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Symbian-Guru.com Is Over

symbian-guru.com

110 pointsprabodh42 comments

I worked as an intern at one of the Nokia's branches (won't tell you where, but it's in N.A.) in a city where there are quite a few Symbian software houses. I talked to a few Symbian developers and they absolutely hate it with passion. We're not talking technology for technology sake but more like "Business wise, it's not worth it unless you'd want your workers to suffer productivity nightmare".

My (short) time at this particular Nokia branch wasn't glowing with roses either; they just laid off several hundreds of their employees and slowly but sure inserting contractors, moving some part of their departments to 3rd world countries.

Their development process was really slow: they'll get their Baseline (I never really sure what it consists of even after I talked to quite a few people but I'm guessing it's the Symbian OS with some standard API/Libraries/Framework toolkits) from Finland once every 2 weeks. Then they would have to merge their code to this Baseline and deal with whatever problems come up.

During the last 2 weeks I was there, some high-level management guy came from Europe. He would gathered everybody to a room to do some sort of All-Hands meeting. In this meeting, he would announce some organization structure "roadmap". I find it strange; instead of talking about the products, this roadmap discussed the company's plan to expand to China and India (DING DING DING!). Of course the guy would immediately told us all that "there won't be any lay-off". But you get the idea...

Here it is... the outcome of such environment: unhappy customers.

It's hard to beat Android that seems to operate in a more Agile way where the workers are far more enthusiastic and passionate.

That's how I imagine the Windows department at Microsoft when Vista and Windows Mobile 6 was in development

After some 8 arduous years of dicking around with the horribly broken Symbian/S60, Nokia finally realized in 2008 that their software process sucks and is fundamentally unable to deliver a competitive mobile app platform. Their solution was to purchase a smaller, nimbler company with a ready product, and let the subsidiary produce the user-visible framework more or less independently of the suffocating Nokia structure.

After two years, they've finally shipped the first SDK which targets existing devices with the new framework. It's actually pretty nice: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt

However, these transitions simply take a long time. Apple purchased NeXT in late 1996, and the first usable Mac OS X release appeared almost five years later.

Nokia has split their "OS X moment" into two separate operating systems: Symbian^4 and MeeGo. But neither is ready yet. Meanwhile Nokia investors are getting very antsy: over the past decade, Nokia's stock has lost over 80% of its value, or something like $200 billion in market cap... If the Qt transition stumbles, heads will roll in Espoo.

I never follow the company anymore ever since I left. While I have no bitter feeling since I was there only for 4 months for the fun, name, and to know what's inside, it strikes me that they don't have a very strong grasp of anything. The market, the talent, the process.

I do think that they need to trim down quick. I know that might have hurt their stocks like a kick in the groin, but they've already lost a lot of their stock values. They should do some sort of reboot and becoming an underdog. Slim down that confusing offerings. Back then, they have tons of numbering systems that confuses people who happen to have interaction (reading news, chat, or whatever) with other people that live in different countries.

In Country A, the model might be called E1234, in different parts of the world, the model might be called E1235. The capabilities differ by tiny margin. It just doesn't make any sense. It might be because of regulation or whatnot, but very confusing.

If Microsoft offering is confusing, you should check Nokia's.

Currently, they have nothing other than cheap cellphone to be sold to Asian markets. I happen to be born in another part of the world. Back at my home country, Nokia is still strong because they sell cheap unlocked cellphone (coincidentally, the providers aren't operating like N.A. providers). Having said that, the mid-to-upper level economy population are full of BB users (weird isn't it, not Android, not iPhone, but BB).

BB at least has this "PIN" thing (I don't have a BB so I don't know much about it) where I noticed that most of my high-school friends are exchanging PIN, or exchanging stuff within BB. So I'm assuming there's some sort of ability for BB to have a "soft" vendor lock-in. Nokia has nothing other than cheap price.

I think they're almost done.

However, these transitions simply take a long time. Apple purchased NeXT in late 1996, and the first usable Mac OS X release appeared almost five years later.

Also, Apple had Steve Jobs.

This does not look good for Nokia.

I've worked in large corporate environments for many years and one of the things I've learned is this: if they call a big company meeting and a guy in a suit gets up and tells you they're going to do X but DON'T WORRY ABOUT Y HAPPENING WE HAVE NO PLANS OF DOING Y, you need to immediately begin assuming that Y is going to happen.

Because it will.

