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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones. The hardware was always amazing.

I owned a Communicator 9290, and have yet to have a phone that performed as well on speaker. Bar none. Noise cancelling and volume both. I had an e90, and although it was less amazing on that front, the build quality, and look at feel just was... Great!

I'd pay iPhone Pro prices for (basically) an e90 running Android with a decent camera. Nobody's made one yet, but I keep hoping. And yes, in a matter of weeks I'll have my Astro Slide from Planet Computers, but I have little doubt the form factor will still fall short of the dream of a truly pocket phone you can type decently well on.

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The N9 was not Symbian though. What I read was that there was a serious management culture issue at Nokia. Even before Elop Meego efforts were seriously sabotaged by the Symbian camp (the N9 was significantly delayed for example) .

Mind you that memo and the decisions made were either incredibly stupid or part of a strategy by the shareholders to break apart Nokia. I mean apart from the fact that you tell the public that you don't believe in your product while selling it, they also decided to axe the Meego version N9 successor even though it was essentially ready. Many believe that was done to not risk it being a success, which would have revealed the whole strategy change to be wrong.

> Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones.

I actually miss it, those were simpler times where your phone didn't spam you with ads or notifications or didn't get outdated every 2 years. No constant data collection or surveillance to the scales we deal with now.

More so, I actually miss the feeling of how new everything was, in the sense that is you wanted to play some games you'd sometimes scour WAP sites for the game files (or pay exorbitant fees through magazines).

There was a certain charm to games back then, too, seeing what people could knock together with Java on such a limited platform. Games like Gravity Defied, Galaxy on Fire or Gish, or even Doom RPG.

I'm kind of nostalgic, admittedly, maybe for a time when not everything was so well optimized towards monetization. And before Wirth's law became so present on our devices.

The problem with Symbian was not the usability but the developer experience.

SDK available only for Windows and really awkward to install and use? Check. Pre-11 C++ but without exceptions and something called cleanup stack and ELeave macro instead? Check. Ok, a whole periodic table of string classes instead of std::string (which would still have been terrible because it was before C++11)? Check. GUI API that was designed for a Psion handheld (Uikon) and implementation for Psions (Eikon) and Series 60 UI implementation (Avkon) piled on top of that? Check. App architecture that doesn't really have a concept of standalone app but works on the idea that apps are views and controllers that handle files? Check. What about making every single phone model slightly different so that apps are not portable between Symbian phones by default but you have to actually test and port with every model? Check. And there was a lot more at deeper technical level that I never had to reach.

I understand that the developer experience was better for the last Symbian versions but at that point it was already late, iOS and Android were taking over and Symbian had a reputation to fix.

My definitive memory of Symbian development having a lunch at a Nokia cafeteria, a week after starting the job and all the dreams about having a computer in your pocket that could run anything as long at it didn't need huge amounts of CPU power, memory or screen area crushed, and complaining with a friend who was in similar situation. An older engineer had heard us, told us that we don't know anything about how bad S60 is and continued with a hour-long rant that as far as I know was all pure facts.

All true, and then there was also the schizophrenic S40 or S60 development too.

I was told by someone who had developed for both that S40 was much better for developers. Of course it was completely closed ecosystem except for J2ME apps so it didn't have much of future in competition with low end Android. I'd really like to know what Meltemi was like.

And a whole bunch of phoned under that s30

That you couldn't develop for at all.

All of that is true, and that's why Nokia acquired Trolltech: Qt solved all those problems on Symbian, and provided an easy, mostly OS-independent, way to rebuild the apps for Maemo/MeeGo.

I must live in simpler times then, with an iPhone from 2017 that has notifications set where I want them to be.

I do have a newer one, that's because the camera is something I care about, not because an X isn't fast enough or whatever, it remains a capable phone.

I get nostalgic for the HipTop, personally. Probably because I never had one, by the time I was done with flip phones the slab-o-glass was the obvious winner. Seriously cool little gizmos though, I don't think a better typing experience has been made for a pocketable jeejah to this day.

I wonder if we ever going to see anything other than Android or iOS. A third ecosystem wouldn’t be so bad.

Sailfish has been around for years and somehow still under active development.

I don’t see how it can happen, on the same way we’ve been stuck with the Mac and DOS/Windows duopoly since the 80s. The problem is a new platform isn’t just competing with the established OSes themselves, it’s also competing with the associated peripheral, software and services ecosystems. Those consist of thousands of companies providing thousands of products and services worth trillions of dollars. There’s just no way to get traction against that from a standing start.

> I don’t see how it can happen, on the same way we’ve been stuck

In-between Chromebooks and generic Linux distros (say what you will about the year of Linux on the desktop, use is only growing; slow paced or not, doesn't matter), specialised Linux distros (SteamOS - you might think it doesn't matter, it's only for a handheld console, the Steam Deck, but it will force many games to have Linux compatibility. And one of the main things keeping many tech savvy users on Windows is gaming) i think a duopoly is a bit of a strong word, and it's getting disrupted.

Oh sure, I was mainly addressing the current mobile OS landscape with the desktop as a historical case in point, but you're right. There have always been alternative options, especially for niche use cases. I think there are several things happening there right now. One is the erosion of the desktop as a native application platform, if you mainly only care about web apps then the desktop OS isn't an issue because the web is already a powerful platform.

The other is the advanced state of Windows emulation for games, you can bypass the platform effect if you can piggy back on an established platform's APIs. That's tricky though, plenty of mobile OSes tried to get traction with Android APK compatibility, but the problem with that is, why bother developing native apps for them? With games consoles it's a different situation, maybe emulation in the long term is just fine.

HarmonyOS is the only thing really new that I've seen , but I wouldn't touch it with a 10 ft pole.

Um. HarmonyOS is literally just Android. It’s not even remotely new. There’s even. Android/Google copyright notices left in it.

My phone runs Debian (PureOS to be exact) and I'm perfectly happy with it.

What device do you use?

Librem 5

This is exactly what Nokia were working on; the N9 ran Meego, a Linux-based OS Nokia had been developing for years. There had been a string of "internet tablets" (eg N800, N810) and phones (N900) running Maemo, a precursor to Meego. They even bought QT as part of the development!

Meego, running on the N9, was an absolutely wonderful experience. It was smooth, fast, beautifully designed, and had simple elegant swipe-based navigation system, it had multiprocess app switching (AFAIK before iPhone OS did) and a brilliant newsfeed/notification system. It felt like it really had extraordinary potential. And Elop ditched it.

It really sounds it should have been given a chance. Did they ever open source it to give other Linux OS’ a chance?

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