Hacker News Reader

I'll bite.

From the bottom of the summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian#integrated_Symbian_plat...

We get: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/08/21/canalys_iphone...

Symbian OS had 50% of the smartphone market as of August 2009. And 50% of the market in that dataset is a majority - probably a good enough a citation for "C++ was the mobile world" when you consider what that would have looked like before the iPhone.

View on HN

The majority of phones out there that are not "smart phones" and are quite programmable, via J2ME. Also, Symbian OS doesn't necessarily mean that you have to write in C++, as they run J2ME as well. You do get better results and more integration with the C++ API, but it's apparently quite a pain in the ass to use.

For some reason, people here seem to think that iPhones and other fancy devices are all there is out there.

I originally wrote Hecl to run on a Nokia 3100, which came out something like 5+ years ago, and was certainly not top of the line then (it was about 100 euros, IIRC).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com