Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

The result of the pioneering joint Psion and Nokia smartphone effort is still out there on GitHub. Smartphones are everywhere. They are entirely commoditized now. Most of them run Android, which uses the Linux kernel. The rest run Apple's iOS, which uses the same XNU kernel as macOS. As we've said before, they're not Unix-like …

[blu3b3rry]

Ah, Symbian

One of the last Symbian devices I owned was a Nokia 5230. For 2009 it was pretty advanced looking back especially for its size.

Touchscreen with handwriting support via a stylus and even had a built in satnav application, although you were far better off downloading the maps first via PC.

Definitely better to use and longer battery life than the HTC running early Android that I replaced it with a few years later.

[Catkin]

Re: Ah, Symbian

I bought and got rid of an N97 in just a bit over a year because I made the stupid mistake of trying the N900, which was just a joy to use, viciously slow repositories aside. It felt like a long time before Android offered everything Maemo did.

[Dave559]

Re: Ah, Symbian

I miss Symbian, too: well, I don't know if I technically miss it as an OS itself, never having delved at that level, but as a means to the end of having some, at the time, state of the art (and far less bloaty than the nascent competition) smart mobile devices, long before Apple and Google very belatedly jumped aboard the train, it really was great in what it enabled you to do.

Although you could, if you wanted, spend (by the standards of the time) what seemed like terrifyingly large amounts on some of the really high-end devices (such as Nokia Communicators), it also powered a great many much more affordable devices too (which is, again, far more than can be said for many of Apple's and Samsung's (etc) devices these days).

And it was an all too rare (mostly) British success story too!

Forgive the flag-waving, but, ARM itself aside, we sadly have far too few more recent tech success stories to shout about… :-(

I still really miss my Nokia E7, combining both touchscreen technology and a really, really, usable slide-out physical keyboard, a true successor to its at least equally innovative Psion 5mx ancestor. If only Nokia hadn't spent far too long running around in multiple different directions once they realised that maybe it was getting to be time for Symbian to start to think about going for a well-earned rest in the summerhouse at the back of the garden, and had got MeeGo and the N900 and N9 ready much sooner, and most especially before the fireraiser arrived…

[Gene Cash]

Not available in the US

> And it was an all too rare (mostly) British success story too!

I remember almost none of it was available in the US. My boss spent an absurd amount of money and time just TRYING to buy a Nokia Communicator.

[ThomH]

Re: Ah, Symbian

> Although you could, if you wanted, spend (by the standards of the time) what seemed like terrifyingly large amounts on some of the really high-end devices

Or indeed spend a genuinely terrifyingly large amount just using Symbian — I had a 6600 from 2004 and at the time O2 was charging something like £20 for 250mb of contract data. Suffice to say, other than installing applications I'd downloaded at home and transferred by infrared, it rarely got used as anything more than a feature phone.

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Re: Ah, Symbian

Infrared! That's the first time I've heard of anybody actually using it on a phone. I always wondered what it was for.

[Slow Joe Crow]

Re: Ah, Symbian

I didn't have a smartphone until 2011 but in the early oughts my iPaq had IR which I could use with a Canon portable inkjet printer, and my TV set. The circa 2002 iPaq had a consumer grade IR emitter and a universal remote application. These days I can control my Roku over WiFi so I have some of the same function.

[Press any key]

Re: Ah, Symbian

I used infra red to get mobile internet access on my Cassiopeia using my mobile phones built in modem.

The speed was probably a massive 14.4kb/s but in the late 90's that was usable if you were patient.

[Ken G]

Re: Ah, Symbian

Xiaomi Redmi devices still have it and include a sometimes useful TV remote control app.

Back in the day, I used it to connect my Psion Revo to my Nokia 6310 to send an email. I was excited.

[anothercynic]

Re: Ah, Symbian

Regarding the terrifying amounts spent on Nokia Communicators - These days no-one blinks an eyelid at the same amount to pay for an Android/iPhone device... How times have changed!

I loved my Communicator - It provided data to my laptop (via PCMCIA, remember that?!) and it was great to do work on the train from Cambridge to Norwich (even over EGPRS which was the fastest then).

:-)

[doublelayer]

Re: Ah, Symbian

That's not entirely true. The original 9000 communicator cost a nice round £1,000 in 1996, but that would now be over £2,000 in today's money. The most expensive iPhone you can buy is the iPhone 16 Pro Max with a terabyte of storage which will run you £1,599. Even if you include the most expensive extra warranty, you cannot buy a single iPhone for the same or more as the original Nokia Communicator. And, in my experience, people do blink an eye at those prices and, when they buy iPhones, they tend not to be the most expensive model with as much overpriced Apple storage you can fit into it.

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Re: Ah, Symbian

A terabyte? On a phone? Just... why?

[doublelayer]

Re: Ah, Symbian

Well it can take 4k video at 120 fps, so if people actually have a reason to do that, I can see why they'd need lots of storage to hold the results. I think that just moves the why question around. The other option is people with huge photo or music libraries, and although that doesn't describe me very much, I know people who have hundreds of gigabytes of music, so presumably they would be interested. That model starts with 256 GB of storage. You have to go up two levels, with eye-watering Apple prices, to get to that level. Admittedly, the storage they're using is quite snappy NVME, but still.

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Re: Ah, Symbian

Yeah, I feel like if you were serious about 4K video (I mean, in any way that was actually useful rather than just because you're a "creator" who thinks people care about the perfect life you post online), then you'd probably be using a dedicated device with more flexibility. And I have hundreds of GB of music myself – but is that really very common these days? Even if someone has it, do they actually put it all on their phone? Even I just stream music when I'm out and about, and as a non-Apple user, I could just stick a massive and cheap microSD card in my phone that would store my whole collection without blinking (speed doesn't matter one jot for MP3 or even FLAC bitrates).

I'll admit that Apple devices have their advantages, even if I wouldn't buy one myself. However – and this is probably harsh – I believe that people who buy those top-end Apple phones can only either be (a) too rich to care about the cost (which is fine; lucky you) or (b) stupid enough to suck up the hype and possibly go without food for a month [or perhaps (c): both of the above].

[Jurassic.Hermit]

Re: Ah, Symbian

Not me, but some pros and semis record an awful lot of 4k 60 and 120 fps video on their iPhones whilst they are out and about.

4K at 120fps (ProRes 422 HQ) on the iPhone 16 Pro uses approximately 7 GB of storage space per minute of footage, so a couple of hours needs 840 Gb….

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Re: Ah, Symbian

(see my response above!)

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Ah, Symbian

My 9000 communicator costs me, as far as I can remember, about £30/month on a 12 month contract. on Cellnet.

[meanioni]

Re: Ah, Symbian

>>>PCMCIA<<<<

Involuntary shudder......

