I remember its existence but never used it. It was also not popular in the USA. Motorola dominated, and if you looked at their offerings and their syncing software it was incredible how utterly incompetent it was. For example, their contacts didn't have addresses... I mean, WTF? And the syncing software (to Outlook, for example) just straight-up didn't work. I had a Motorola phone with 32MB of memory, and it couldn't hold the data my 8MB Handspring Visor could.

When the iPhone came out, that was the dominant landscape: PDAs and horribly incompetent phones. Internet browsing meant WAP (a clumsy attempt to dumb Web pages down enough to show on tiny, all-text phone screens) or a Blackberry. Blackberry rested on its laurels and a shitty, shitty browser until dead.

There are plenty of things that Apple remains bafflingly ignorant of, or just petulantly refuses to fix on its mobile devices. Great example: The iPhone, after 15 years, STILL doesn't notify you of missed calls. That's right: You don't even have the OPTION to get audible alerts of missed calls, but meanwhile you can get up to 10 alerts of missed TEXTS. That is simply stupid.

Then came the Apple Pencil... and no support for it in iOS. Every app developer had to implement handwriting recognition independently. WTF? Why didn't Apple simply allocate a square area in the on-screen iPad keyboard to accept written characters, which Palm OS nailed in the '90s?

Annnyway... I looked up Symbian because I work in Qt a lot now, and it was originally from Nokia. I knew it had been developed for phones, but could not imagine why. That's because I didn't ever interact with Symbian or see it in the wild and know it was from Nokia. So thanks for the note. I think Qt is pretty cool, and my team just made a good desktop app with it. I'm curious why the C++ Symbian experience wasn't good.