I guess abandoning Symbian to switch to Microsoft should be considered a significant misstep, even if motivated by the then financial motives.
(Maemo, the precursor to Meego, was originally a GTK-based platform. The Symbian faction of Nokia acquired Trolltech in order to be able to advocate for Qt to be a shared development platform for both Series 60 and Maemo, which meant throwing out large parts of the existing Maemo codebase and starting again. This delayed Maemo significantly, and somewhat ignored the fact that there were basically 0 apps on Symbian that anyone cared about in the slightest)
Around 2003:ish Nokia was the only Symbian licensee left and they had even 3 UIs: Series 60, Series 80 and Series 90. Only Series 60 survived. Series 80 had 2 products and Series 90 one public prototype. Series 90 was the only with touch input originally. Series 60 got touch after the iPhone, but that was too late.
Yes, Symbian C++ was too difficult even inside Nokia. Productivity was very low, many products got cancelled before seeing the market and those who did were massively delayed.
Agree with the ugly. Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some say it was an engineering master piece of the 1990s. But it was different from everything else and it was difficult, I don't think this can be disputed.
The no good reason is not the whole truth:
* When Symbian (then called EPOC32) was developed there was no C++ compiler that supported exceptions without major problems. "Don't use them" was typical in style guides at the time. So EPOC came up with their own macro hackeries instead, which worked when used correctly. The latter was too difficult for many developers.
* Early devices had just single digits of megabytes of RAM. So 500 times less than a phone of today. More macro trickeries to save Bytes were the answer.
That's definitely not true. I joined Symbian in 2005 and there were lots of licensees around. I think 2005/2006 were the glory years of the company.
That's not fully correct. Symbian was the leading smartphone operating system years 2000 - 2008 or so in Europe and some parts of Asia. Skype, browsers, games existed. I remember Skype offering me a refund when they discontinued the app.
I remember visiting software conferences in the US maybe 2005:ish and all the Americans had only feature phones. They seriously told me "All I want to do is call and text, I don't need anything else". The truth was that packet data coverage sucked in the US in those days.
These were Smartphones with keypad navigation (qwerty models also existed). They had packet data and the possibility to install apps, both native Symbian and Java (J2ME MIDP).
The problem was that developing for Symbian was too difficult for many programmers. Not only outside Nokia but also inside. I would claim that at least 40% of the Symbian developers did not fully understand how strings worked. Which had several types, none of which was called string and conversion between them or using the wrong one was a continuous source of bugs.
MIDP was too limited in its sandbox to build truly competitive apps.
When the iPhone came and capacitive touch started to win Nokia had nothing to offer. They had a couple of models with resisitive touch (requiring a pen or long nails), but all too little and too late.
When the Smartphone development started in the US Nokia was just obsolete. No competitive hardware and a difficult software platform. So Apple and Google conquered the world.
Depends on the time. It must have been christmas 2002 that I took my first skiing videos using the video recording app. Probably still in beta then. And I sent the app to the recipient by Email. Sending the videos went by MMS. Max size 50 KB IIRC, maybe 100 KB but I believe that came only in the next model.
Yeah, those smart phones came only with a still camera. But being able to build a video recorder show the strength of the platform. Of course there was no security model, access control or anything at the time, which made things easier.
Of course in 2010, being able to build a video recording app was no longer a competitive advantage.
Porting Symbian UI to Qt meant that they could at least merge surface-level stuff and have core apps that ran on both Maemo/Meego and Symbian, then retire Symbian when no one would care or notice.
I think this is correct. It had a traditional market base but was already hopelessly noncompetitive except for old reputation and brand value (see my other comments here) and on a steep decline. Compared to iPhone and Android which were more modern and on a steep growth path.