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Ah, Symbian

The best device I ever owned was an original Nokia communicator. SMS, email and even fax were seamlessly integrated, it had a browser and in the two years I had it (before it was stolen on a train near Birmingham) I never one had to look at the manual, because it was all so intuitive.

[VLSI]

Re: Ah, Symbian

I had a 6301 which I firmware flashed using Nokia Phoenix to rid of bloatware and have real IMAP/POP email instead of the whatever my carrier wanted me to use. Opera mini, Google maps and J2ME games all ran well. Used it for years until an HTC. Android was in ways an evolutionary successor, by a different company.

[Conrad Longmore]

The Burning Platform

Even in the face of iOS and Android devices, Symbian was still doing well although on many Nokia devices you'd be hard pushed to tell they were actually a smartphone. But in the long term, Symbian was written for tiny underpowered systems and newer smartphones were beasts running Unix.

What killed the platform was Stephen Elop's "Burning Platform" memo, which led to what was *meant* to be a gradual shift from Symbian to Windows. Customers dropped Symbian almost overnight because nobody likes a dead-end platform, sales dropped to a fraction of what they were and a bunch of quite interesting Nokia touchscreens got canned as a result. Symbian's swansong was the remarkable Nokia 808 PureView. The 808 and other late-model Symbian devices run Nokia Belle which was really quite nice. It's a shame really because the platform did still have a lot of life in it.

Of course we know how Nokia's dalliance with Windows turned out..

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: The Burning Platform

I wonder if MBA courses have a foot-shooting module. It would be a nice case study to go along with Ratnerisation.

[IGotOut]

Re: The Burning Platform

Interestingly, look into the story of Ratner....it's not what it seems.

It was a supposed to be closed audience where he, a complete underdog, was ripping apart the established jewelers, who were a snobbish clique.

He was saying people know our products are cheap plated crap, but I'm still completely destroying the patronising elite.

A journalist quoted it out of context and of course the elite love to knock a commoner back into his place

[gryff]

Re: The Burning Platform

MBA courses do cover Nokia. But as the academics who teach them don't know much about what happened, the coverage is mostly vacuous and worthless.

I wrote extensively on the end of Nokia based on 1st hand sources/experience for a Masters degree...

The best summary came from an exec who reported to board: "When you have to go through 6 approval cycles with a 50:50 chance, its hard to get anything done." and from a Director of Innovation: "We offered too much, like a food court that has every style of cuisine, but none of it is high quality."

[James Anderson]

Re: The Burning Platform

Food court quote is right on. I remember looking for s new phone and not being able to see any significant difference between the cheapest Nokia and the most expensive one at 5 times the price.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The Burning Platform

"...but none of it is high quality.""

And none of that was high quality because MBAs at the management had no idea what to offer, so they went the MBA-way:

Offer 70 different "new" products having collectively 25 different features, but not a single one has all 25, but 10 to 20. As cheaply as possible, of course. "Quality" is something MBAs do not understand. Never have. 'Product variation' is the thing they *do* understand. Not 'good'.

MBAs also killed almost everything product developers invented claiming 'not enough profit', based on *market research* before publishing... as if anyone knew what a smart phone should do or look like at that point. Pure stupidity which meant that all the bright people left because none of their ideas went into production. N950 being the most famous case: It was recalled immediately when MBAs realized it's "too good' and 'not enough profit forecasted'. Official excuses of course invented later, but that's what the developers said.

Not only that: Hardware- people were making last minute changes and software, when phone came out, was more or less in alpha -state because HW had changed. Ironically Symbian Belle II was the *first finished* software version, but not available to many models. I was working for Nokia at that time and I managed to grab one for my E7. Still works nicely and physical keyboard is a killer feature for me.

Also Nokia had *model specific* software because of HW-people doing whatever they wanted and top management didn't do anything to stop internal warfare: Absolutely incompetent: None of them were actually *managing*, they were there as figureheads with fat pay checks. Of course Elop then butchered Symbian the second he opened his mouth and that's the end then.

Microsoft owners/management *never* could understand that literally no-one *wants* Microsoft products and therefore Microsoft phone is and will be DOA.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: Of course we know how Nokia's dalliance with Windows turned out

You do not ally with Windows.

You submit, or you don't. You'll get the shaft anyway.

[Ken G]

Re: Of course we know how Nokia's dalliance with Windows turned out

Windows Phone was actually a nice UI (better than android or iOS, worse than BB10)

[Simon Harris]

Re: Of course we know how Nokia's dalliance with Windows turned out

I remember my wife had one when we first met. It was surprisingly good.

At the time I was still using a Sony Ericsson feature phone!

[Joe Dietz]

Re: Of course we know how Nokia's dalliance with Windows turned out

I'm probably one of maybe 7 people... but I really miss Windows Phone. It was so much better than the Android I had to settle with. The real problem with Nokia using Windows was getting acquired by Microsoft which left no other device maker willing to look at it and the new Msft CEO only too happy to emphasize that the only future at Microsoft was Azure. If Nokia had remained independent with Windows Phone as an equal competitor to Android, Windows Phone would still be here and we'd still have the brilliant Nokia hardware.

[Paul Hovnanian]

Re: Of course we know how Nokia's dalliance with Windows turned out

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Need a Borg icon -->

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The Burning Platform

Elop was hired to kill Nokia phones so MS can buy it and he did exactly that. Intentionally of course and the people who hired him, didn't do that by accident and Elop had fu**ed up whole departments in Microsoft earlier, several times, so it was obvious he'd to that again.

Here in North not a single person believes that 'burning platform' -memo was meant to be gradual shift: It was literally meant to kill Symbian, right now, and bury it at least 6' deep. But we also know that Elop is and was an idiot, so there's a very small chance it wasn't *all* intentional.

I've still an E7 with Symbian Belle II in use and, while somewhat limited use, the actual keyboard in it beats everything on the market whenever you need to write something.

Also it's a nice privacy item: You know it won't report what you do to anyone, polar opposite of Google/Apple.

I've bunch of old Nokia phones in the drawer, I'll probably move to Communicator (S60) when this E7 finally gives up. Rather than spyware-ridden 'smart'phones.

[Ken G]

Re: The Burning Platform

Do you still have 2G/3G coverage in your country?

[0laf]

I always found the little psions very impressive. I still don't think anyone has matched the usability of those little keyboards since

[theOtherJT]

Well, there was that brief attempt at a revival by Planet Computers but it really didn't stick. I actually bought one and rather liked it, but outside of being a handy thing to take into cramped comms rooms and behind difficult server racks when one needed something that supported a USB-C serial adapter it was too big to be a phone and too small to be a laptop so it never got as much use as I had hoped. I also bought it just before covid meant that we were suddenly all working from home, and the need for something I could keep in my pocket and use on the train suddenly went away.