Maybe not the next day or the next week or even the next month. But it will happen, and it is because the suits have already started knocking the dominoes over in just the right way, behind the scenes, in the back offices and off-site conversations that you will never be privy to. I'd say this prediction method has worked successfully for me say 90% of the time. It's just something about corporate culture and the types of people who get into those positions, or at least, the pressures put on them to say certain things and not say other things, in order to manipulate employees and maximize their own personal benefit.

It's a bit Orwellian.

It's entirely Orwellian. It reminds me of what it was like working at Netscape, during the whole weird, elaborate AOL/Sun/iPlanet dance.

I too feel bad for Symbian. I did my first mobile dev on my Nokia N70 phone which I still have (bought my HTC Desire a week ago).

I can only see 2 reasons here...

1.) Too much fragmentation. Fragmentation in android is nothing compared to slaughtering in symbian phones.

2.) No unified app store for developers. And that's probably due to #1

And #1 and #2 made it pretty easy for others to compete after apple showed the way.

All the above is not true for India though. Nokia seems to very popular even today. HTC is almost non-existent. And the BlackBerry only with the executives at corps. Palm is unheard of. iMate was once popular among the rich and classy and it's almost dead.

Nokia, Samsung and Sony can still happily sell their non-Android phones here and people would grab it happily.

Whatever, the nokia label would take a while to fade here in India until Android phones or iphones become goat-nut cheap. We've been having a slew of low cost manufacturers of phones with high-end features (touch screen, accelerometers etc) with products almost half the price of a nokia low-end smart phone. And still a lot prefer Nokia.

IMHO I would surely credit Nokia and Symbian for making some of the first easy to use devices. My mom who's been using a Sony phone for the past 6 months still can't figure it out quickly like she did the Nokia 1100 (!!) a few years ago. And I loved my N70 (S60 2nd edition FP3) when I first bought it. But again I have similar experience as Rick mentioned in the blog post - poor Memory and processor. And when I had 100 songs, the music player took ages to open. Like around 10 seconds.

I'm forced to mention that HTC, which has released the most number of Android phones has a clear website. Clean, simple to navigate and use and no conflicting pages offering different info on the same topic like Nokia's site. Takes only a 2 clicks max to reach the support page of my phone on the HTC site. The same would take a minimum of half a dozen clicks on Nokia's site even after going thru google.

P.S: Offtopic - just check out http://www.imate.com/ for some fun. I have on idea why iMate has been busy making a phone that meets U.S Military Standards? :P (or am i wrong and every phone in the US has to meet U.S Military standard?)

EDIT: Wikipedia says i-mate is now defunct http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mate

The real fragmentation was in the UI level for a long while. Remember UIQ and S60? This led to half assed ownership of documentation and developer relations. Funny how business models have impacts on products.

FWIW, i-mate was never a phone manufacturer, it just resold phones made by others. For most of its existence, the company sold HTC phones under licence in some of the territories where HTC did not have a brand presence. This ended once HTC started selling phones under its own brand.

And a minor nitpick, but Symbian was limited to Nokia's smart phone range, their low-to-mid-end phones run either Series 30 or Series 40 which are far more basic yet far more responsive software platforms that are not based on Symbian, unlike Series 60. To be honest, I've never been impressed with Nokia's smart phones, as I've found their implementation of Symbian to be slow and buggy with a clumsy UI. This is in sharp contrast to their S30 and S40 phones, which quite justifiably have a reputation for performance and no-nonsense ease of use.

Symbian wasn't limited to Nokia phones until they took over the whole project and created S60. I had Symbian UIQ3 on my Sony P1i.

Which is why I referred to it as Nokia's implementation of Symbian, by which I meant S60. At the time the N70 was released Symbian was not controlled by any one company, with both Nokia and Sony Ericsson controlling the majority of shares in Symbian Ltd, although Nokia had strong control over S60.

Aside from a few half-hearted attempts from Samsung and LG, the only really ambitious attempt by a company other than Nokia to use S60 was Siemens with the SX1. Unfortunately it was not much of a success, due in no small part to the odd keypad layout. So for all intents and purposes, S60 equalled Nokia.

UIQ, similarly, was driven primarily by Sony Ericsson although it was owned (till 2007) by Symbian Ltd. Unlike S60, which was in some ways a scaling up of Nokia's dumb phone interface to a smart phone, UIQ was designed from the start for stylus-based touch input. But both co-existed, with the SE P800 and the Nokia 7650 having launched as far back as the second half of 2002. I always preferred UIQ, to be honest.

