's. This puts
more odds at Android, but that doesn't mean it will meet the expectations,
and OpenMoko might surpass it, or maybe just compete with it.

>
>
>  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?

Android uses Java, and many applications have already been written, which
means, there's already an available base of applications to run on Android.
The interesting part will be the applications that are provided by the
manufacturers which exploit its own hardware. and since HTC is in the game,
hopefully we'd see neat applications, since developing with Java is much
easier than Symbian.

-- 
Majed B.
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