A nice little device, but like so many nice little devices from small start-up companies, the company clearly floundered and support sputtered out before it could be polished up beyond "interesting prototype" sort of status. A couple of years iteration on the software and a rev2 of the hardware with better battery life and it would have been great. Sadly I imagine the demand was never really there.

[Liam Proven]

> A couple of years iteration on the software and a rev2 of the hardware with better battery life and it would have been great.

Are you not aware that there were 2 more iterations of the product line?

Gen 1: Gemini. I own one. You are largely right in what you say.

Gen 2: Cosmo. External screen.

Gen 3: Astroslide. Switched from clamshell to chunky slider.

[theOtherJT]

I did, I bought the cosmo - which is the one I linked to and little external screen aside it has all the same problems as the gemini. Also a bunch of new ones, because the little external screen is terrible it's way too small to be useful for much beyond notifications - which is probably just as well because the lag on touch inputs is so bad as to make it unusable. The big problem was the software - which they just didn't put enough effort into keeping up to date. Maybe that's mean - maybe they did the best they could with the resources they had, but that brings me to the Astro.

The Astoslide Struck me as a rather different device, and probably the one that killed the company. They sort of still exist, but I've never seen them have any phones in stock and there haven't been any new firmware releases for four years, and the last one we got still contains some pretty show stopping bugs.

All the development time that went into that thing should have been spent on making the software on the Gemini and Cosmo devices actually work properly. It left those of us who bought them feeling very much like we did when Microsoft brought out WinPho7. We got all excited about it, we liked the new hardware, and then suddenly got rug-pulled when they announced that WinPho8 would be incompatible and our existing devices would be abandoned as all development went into the new platform.

[adfh]

I bought the Cosmo...

I loved the keyboard, I loved the landscape aspect, but the rest SUCKED.

Iffy battery life.

Bodgy OS customisation to handle keyboard + default landscape aspect.

Android updates, including security ones, few and far between.

A dubious third party OTA mechanism.

They promised Sailfish and Linux support, never delivered on Sailfish as far as I understand it, and screwed over the open source developer who was working on the linux distro (which kinda cheated by using Android Linux Kernel with Debian).

The external display was slow and painful, leveraging one of the IO ports out of the SoC and running on a separate microprocessor...

... so turning off the external display was the best way to extended battery life, but

... this would disable NFC

... this would disable the right hand USB C port

... the right hand USB port was slower

[Liam Proven]

Re: I bought the Cosmo...

> screwed over the open source developer who was working on the linux distro

Tell me more?

> (which kinda cheated by using Android Linux Kernel with Debian).

Is that cheating? It is more or less what Furilabs does. The result works, which is more than can be said for many phone Linuxes.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/

[doublelayer]

Re: I bought the Cosmo...

"Is that cheating?"

Definitely not the word I'd use, but it can still be a problem. If you can't update the kernel, things stop working. Something you want to use which works on normal Linux devices won't because the kernel was only built for a phone, so they leave things out. Patches are insufficient, but you can't update it yourself without breaking both systems. Sometimes those problems are small, and sometimes they're massive, and when people build mobile Linux, what kernel they're running is, for good reason, one of the major questions that get asked.

[werdsmith]

Re: I bought the Cosmo...

They promised Sailfish and Linux support, never delivered on Sailfish as far as I understand it,

The Gemini was directly supported with Sailfish by Jolla. I still have a Gemini running Sailfish and it was still getting updates in 2024. I haven't seen an update yet this year though. I still use the Gemini for occasions when I am going to be waiting around, it goes with me and I write stuff, drafts and idea frameworks. The keyboard totally enables this. There is no WP application, sadly but there is a decent note taker app which serves the purpose.

I considered Cosmo and Astro, but they didn't promise any Linux and my instinct, which has always served me well, guided me to steer clear anyway. I consider the Gemini to be peak Planet. Shame how Janko and others went about that business, though they were set back by covid they really did waste money on Sloane Square offices etc. That keyboard deserves much better and so does Martin Riddiford and the name of Sir Clive.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: I bought the Cosmo...

And by the time it launched you could get a whole range of GDP Pocket-pcs that offered more for less money in a "standard" PC that worked

[werdsmith]

Re: I bought the Cosmo...

The GDP is irrelevant as the USP of the Planet range was their rebirth of the Psion keyboard.

[doublelayer]

Re: I bought the Cosmo...

Not entirely irrelevant depending on what the purpose was to the buyer. The purpose was a small device with a keyboard, since there were few options that had any keyboard at all. Using a good keyboard was a positive. Even if the Gemini's keyboard was significantly better than other small devices, their use of standard desktop OSes might compare so well against the Gemini's Android with no updates and Linux with some things broken that that could have changed the user's mind.

It at least did in my case. I have not used a Psion, so I don't know how excellent that keyboard was. When Planet released the Gemini and the Cosmo, I was tempted to buy one. It was the software that convinced me not to, well that and not really needing one, but I have ignored that problem before.

[werdsmith]

Re: I bought the Cosmo...

It was the keyboard that convinced me to get one. It was the main driver of their campaign and the USP.

The software was a bonus, being supported directly by Jolla for Sailfish was a real plus.

The keyboard and Sailfish are why I am still using it over any alternatives.

[Liam Proven]

> there haven't been any new firmware releases for four years

I maintain they should bung some leftover hardware to the postmarketOS team and get that on all 3 models.

[doublelayer]

Does their record with promising OS updates that never showed up lead you to believe that they care? Postmarket OS, or actually pretty much any mobile Linux, would be welcome, but if they wanted to do that, they would have done that when having better support would allow them to sell more hardware. By now, it's too late.

[Steve Goodey]

I bought the Astroslide and still use it..

I crowdsourced the AStroslide on Indigogo. But never received it from them as the company went tits up. I spotted one on Ebay so got that and have been using as an everyday till now and been very happy with it. A few people are rather jobsmacked when I get the keyboard out.

Luckily I got a refund from Indigogo as there was some cash left over, but others were not so fortunate.

Every morning on turning it on the Planet update app vainly tries connecting but no joy.

Recently i dropped it out of my pocket onto the garage floor and bust the screen!

Now waiting for a fold 7 to replace it.

[Liam Proven]

> I did, I bought the cosmo - which is the one I linked to

Ah, OK. Sorry, then, my bad. I _did_ say I agreed with your points.

But the thing is: that _was_ the Gen 2 device, and there _was_ a Gen 3.

[doublelayer]

"But the thing is: that _was_ the Gen 2 device, and there _was_ a Gen 3."

Well, there was another device with a keyboard on it, anyway. It ran more phone-oriented software, a new design that wasn't as laptop-like, a new software update promise that was immediately broken, and completely dropping something I wanted (Linux support). In my mind, that doesn't count as a third generation. That counts as a separate product.

