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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

> Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries.

Symbian was open source, ran on millions of smartphones - most of which had app stores and web browsers. Some of which had touchscreens, GPS, augmented reality features etc.

Don't get me wrong - Android has been brilliant. But let's not completely rewrite history, eh?

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Right. I didn't think I was trying to rewrite history -- I'm simply pointing out a gap in the market that Android was attempting to fill. Asking me to enumerate everything out there at the time is silly -- especially given the haze of memory.

Symbian was far more popular in Europe than it ever was Stateside, so bear that in mind. I had to import my Nokia E70 gullwing phone before I received my sooner, and what functionality it had was okay, but the browser was hardly more than a WAP browser in a feature phone. The app store was barely there as well, including only a handful of very simple apps at the time.

The browser in S60 phones was actually WebKit. In fact it was Nokia that started the work of fitting WebKit into memory-constrained devices.

Oh, neat! I had no idea it was WebKit on there. Still, what I had wasn't exactly what you'd be comfortable using for more than a few moments. I bought one of the original Nokia Internet Tablets and put together a full wearable system back then to make things a bit better for myself, but I never used the browser in S60 for anything serious because it was so cut down.

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