Both S60 and UIQ were abandoned when Nokia bought out the other Symbian Ltd partners in 2008.

I worked on a Symbian application a few years ago. Symbian C++ IDE (Carbide C++) costed 1,300 euros in 2007. Some S60 APIs are only available to Nokia partners (costs money). Now combine it with antiquated and poorly documented API, and the most godawful SDK and the simulator known to man.

Is it any wonder that Symbian has stagnated as a platform without any hope of recovery?

I know the IDE is now free and the simulator is about to be replaced with a new QEMU-based one, but it's a little too late.

I understand that. I have an N97 and it is a dog. I hate it. 32 Gig E: drive which is plenty, but the C: drive has around 100 Meg or so, around 50 free, and after using it for a week it is straight down to 10, after a month it sits around 5 and you get errors all the time and you have to do a hard reset which takes it back to 50 so you can use it again.

I don't even use it as more than a phone anymore because it is not worth installing anything and using up the c: drive.

I intend to switch to Android.

You know that you can install apps on E:, right?

Yeah, no problems installing apps on E: Doesn't seem to help much though.

Then they changed something.

I had several Symbian phones (6260, 6120c) and the free space on C: was always somewhat constant. I installed most of the stuff on E:. During my use of the phones, I never had to reset or wipe them.

Of course, I switched to Android.

Or tell your mail program to buffer mails on drive E: ?

I feel so sorry for you. A few years ago I really wanted one but the people that already had them told me not to do it to myself.

Second example of funky italics I've seen today. You want to use asterisks :)

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

N97 was released barely one year ago.

I've used Nokia for a long time and I can't remember a phone that didn't have SOME annoyance. My e72 has several.

I'm looking forward to MeeGo, a true Linux mobile computer. Neither Android nor the iPhone cut it for me so far. The iphone is great fun, but too locked up and hyped, I hate hype and fashion. I don't like Android because I think that it's just one more piece in Google's plan for world data domination. Still, they are both compelling pieces of tech.

Ultimately, Apple, Nokia and Google are all corporations. Feeling attachment for them is a mistake.

You do realize that being anti-hype and anti-fashion is fashionable nowadays? ;)

I dislike hype and fashion because it is not rational, promotes strong emotions over judgement and it is costly for us as a society.

You could almost feel this guy's soul tear while writing this. For what, a phone? A corporation?

When the market slams Nokia in the face, they will feel it, not when a fanboy jumps ship. And Nokia is getting slammed pretty badly right now.

They need to control the Os less they become a comodity producer like Htc and Moto already are. Sony didn't go full-android, but they're a shadow of themselves. We'll see...

Nokia have their hopes set on Qt and MeeGo and that looks fine to me, even if I don't know whether they will ultimately succeed or fail.

I love QT for the desktop and I hope that Nokia can make it easily portable to phones... Things sound grim at the moment.

I agree, the point I was trying to make was that deciding to _not_ buy a phone because it's fashionable is a fashion statement in itself. If the iPhone 4 is good, why not buy it regardless of how (over)hyped it is? Then again, I do see ideological/technical reasons not to buy the iPhone, for instance due to its closed nature.

I think Nokia could have challenged Apple if they had fully focused on Maemo when they first released the 770, and developed a culture of making better, more bug-free software. Now, I'm not so sure. Android has taken the place that Maemo could have had. Steve Jobs was actually right when he said that smartphones had "baby software" during the iPhone introduction - and the mobile industry didn't realize it at that point because _everyone_ were making baby software for their phones until Apple came along.

The people complaining that Apple didn't use the Newton OS for the iPhone doesn't realize that Apple would have been in the same position if they had (regardless of all the innovative features of the Newton).

Hype is just marketing. The actual device is really nice. Just because the reality isn't quite at the level of "revolution", is it really necessary to discount the platform in its entirety?

I had a friend who refused to get an iPod. They were then stricken with using stuff by Creative, which were plagued with hardware issues. Getting them serviced was a chore that took months at a time without the player. They still refused to get an iPod. Even if the iPod was as problematic (in my experience it wouldn't be) she would have gotten replacements so easily by going into the Apple store.