[Shonko Kid]

Cosmo/Astro were the problem, each one was not only new silicon but an entirely new form factor, so new tooling was required. This just chewed up backer's $$ without ever really getting the company to a sustainable financial position, and meant the existing product quickly became obsolete.

The Gemini was a great idea, and what was delivered was an good beta. If it had been better supported, it might have become a successful, if niche, product.

[Charlie Clark]

Yes, it was clear that, due to lack of capital, the company was almost entirely dependent upon the cashflow from sales but also at the mercy of supplies. It never had a stratgey for OS updates, leaving this entirely to MediaTek, and focussed development resources on its own software suite. And, nice as the hardware design was, it did have a couple of weakpoints: my screen connector died long before the battery did.

[theOtherJT]

It would seem, based on the last hour or so of googling around, that they're effectively bankrupt and that any money given to them at this point is unlikely to lead to you actually getting a phone out of them. I've no firsthand experience of this, so I'm not going to say for sure that it's so, but there do seem to be a lot of people throwing the word "Fraud" around at this point. It does look like a defunct company that survives as nothing more than a ghost of a website that really ought to be shut down.

[werdsmith]

They failed to fulfil their crowdfunding backers apart from a very select few which enabled them to avoid having the fraud accusation become a real charge.

They tried to release a little linux box with an OLED display but overpriced into a very crowded market for small desktop PCs and where tech people are capable of rolling their own, their Astro-Slide performance scared off any backers (along with campaigns by people who had lost their money). I think they hoped to raise money from the Linux box campaign that would pay for the production of unfulfilled astros.

Most of the astro devices that were manufactured were supplied to direct sales and I believe largely in Japan so I guess that was the keyboard layout they started with.

[Liam Proven]

> They tried to release a little linux box with an OLED display

Yep, and indeed they offered me one for review, but the editors don't want to go near the mildly radioactive brand now.

I would have liked to play with it! Ah well.

The XR desktops are on sale. They hit the kickstarter budget, I believe.

https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/computers

But the company is alive, and it's not in debt, even if it's not very lucrative. As I recall, it got screwed over very badly by its Chinese OEM supplier for the Astro Slide. I think the deal was that the OEM promised a device based around one SoC, and then after making a small number, not enough for the initial run, the Mediatek SoC going out of production, and the choices being a new production run with a lower-end chip (bad: customers get a downgrade) or a new model with a higher-end chip (bad: much more expensive, but there wasn't budget to swallow the costs.)

Planet is to some extent subsidised by a division selling embedded kit:

https://planetembedded.com/

[werdsmith]

It was on IndieGogo, the XR mini raised £1418 of a £150,000 goal......

Yes, the did hit a few bumps - I do believe their intention was good. But still, Sloane Square offices when hundreds lost their monkey wasn't a good look.

[Liam Proven]

> It was on IndieGogo, the XR mini raised £1418 of a £150,000 goal......

Oh! Fair enough, I must have mis-remembered. Apologies. Even Jove nods, and so do I.

I do think that the company mis-handled the affair badly, and that possibly includes their choice of OEM in Shenzen or wherever.

[doublelayer]

I wonder why. The design of their desktops effectively involved taking a standard design for an SBC based around the Rockchip 3588, sticking on a little screen, putting it in a box, and multiplying the price by a random number between 4 and 8. What did you expect to see with this that you couldn't see much more easily with any of the twenty 3588-based computers you can easily buy or, based on the number of reviews I have seen, get review units for?

[Dan 55]

They failed to fulfil their crowdfunding backers apart from a very select few which enabled them to avoid having the fraud accusation become a real charge.

This sounds very similar to Retro Computers Limited, that company barely delivered the Vega+ and then coincidently it was wound up by a company belonging to one of Planet Computers' CEOs.

[werdsmith]

Another one that tempted me, but instinct protected me from.

[Dave559]

Planet Computers, startup funding, and ISAs

(As you might expect, I likewise bought a Planet Gemini PDA, partly as a show of support in the hope that decent sales would get them off to a good start, and partly in the hope (sadly, not really to be) that they would come through on their promised Linux support.)

It's so sad that what should have been the start of a successful series of devices ended up afflicted by the all too common British "garden shed" development curse (and I'm well aware that many of the US tech giants literally or metaphorically did start in garden sheds).

To be fair, Planet did very well to "sell the dream" to enough people for kickstarter funding to make actual devices happen (and we probably all knew that that the first product would be a "reasonably well polished beta" if we were lucky), but that's the problem that we seem to have in the UK: scrabbling around for bare minimum funding and if things actually work out it is by incredible sheer luck.

If they had been in the USA, I'm sure they could have waved a prototype (or maybe even just a slick presentation) around a handful of potential startup funders and have raised millions to work with, and really got off to a good start…

Which then brings things timeously to the current hot issue in British personal finance discussion: ISAs (for the rest of you: those are Individual Savings Accounts - a tax-free savings wrapper). All the recent political discussion about whether the amount of ISA deposits that can be saved as cash (rather than invested in stocks and shares or elsewhere) does have a degree of validity in it, in that we collectively do need to invest in our companies for them - and us as a country - to be able to become successful (taking into account that for some people, investing may be too much of a risk and it would certainly be wrong to reduce the limit that can be saved in Cash ISAs too far). But even then, deposits going into investment ISAs generally go into buying funds or shares in existing large or medium companies, and not startups (where it quite likely is far too big a risk for individual personal investments). Possibly what might be a good idea is for there to be "Startups ISA" funds where - if people want to, and accept the higher risk - you can invest some of your planned investment in pooled investment funds which make their investments across a whole range of startup companies, so that your risk is spread widely, rather than putting all your eggs in one company's basket and potentially losing them all? But we also need institutional investors here in the UK that are more willing to invest in our potential future successes as well!

[0laf]

Re: Planet Computers, startup funding, and ISAs

Well that same government has kicked investors in the head by reducing the tax free allowance on dividends from your investment.

Investing in individual startups is a very high risk activity and really not ethical to encourage those with only a small amount of savings anyway to take huge risks with it.

Maybe there needs to be another way to encourage investment. A low vlaue startup ISA that isn't included in any other allowance, maybe a salary sacrifice option. Plenty of people would take a punt on putting in a small amount, maybe only £10-500. It might be high risk but it's better odds than the lottery and a million people putting in £100 is a lot of money.

[steelpillow]

ISTR

Planet's launch product was the Gemini. They wheeled out Psion's designer, Martin Riddiford, and he stuck with the classic Series 5 keyboard while giving its feel the best uplift Psion never got round to. In design terms, the device was a Psion Series 9. Mine is still my everyday phone and I shall be gutted when it dies. Runs Android of course. Alpha/beta-ish builds of Debian and Sailfish did arrive for the Gemini, but flaky and minimal apps. Could ssh onto a server, that was about it.

