Hacker News Reader

Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

But when J2ME support was added, it became easy to develop apps. I used to develop J2ME apps as hobby, I made a game and took it for my first job interview. In that job I had to port a 30,000+ J2ME code app to Android in 2010. The company I worked for was even experimenting with NFC payments in Nokia Symbian phones in 2010!

View on HN

> But when J2ME support was added, it became easy to develop apps.

And adding Python support for S60 (PyS60) was the best gift by Nokia for users as it brings Symbian devices to be "on-the-go handheld devs tool for developing apps without desktop PC".[0]

Has you ever know that there is fully functional Blender-like 3D mesh editor & animator app written in Python for S60 (PyS60) directly on Symbian smartphone?[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60

[1] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1251175469044637696

Oh my, this thread is bringing back sweet nostalgia!

>And adding Python support for S60 (PyS60) was best gift by Nokia

Yeah installing python interpreter in S60 on my Nokia N70 ME, motivated me to checkout Python programming book from my college library. As I was reading it in the class during break, the top-ranking girl student came across and asked me "Why Python, isn't it a dead language?"(circa 2006-2007) I assumed she must be right, I didn't write python until several years later; I bet she's using Python in her job now.

So if all these things were possible on Symbian so early what in the world happened that they lost the market race so badly. Too much engineering-driven design? Lack of a unifying Jobs-esque force at the top to make hard decisions?

IMO

• iPhone's capacitive touch screen vs Nokia's resistive touch with stylus requirement was too much of a friction (pun not intended). 1 year after iPhone's release, Nokia released 5800 marketed as iPhone killer; guess what? it had f'in stylus with resistive screen.

• Then when android happened, which was poor man's iPhone; Nokia hugged Windows Phone OS. Which never became a thing as it lacked Google apps (Google killed it, MSFT would have done the same to Google if places were interchanged). Other comments have detailed possible leadership sabotage related to the MSFT deal, which I agree with.

> 1 year after iPhone's release, Nokia released 5800 marketed as iPhone killer; guess what?

I guess beside its resistive screen, Nokia 5800 has much more power than iPhone 3G:

- J2ME apps;

- Python for S60 apps (+ Pys60 IDE);

- Qt4 apps;

- Voice input;

- Built-in voice recorder;

- Video recording;

- Frontal camera for video calls;

- 3.2 Megapixel camera with zoom & flash;

- 35 hours of work in music player mode;

- Changeable battery;

- And much, much more.

Here is good comparison list (in Russian).[0]

[0] http://mobiltelefon.ru/post_122880924.html

That's true of several mobile hardware/SW of that time, I mentioned capacitive screen to show typical consumer preference.

Btw, you can also add native 3G video calling via front camera to that list, my Nokia N70 did that years earlier in India. Not many westerners seem to know about this feature in my earlier discussions.

Reading around on the Internet a bit I came upon this [1] which indicates Nokia's leadership was less engineering-driven than I thought.

[1] https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/who-killed-nokia-nokia...

> Nokia's leadership was

Stephen Elop, Nokia President & CEO since September 2010.[0,1,2,3,4,5]

Since 2011 Symbian & Nokia starts its degradation under Elop 's "leadership".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#CEO_of_Nokia

[1] https://www.europeanceo.com/profile/stephen-elop

[2] https://www.smartcompany.com.au/business-advice/strategy/how...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/08/nokia-ste...

[4] https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/17/8796465/grand-theft-elop

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2018/02/15/elop_and_the_fall_of_...

Which is to be expected when one gets a contract from the shareholders with a bonus clause if the CEO manages to devalue the company and sell it.

US market was never keen in Nokia devices and Android is free beer.

The market have shifted. Before iphone, everyone was trying to build the smalles phone possible. Jobs convinced the world for brick sized devices and SymbianOS lost its USP - doing a lot on small batteriess. Had there been a wearables market back then, it could have had a second lease of life.

> So if all these things were possible on Symbian so early what in the world happened that they lost the market race so badly.

TL;DR: "Operation Elop" organized by Microsoft...[0]

[0] https://asokan.org/operation-elop/

Actually by Nokia shareholders, including a big bonus for managing to sell mobile division.

No. Nokia just sold its business to new owner, but new owner killed it.

Which is why Elop got the bonus from Nokia shareholders as per the signed contract. Finn press found out all the dirt about the contract back then, and the news are still relatively easy to track down.

The J2ME world never really felt easy to me:

What worked on 1 device didn't on another, there was very limited shared UI, and it felt like it was impossible to target multiple devices.

There were MIDP profiles[1] as long the version matched, the apps worked fine in my experience on any device although the devices themselves varied in their key pad placements; Nokia went crazy in their phone designs[2]!

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Information_Device_Prof...

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZi-7V11k8

Wow, thanks for that video down memory lane.

I had a 3660 (friends called it the "communications brick"). There was no wifi and I couldn't afford a data plan but I was able to have the phone dialup via Bluetooth (think "reverse tether") to my Linux desktop. I never got into J2ME: being a fledgling Linux snob in college, I went for Nokia's C++ target and got stuck in the quagmire.

But MIDP profiles were so limited that you could only build the simplest apps. To do anything complex required calling proprietary extensions, which destroyed portability.

Yeah, the portability on Android is wonderful. /s

Just like Android.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com