Yes, 4G is really nice! But the 3GS and 3G were made to look much better than they really were. It's not so much the hype itself that bothers me, but that the reality was much less impressive:

- iPhone didn't have a flash until 4G and had a weak camera. I don't have a camera, I use my phone. - no multitasking until 4G. I've used multitasking for a lot of time and run multiple apps at once. - it was very expensive and not available in my country for my operator

With each iteration the iPhone has gotten better and better to the point where I would actually get one, if it weren't for two facts: I like to be able to run anything I want on my phone and I want to be able to program it.

I'm probably a very special case... I would not hesitate to recommend an iPhone to friends.

Who cares if the product is hyped or not. Who cares if the guy next door already has one.

I don't use google for search because everyone else does, I use it because it works for me. If I start to find that Bing works better, I'll switch to that. Who cares if everyone else is using google or not.

Saying you don't want to use an iPhone because it's too locked up makes sense, even though I don't agree with that position. Saying you don't want to use an iPhone because of hype and fashion, that's cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I had a talk about a year ago with a developer working for Nokia, regarding the future of Symbian. There seems to be some understanding within the company about the issues facing Symbian, which is why we've seen Maemo and Meego. Nokia does, however, seem to lack the nimbleness and daring to really abandon Symbian quickly.

People always trash Steve Jobs over the "walled garden" of the iPhone, but this looks like exactly what he wants to avoid.

Of course if all the problems he was talking about came from apps that are part of the phone then I guess my point doesn't apply to this specific article (though I could see this happening if the Nokia apps were good but the downloadable ones weren't).

Total false dichotomy, you don't have to become nokia if you open your garden. It may be what he wants to avoid but it's not true that opening the garden will automatically result in customer dissatisfaction (otherwise why would Android market share be growing?)

> (otherwise why would Android market share be growing?)

Because it's the least-awful alternative if you don't want to go to AT&T. People will live with bad things or bad situations quite well, if they believe they have no choice.

ETA: Of course, for them to have 'no choice' but to go Android, they have to perceive AT&T and/or an iPhone as unacceptable, as well as the other alternatives.

Is there data out there that most people (in the US) are getting Android phones because they don't want to switch to AT&T (for reasons other than price)?

How did you come to that conclusion? I can only speak for myself.

I have been using iphone for 2 years now and I don't see myself getting another one. When I do get another phone (mine working just fine right now) I will move to android based device as soon as my contract is up.

And no I am not leaving because of AT&T, unlike most people my coverage has been fairly good even here in NY. The main reason I am leaving iphone is because I don't like being told how I can use my phone and what I can install, putting artificial limitations. And most importantly, I love having more than one choice.

Symbian, Palm (HP), Microsoft, even BlackBerry. In the long run it doesn't look like these guys stand a chance any more, does it?

I wouldn't write of BB. Exchange clients are commoditized: BES clients aren't. BB would never release a phone requiring holding in a particular way - they take things very seriously. They also know they've fucked up on web browsing and have the brains to scrap their old shit.

One of the biggest problem with Symbian development is strings. I mean what the @@@@, do the C++ programmers have less string types to deal with that they introduced six of their own? That scared me, only reason why I asked my boss to switch me to other non-Symbian project. It was a complete nightmare.

"I also can’t continue to support a mobile operating system platform that continually buries itself into oblivion by focusing on ‘openness’ while keeping a blind eye towards the obvious improvements that other open platforms have had for several iterations."

I could not agree more!

Like watching your favorite sports team lose game after game after game. Eventually, even the most die-hard sports fans have to find a new team.

Apparently this guy is not a Cleveland fan.

after reading his piece I did the obvious thing next:

checked android-guru.com

Yep, somebody's running there! Getting a 404 though.

Heart filling post. I never owned a nokia phone neither did I read the blog. But something about the two authors losing there passion for something they loved so dearly makes me feel sad.

Its funny that this got posted here. My friends and I were discussing just this morning. Everybody agreed that all nokia phones were sluggish and had ugly interface. My personal opinion is that fastest phones are released by Samsung(this might be biased as I use a Samsung Corby) and the best quality in accessories like camera and music is from sony ericsson.(Remember that we were talking about low budget phones so that rules out Nexus One and iPhone). I have used N97 myself and found it sluggish and ugly. Sure I was first excited by the hinged slider screen, but apart from that there is nothing special about it.

BTW the nokia phone I like the most would definitely be 1108. Sure its black and white but its fast, it has high quality of signal and it so reliable that even if I throw it on the wall and put the pieces back together it would bloody work.

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