The later Cosmo and Astroslide keyboards - and design quality generally - were steps backwards in terms of feel and usability. I am told that they dumped Riddiford, I don't know where in the line but the Cosmo suffered the same clunkiness as the Nokia Communicator and the Astro, which should have been the masterstroke, was weak and wobbly.

Their other business feature was to sell entirely through Indiegogo and their own website. No retail outlets, I have no idea which side of the fence was so shortsighted but, apart from Riddiford's initial professionalism, Planet was never more than a handful of kitchen-table tinkerers who got bored with product updates as soon as the thing was stable enough to meet the Trades Descriptions Act.

Finally, production problems in China were already building when covid zapped the whole deal and the business faded out.

[Liam Proven]

Re: ISTR

> I am told that they dumped Riddiford

He designed the Astro Slide too. Here he is talking about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-PBPxN8Sv0

[Oh Matron!]

UIQ

Let's not forget the wonderful UIQ based phones, like the Sony Ericsson P800 / P900 etc.... Absolutely loved mine. A bit of a monster, but had email, web, and everything else that you'd need

[Dave559]

Re: UIQ

UIQ was also Symbian. As @mage has written below, each/many of the companies involved in Symbian developed their own interface layer on top of the core OS.

Kind of like command-line Linux + "choose your own desktop environment" on top, in a way!

[Mage]

Symbian vs S60

Symbian was the OS.

S60 was the UI layer.?

Politics caused Nokia to scrap S80 and use S60. Motorola used some different UI. Later S60 based UI was inferior to 2002 S80 on the Communicator.

Also there was the Java issue. Unlike later Google, mobile makers used the crippled mobile Java for apps, because the full Java was only licensed to desktops.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Symbian vs S60

> S60 was the UI layer.?

*One of the* UI layers, along with Series 80, Series 90, UIQ, MOAP, and OPP.

[PhilipN]

Re: Symbian vs S60

Good reminder. I had the Communicator “Brick” but in no time new apps and functions were S60 only. Fine product end-of-lifed far too soon.

[Dan 55]

Re: Symbian vs S60

Mobile makers licenced the official J2ME, Google used a J2SE implementation called Dalvik without paying licence fees which lead to Oracle suing them.

[adfh]

Maybe Symbian itself was good...

... and the Nokia hardware was great for the time, but Nokia phones as a user experience (mine was with N70 and N95 last) was horrendous.

Apps would crash, the phone would reboot, it was sluggish, trying to get apps that would work on your specific model of handset was a pain..

If there's a gold nugget underneath the turd, I hope someone finds it, but overall, it just felt half baked and before its time.

[werdsmith]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

I had N95. It was a fine thing until Apple came along and "invented" the smartpohne.

I never had problems with apps crashing, not even the basic apps I wrote for it. It was, however, badly hindered by poor network infrastructure and the things that being a smartphone enabled it to do would require more data. The rates available on 2.5g would just make it pointless, the thing would grumble along loading data for 10 minutes and get extremely warm whilst flattening the battery -even for basic WAP pages.

Apps that didn't need data though, were excellent for the time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

The N95 was the only phone I had that could play music during a live phone call and the person on the other end heard it piped through as if they were on hold. The browser was good enough for me to set CMS's up. You could tell it was a powerful OS. It's a shame they gave up on it.

[doublelayer]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

That's a pretty niche feature. There is no reason why you couldn't do that on Android either, but I don't think people want it, because playing music through a phone line while they can still hear you isn't the same as putting someone on hold.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

It is niche. But my point was, it could cope with doing that. It was ahead of its time in many things on the basic telephony level that I don't think Android or iOS has ever caught up to it. The people at Nokia did the fundamentals well. Then the leadership missed the smartphone boat with arrogance. They never believed the smart phone could kill them off and they didn't try and release one until Windows Phone. There really should be a proper third way with mobile operating systems, rather than just forks of Android.

[werdsmith]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

They most certainly did produce Smartphones, long before Apple did and way before Windows phone.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

Nokia had touch screen -based phones more than 5 years before anyone else, but management decided that no-one needs them and yet another innovation was buried because'we don't make those'. Literally.

When top management consists of morons, there's not much hope for the company in the long run.

[tp2]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

I don't think management were morons. Its just that nokia missed the touchscreen since the timing was bad. The early touchscreen hardware was not good enough for proper user interface. Few years later the situation was completely different. even after apple showed how to do it properly, nokia was still playing with resistive touch screens, which were horrible to use. Nokia just chose different technology initially and had to quickly catchup when competition went different direction. The larger screens were always available, but incremental development is always slower to adopt new tech than big push to new tech.

[doublelayer]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

Your example does not prove your point. IOS and Android aren't lacking the "play music down the line" feature because it takes advanced telephony software they don't have. They lack the feature because nobody wants it. What you need in order to implement that function is an audio system that can handle more than one simultaneous source. They've had that since the first version. On IOS, you'd need to convince Apple to make that software, whereas all you need on Android is to write an app that implements it. If you have a different thing that proves a difference in telephony support, maybe that could still prove your point, but your example has nothing to do with that.

[Dan 55]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

Not only can you not play down the line (music was the example, but it is useful for playing voice notes or audio messages received via a chat app from someone else), you can't even record calls using built-in functionality on most Android phones any more and the remaining third party call recording apps on the app store may not record on your phone and you won't know until you try. Just one example of how limited and fragmented Android is compared to what was standard on Symbian with a fraction of CPU power and memory.

People don't want to play audio on a phone call because they don't know that the option could exist, but I guarantee some people would find it useful if the option were available to them. 5 to 10% maybe, but in this market that's a large number of people.

[ThomH]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

I had the following issues with late-era Nokia phones — i.e. once Androids and iPhones were also in contention:

* far too many contextual dialogues, with menus branching into menus;

* a small number (three?) of fixed levels of zoom in the browser; and

* very poorly grafted-on touchscreen controls.

On the final point I'm primarily thinking of my experience with an N8; some text screens were direct-manipulation push to scroll but some still involved trying to poke at a scroll bar. The direct-manipulation screens would sometimes have momentum, sometimes not. Some programs were able to adapt to having a virtual keyboard appear, some weren't, creating an odd experience where you'd tap on a text box then be taken to a completely context-free screen with a virtual keyboard and a text box to type your content, then hit submit to return to the original screen and have that input inserted.

And this is all using the out-of-the-box software. To their credit it seemed like they'd tried to optimise for the main user flows, e.g. the scroll bar text screens were mainly things like buried legal notices, but it overall felt like a rush job.

I don't recall whether they were still substituting that one Nokia font for everything on a web page.

My memory might easily be adrift, of course, but I seem to remember that Android was well over its initial touchscreen pains by then and still doing unique usability things like the scroll ball on the Nexus One, because being able to place a cursor accurately still mattered to the people that get to make these decisions.

[diguz]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

do i remember wrong or the N95 did have 3.5g connectivity? I vividly remember that i used my black 8 gig one as a wifi hotspot when i was in high-school to watch youtube (still remember the hotspot app: joikuspot). Fun fact: at that time (at least here in Italy) you could choose a mobile plan based on data OR on time, because 1 you didn't need to be "always online" and 2 carriers hadn't realized yet the sheer amount of data you could transfer at 3g speeds. And i know, because where i lived we didn't get any sort of ADSL/broadband until about 2009, so 3g it was if i needed to use a connection other than 56k dialup....

[Hammera]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

If your N95 was black, it was the updated version 2 (or possibly an N96). I miss my E7 :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

E7 with Symbian Belle II is a killer.

It came out with some version of Symbian (I got pre-production series from internal channels) and it was crap, barely usable. Symbian Belle was fortunately published soon after (2011) and it fixed almost all of the bugs it had. Still in use, it's a good phone ... a crack in the corner of the display and GPS doesn't work anymore. But it works: 15 years is a good life for a cell phone.

[MacroRodent]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

> (mine was with N70 and N95 last) was horrendous

My last Symbian phone was the N97mini, which I got second-hand, and really liked. Used until it developed a hardware problem partly disconnecting the display and keyboard halves (could no longer make or answer calls). I have got the impression it was a better product than the original N97 "not mini".

[Test Man]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

Nah, I had an N95. It was described as a "computer" because it was. It was the last great Nokia phone. Even when the very first iPhone came out, it was clear the N95 could do far far more than it.

However, the successors N96 had awful firmware issues at the start, the N97 was utter pants with a firmware that was a clear jerryrigged S60 interface rather than a proper touch-orientated one, and the iPhone gained 3G, apps, and had a screen that utilised fonts that were properly readable, so for me the writing was on the wall.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

"e (mine was with N70 and N95 last) was horrendous."

Basically every model had alpha-level software when published because management wanted it so and none of the morons could understand that buggy software ruins whole product.

Developers: This isn't done yet and we need 3 more months to fix the bugs.

Management: No, there's a trade show next week and we want it there, as it is now.

Repeat ad nauseatum. I was working for Nokia at that time (not directly with phones, but in the HQ).

When you take an engineering corporation and put MBAs at the top, you *will* get a chain of massive stupidities. See: Boeing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe Symbian itself was good...

"it just felt half baked and before its time."

Because it wasn't ready. Management defined deadlines by trade shows and not when the software is ready and developers were cursing it loudly.

MBAs at the top couldn't understand the problem at all and/or didn't care. Classic example of cluelessness.

Repeat until Elon butchered whole company.

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved my N8

It took until I got a Pixel with CalyxOS to find something I liked as much

[Anonymous Coward]

Maemo

Sadly sunk without a trace. I think that is OSS too now.

[werdsmith]

Re: Maemo

Subsumed into Sailfish.

[jpennycook]

Re: Maemo

also Tizen

I boot up my SailfishOS phone sometimes to see if there are any updates, or use it as an alarm clock when I'm camping.

[Charlie Clark]

No resources for the architecture port

IIRC, one of the main reasons that development effectively stalled, was the lack of resources for porting the kernel for newer versions of ARM chips. This was, of course, at the same time as Android and IOS were starting to carve the market into two: Apple owned the whole stack; Google provided a complete OS and support for the SoC integration for manufacturers. Google's commitment to the OS and support for manufacturers can't be understated and it goes far beyond anything Microsoft has ever done with Windows.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe IoT

Maybe Symbian has a future for size and resource constrained IoT applications?

[ilmari]

Re: Maybe IoT

I think FreeRTOS has the IOT market covered.

I vaguely remember at the time Symbian was alive, developers expressed that rolling around naked in ants' nests would be a more pleasant experience. Today, developer comfort seems to rank much higher than back then.

[Colin Critch]

Re: Maybe IoT

Yes amazon bought that. I believe that Zephyr is upcoming at the moment, but there are more embedded OS than you can shake a stick at..

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Maybe IoT

Maybe Symbian has a future for size and resource constrained IoT applications?

That was something I was wondering. So home automation is pretty popular. Louis Rossman's just dropped some videos about why IoT has problems. Like vendors flogging IoT things, then deciding to start charging service fees, disabling API access or just ending support and bricking devices completely. So devices that aren't at the mercy of vendor lockin or out would seem to be a GoodThing(tm).

Whether that means Symbian is the right thing, I don't know, but I'd heard of it and at one point thought it could be. But it has a lot of competition, and not being a software person don't really know what the best IoT thing is, other than I want something open enough to give me a fighting chance of keeping the lights on (or off), if vendor support goes away or gets too greedy.

[doublelayer]

Re: Maybe IoT

For anything being hacked, the right OS is whatever it already ran. If it was embedded Linux, and it usually is, it stays embedded Linux and you only replace the proprietary control program running atop that. If you're building it yourself, it's likely still to be embedded Linux just because that's got tons of hardware support, so you can build it around a lot of cheap components, and if those components become unavailable, port it to some different ones without a lot of work. Symbian's open source nature doesn't mean you can easily boot it on something without doing a lot of work. There are many smaller OSes which work in places where the size of Linux is a problem, and the choice between them is often made by the people building the hardware and firmware to minimize the amount of custom code they need to write to make things start up.

[Fred Dibnah]

I am I the only one who glanced at the headline and thought it said ‘Sybian’?

[Irongut]

Steam powered, of course. Mrs Dibnah is a lucky lady! ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, Mrs Dibnah surely doesn't need one of those - have you see the size of Fred's chimney?

[Proton_badger]

At the time a number of our licensees, especially from non-english speaking countries, accidentally went to the wrong website. The reactions were everything from "oops" to compliments.

[xc8]

Symbian rocked..

a heck of era... esp warez / keygens (after PalmOS)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Symbian rocked..

When nobody here ever downloaded one of those N-Gage -> SIS conversions to run Sonic, Tomb Raider or whatever on a regular Series 60. Not once.

[heyrick]

Symbian's progenitor, Psion EPOC32

It's a shame that the original EPOC16 isn't available to look at. I had a Psion 3a and thought it was a pretty impressive machine. Simple enough to be suitable for children (re. Acorn Pocketbook) and complex enough to be useful for doing real stuff on. The days when you could get weeks out of two AA cells.

[Colin Critch]

Re: Symbian's progenitor, Psion EPOC32

That may be laying around somewhere, it really did not take that much space and was very quick.

[MacroRodent]

Before Nokia was assimilated

> Before Nokia was assimilated and digested by Microsoft,

Sigh, not again. The whole Nokia was not assimilated, only Nokia Mobile Phones. The rest is still doing fine making network equipment and some other non-consumer things.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Before Nokia was assimilated

> The whole Nokia was not assimilated, only Nokia Mobile Phones.

I am well aware, ta. Worked for a Swedish company, formerly engaged to a Norwegian; my nearly-father-in-law had a pair of Nokia _wellies_.

But it's the phone bit that the world was aware of.

[JLV]

Re: Before Nokia was assimilated

Wasn't Nokia originally a paper manufacturing company?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Before Nokia was assimilated

"Wasn't Nokia originally a paper manufacturing company?"

Not even that: They were originally making wellies and other rubber products, like tyres. In a town called Nokia.

They later expanded to making pulp and paper and communication devices and from those to computers (already in the 70s: Mikko- series of minicomputers, as Nokia Data, and later PC compatibles like everyone else) and eventually to mobile phones.

Nokia tyres is a major manufacturer here in North, but no more paper or pulp production.

[MacroRodent]

Re: Before Nokia was assimilated

> Not even that: They were originally making wellies and other rubber products, like tyres. In a town called Nokia.

No, the pulp factory came first, in the sense it used the name "Nokia" as the company name. But the rubber products came soon. The original Nokia was acquired by another company, "Suomen Gummitehdas", making rubber products, the combination then started using the "Nokia" name. Pretty forward-looking, I mean "Suomen Gummitehdas" would have been a clumsy mobile phone brand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Before Nokia was assimilated

" The whole Nokia was not assimilated, only Nokia Mobile Phones."

That's factually wrong: The company called Nokia was assimilated: What was left emerged as Nokia Networks. But no more Nokia until a lot later.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Before Nokia was assimilated

No, Microsoft bought the brand rights for a couple of years only. One of Microsoft's many questionable business deals. And yet, Nadella will point to the share price and say: who's worried about the Skype acquisition, the dodgy advertising one (Aquantive?) and Nokia? The deals with OpenAI also don't look like the smartest ones. Some of these purchases are sometimes justifiable by the beancounters solely on their ability to generate write-offs for a few years. And their customers stay with them!

[MacroRodent]

Re: Before Nokia was assimilated

> The company called Nokia was assimilated: What was left emerged as Nokia Networks. But no more Nokia until a lot later.

Getting back late, but this cannot stand. "Nokia Mobile Phones" and "Nokia Networks" were both subsidiaries under "Nokia" the parent corporation, along with some others. Nokia selling the mobile phone business to Microsoft was analogous to IBM selling their laptop business to Lenovo.

[JoeCool]

I do miss BB10

What Blackberry did very well was to build a software phone that worked as well as a hardware phone. Contrasted to Android which is a handheld computer / app store / ad platform, that happens to run a phone app occasionally and not very competently.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Microsoft Symbian connection

“On information and belief, as part of Microsoft’s recently announced agreement with Nokia to replace Nokia’s Symbian operating system with Microsoft’s own mobile device operating system, Microsoft and Nokia discussed and apparently agreed upon a strategy for coordinated offensive use of their patents.

Indeed, in videotaped remarks made two days after the Microsoft-Nokia agreement was announced, Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop confirmed that Microsoft and Nokia had discussed how their combined intellectual property portfolio is “remarkably strong” and that Microsoft and Nokia intended to use this combined portfolio both defensively and offensively. This type of horizontal agreement between holders of significant patent portfolios is per se illegal under the antitrust laws, threatens competition for mobile device operating systems and is further evidence of Microsoft’s efforts to dominate and control Android and other open source operating systems.”

[kmorwath]

People have been brainwashed into thinking the Unix is the One OS....

And that's the result. And we are in dire need of OS that are not based on the flawed Unix architecture.

[Dan 55]

Re: People have been brainwashed into thinking the Unix is the One OS....

I'm sure one OS can't truely cover all the needs of server, desktop, mobile, and IoT use, but an OS with a POSIX API (as PIPS did/does on Symbian and Haiku does) makes developers lives easier.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: People have been brainwashed into thinking the Unix is the One OS....

What's wrong with you? In almost every post related to OS you go on a rant against Linux/UNIX. Really, I do not understand your hate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: People have been brainwashed into thinking the Unix is the One OS....

And he never has any alternatives, or ideas for alternatives, to point to, just that anything unixy is bad.

Nor does he say what it is about any "Unix architecture" he dislikes. The use of unstructured text through pipes as a means of gluing utilities together? Maybe he just believes that everything has to be driven by a Job Control Language?

I doubt that we will ever know.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: People have been brainwashed into thinking the Unix is the One OS....

" flawed Unix architecture."

It's actually by far the best we have and it actually works. More likely it's the commenter who is flawed and doesn't understand it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

One of my close friends (and best man at my wedding) was a developer at Nokia for a while. I heard countless stories about dysfunctional management, code passed between teams based in different countries that wound up hating each other, and other endless tales of slop swept under the rug.

This wasn't just Nokia - back then the economics of phone development dictated incredibly tight budgets and schedules. This could be blamed on the carriers, who set all of the target specs, assigned ridiculous product development deadlines, after which they might or might not buy the phone you just made. Everything was rushed out the door and buggy as fuck. Apple putting several years of development work into the iPhone before the announcement resulted in a product good enough to nuke this cycle of abuse driven by the carriers, which is a very good thing (if you're wondering why Apple was so hostile to the carriers in a "we'll do it our way or you can fuck off" manner at the beginning, this is why).

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Why?

> "Apple putting several years of development work into the iPhone [..] resulted in a product good enough to [tell the carriers] "we'll do it our way or you can fuck off" [..] at the beginning"

It's easy to forget that- despite its shiny new high-tech image- the original iPhone only supported EDGE, i.e. built on GSM/GPRS and still basically jumped-up 2G. This was odd as "proper" 3G phones and networks had already been around for a few years by then.

The UK networks hadn't originally bothered supporting EDGE in the first place, and they almost certainly wouldn't have done so by that point- when 3G was already taking over anyway- if it hadn't been for the iPhone.

But there was enough of a buzz around it that O2- which a bit of searching confirms was Apple's chosen telco (*) in the UK- basically upgraded their entire network to support EDGE just for the sake of the iPhone.

(*) Remember when the iPhone first came out it was only available on one network in most countries IIRC.

[Andrew Scott]

Re: Why?

sure, we updated our entire email system to support the new head of the universitys iphone. that's why we currently use outlook.

[gryff]

Re: Why?

The development sites were very ...umm...variable. Mobile Phones Oulu did better than Smart Phones Oulu, but originally were all one team. NMP Oulu openly wondered why the cousins over the road had so much trouble getting product out on time, on quality. I suspect teamwork and leadershp played a role.

Nokia Bochum was developing a Motorola RAZR competitor for years. Late and under par was the result. I remember a project competing with them for prototype build factory time and laughing about Bochum being on protobuild 9 or something just as ridiculous. 3 h/w protos was typical back then. It wasn't a surprise when Bochum was culled early, pre Stephen Elop. It was saddening to watch though.

[MMM4]

Re: Why?

I shared this article with a friend who was in a team that ported a popular GUI framework to Symbian. He said the graphic stack was horrible: unresponsive and with really weird APIs.

Engineers love blaming managers and they are often right, but maybe there are other, technical reasons why no one cares about Symbian.

BTW, Apple is notorious for getting right and into mass production ideas "invented" by others.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why?

"Apple is notorious "

Not Apple, it is and was Jobs himself.

Apple was many years without Jobs at one point and they were totally lost and now again, when Jobs is gone, Apple has no idea what they should do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why?

" technical reasons why no one cares about Symbian."

Symbian was a pita to write code for. It'll do if you get paid to do so, but doing it just for fun? No way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why?

"economics of phone development dictated incredibly tight budgets and schedules"

Not at all: Phones were ridiculously expensive and there were a lot of fat in the prices. The problem (at least in Nokia) was the management who wanted something *new* every 3 months and it wasn't allowed to cost anything. Also anything new was dumped if management believed there's 'not enough' profit. Without any idea if something sells or not, naturally.

The reality, where creating software for a phone took 2 months *after HW was ready*, didn't bother management at all either, leading to phones having crappy software and no time to fix it with an update. Absolute bonkers: Anyone who isn't an idiot, could see that in 3 seconds. Management in Nokia couldn't or wouldn't.

Basically many projects were guaranteed to fail at the planning phase, but management didn't understand that at all.

[Proton_badger]

Symbian C++

It was good times working on SymbianOS, I miss those days.

However the C++ programming model was tailored with explicit mandatory patterns to check whether every memory allocation/new Objects failed and unwind the stack to release other resources and fail gracefully if so. Nowadays nobody cares and apps assumes allocations/new always succeed so modern programmers would find Symbian C++ very tedious and annoying, especially with its home rolled version of exceptions (which came before C++ exceptions and doesn't co-exist well).

[Colin Critch]

Re: Symbian C++

me too, takes out his E61 and looks wistful,

[Blackjack]

Symbian was not any worse that the versions of Android used at the time.

I still own a Nokia N8 that I keep to use as a MP3 player and to play Symbian games.

Monster Pinball anyone?

[AceRimmer1980]

Symbian, the Betamax of OSs

I had Symbian phones, from a 7650 (that could run Doom) , then an E65, then an E71.

They were brilliant for the time. Had all the features one needed, with a battery life measured in weeks, not hours. I got the SDK to have a tinker, but then Android/IOS came out, and the rest is history

[Blackjack]

Re: Symbian, the Betamax of OSs

Let's be honest, half of it was Nokia themselves literally killing it. Nokia N8? One of the most popular Nokia smartphones had Symbian on it.

Nokia N9, what Symbian? Using MeeGo on that thing instead of Symbian was one of the most stupid ideas Nokia has ever done.

Symbian at the time was not any worse than Android, Nokia literally gave up on it.

It they had to release something with MeeGo for contractual reasons it shouldn't have been a flagship phone and it should not have got Nokia on the name.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Symbian, the Betamax of OSs

"Symbian at the time was not any worse than Android, Nokia literally gave up on it."

There was this guy called Elop who personally butchered it in his opening speech. No-one believe it was an accident and Elop was a Microsoft mole. Which was later confirmed as MS hired him back, to collect the 30 silver coins from services rendered.

[Mike VandeVelde]

skookum

The word is skookum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skookum

Synonyms: plumb, true, sound, secure, steady.

It's well built, it's skookum. It's finely crafted, it's skookum. It doesn't look like it's about to tip over, it's skookum. The weight it's carrying isn't about to cause it to collapse, it's skookum.

Something that is not Android or iOS, YES PLEASE!

It doesn't need to take over the world, win trophies and awards, provide millions to some CEO. It just needs to be there. Because it is skookum.

[Shonko Kid]

Just too damn hard to use.

Around the time of it's demise, it'd take a team of skilled, experienced devs, months to get the OS running on any new piece of silicon, silicon that would come preloaded with a running Linux kernel. Factor in that the ARM architecture it was written for is long since obsoleted, and even the dialect of C++ is no longer palatable to modern compilers, theres nobody with the time, money or effort to waste on it. Which is a shame, as beneath it's almost impenetrable APIs were some nice ideas.

Android ultimately won out because it was easier to put onto new HW, and 3rd party devs were given easier to use tools and APIs and crucially, a direct to consumer sales channel.

[Vaughtex]

Quality Control

I remember having a Sendo X that ran Symbian. About the size of an old Mars bar (before the Americans turned them into a glorified Milk Way and beancounters shrank them). OS was OK but reliability wise it lasted about as long as the Mars bar. I think it was closely followed by a Palm Treo, which was vastly better.

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

I would strongly consider a modern Symbian based phone. It's probably the only thing would tempt me away from my iPhone, to be honest.

[JLV]

Only tangentially related, but I still miss my lil Blackberry from 2013 with the hard keyboard.

Sucked at media browsing, with its tiny screen, but much better at content creation with its keyboard. And good enough for music and podcasts. I liked it about as much as iOS and more so than the Google Pixel that I had for the preceding 18 months.

What killed it, for me, was how difficult it was to find out answers to any questions you had. While quite discoverable and elegant, BB QNX, whatever its name was (BB OS?), had no forums or any amount of online coverage. Only CrackBerry and asking any remotely critical question there was about as well received as bringing up venereal diseases at a nunnery's dinner table.

The same thing happened with Windows 10 (8?) Mobile, a little bit later. I bought one for my son and I actually kinda liked it, in a 1.0 way. The tiles were kinda neat. But good luck finding out how anything non-obvious worked: nothing to be had online (the less said about MS help online, the better).

Which makes me wonder. If one sticking point with both those launches was partially the dearth of existing online knowledge bases, and if nowadays, people are using more and more LLM summaries rather than actually searching for answers, might a suitably prepped LLM partially mitigate this chicken and egg problem? Maybe not now, but in 5 years when AI has improved? It's not like there is complete satisfaction with Android or iOS. Yes, yes, I know that still leaves the problem of the users missing their existing app ecosystems when moving.

[StrangerHereMyself]

wxUniversal

I believe wxUniversal is a better option than QT. It has great tooling too, like wxFormbuilder. Too bad it has been deprecated, but you can still download an older version which includes it.

[tucklet]

If you remember the Psion 5mx, here's a nice dollop of nostalgia https://wuffs.org/WindEmu/index.html

[ScissorHands]

"POSIX" monoculture at work

It's not POSIX, GNU or even a *nix, so nobody cares. Even new-build operating systems like Redox have to target POSIX and work like a UNIX

[Dan 55]

Re: "POSIX" monoculture at work

You can run a POSIX API on Windows or even a ZX Spectrum.

People know how it works and can easily program for it and port to it. How many ways of opening and closing files do you need?