Symbian Was Right | Hacker News Reader

Symbian Was Right

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I am using a "smartphone". Here are the specs:

A 5-inch qHD+ screen, a quad-core processor with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, 5MP and 2MP cameras, 2000mAh battery, and runs Android 11 Go Edition.

Android Go is touted to be the OS that is easy on the mobile resources.

But my experience using this "smartphone" is dismal. The battery life is a joke. The applications crash. And privacy is, well no words for it.

Looking at what was available before the availability of Android and iOS, we see that Symbian was a world leader in the mobile OS space. And they were fanatic about battery life, security and reliability and customisability of Symbian OS. They use to go an extra mile to see to it that the development of the OS does not affect these basic requirements.

Symbian was right all along in its approach to mobile OS development.

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Symbian was used and developed in a time before "always-online" was a thing. Check the battery life of your smartphone without internet connection. You'd be surprised. Also, Symbian phones did not have more than 2" displays, that were also very dark (compared to modern day >1000 cd/m² oled stuff). without any installable app (forget that shitty java mobile crap), the OS running on a specific phone was fragile and probably had lots of bugs and vulnerabilities.

Agreed. Constant network wake-ups is the norm. I think apps should have a budget that they need to beg to increase.

This is the key. I'm running a 6 years old galaxy tab s2 for reading at night, about 10 to 30 minutes a day, with an OLED display in airplane mode. Due to the display and white-on-black colors, only standby really contributes significantly to the power consumption. Still, even though the battery is very old by now, with average use, the battery indicator is usually at around 60 % at the end of a week without charging.

Symbian had installable apps. For my Nokia 3650, I installed an updated video recorder from Nokia to record video and audio. And some games that were meh, and RealPlayer.

You're right that battery power with internet was trash. I recall the battery draining in 30-60 minutes if I was actively (WAP) browsing or streaming music.

Later versions of Symbian worked better, but I didn't run them. WhatsApp ran on Symbian and there was no platform push, so it had to stay connected to the servers; when I was there, we would routinely see Symbian users who had been connected for 30+ days.

> Symbian was used and developed in a time before "always-online" was a thing.

I remember that someone commented many moons ago (2000s) that 'less we talk about being "online" the more being online will become important'.

Back in the day, you were online when your home modem dialed into your ISP. Or when you were either at home or at work where you could get a wired Internet connection. Now, with wireless, we're (potentially) online all the time.

I loathe the state of the mobile device market in the year 2022.

I'm long past the stage of being angry about it. The big phone manufacturers are going to do whatever they think will make them most money. I carry a dumb phone.

I had several Nokia 9300 and 9500 smartphones because I wanted a qwerty keyboard. They used Symbian series 80. The software was infuriatingly buggy and trying to get an official Nokia service center to upgrade the software properly was more hassle than it was worth. (Upgrading the software properly required upgrading both the firmware and some included apps that were stored on the SD card, it could only be done by a service center.)

Most likely, the buggy software was mostly the fault of Nokia that made their own UI rather than the symbian consortium that made the base OS.

> Symbian was right all along in its approach to mobile OS development.

From what you wrote i'd say that PalmOS was most likely more "right" - after all their motto was that they didn't compete with other PDAs, but with pen and paper and because of that everything had to be instant.

Also IME having worked with SymbianOS (at least the versions found in mobiles like Nokia 6600, never tried the later ones using Qt) the development experience was beyond abysmal. I remember at a job years ago i made a graphical application - it took me less than an hour to implement the core functionality of the application but about a month to make the full application. This includes writing everything about the UI from scratch using the framebuffer functionality it had because the official APIs were so convolutely braindead that it was impractical to work with them - it was much faster to do everything from scratch and avoid the SymbianOS as much as possible. The amusing bit (in hindsight) was when someone form Symbian visited us they were impressed we managed to make the application in a single month and "normally" we'd need six months for it - meanwhile i had... evil thoughts about their OS (i maintained a polite facade though, i think :-P).

(later i was told by someone else that this was because SymbianOS was originally meant to work on much weaker hardware, but IMO that was a bad excuse since they never maintained backwards compatibility so they could have cleaned up their APIs, not to mention that SymbianOS added so much unnecessary complexity that a much simpler API would actually be both faster and easier to work with)

PS. i never worked with PalmOS myself so it might be as bad or worse than SymbianOS but from a quick glance at a couple of tutorials it seems straightforward to program

> the official APIs were so convolutely braindead that it was impractical to work with them

Examples:

- https://docs.huihoo.com/symbian/nokia-symbian3-developers-li...

- https://www.developer.com/mobile/mastering-symbian-os-descri...

There were Android forks in the past that were security focused, I had one years ago on a HTC phone that would offer fake contacts/camera/gps to apps and you could deny network access per app on mobile and/or wifi.

I haven't seen anything like that for a long time.

Symbian and reliability was never a thing. I worked at Nokia at the time, the various Nokia phones I had rebooted more than windows 95 back in the day. Also, they were slow and the UI was pretty bad.

As for battery life, my Pixel 6 is fine. Easily lasts two days on a battery. I had a cheap Nokia Android phone before that; also fine. Stable, just worked. Fine battery life.

Symbian was pretty much obsolete before it launched. Nokia (and the other Symbian consortium members) bet against the clear trend towards mobile Linux in the late nineties. And they lost. Of the Symbian consortium, most of the companies no longer produce phones or have disappeared entirely. That's how badly Symbian lost.

Things were simpler back then - nokia phones saved the sim pin into memory and had watch dog timers that would just reboot the phone if it locked up and use the in memory pin to unlock the sim.

If you didnt happen to be watching the display at the time you would never know it rebooted.

You miss a point: smart-phones are "smart phones", so the user must be the dumb since smart and dumb are relative classifications.

SmartPhones are not made for the human user/formal owner how actually own next to nothing but as macro-spy devices, maintained by the spied target, bough by him/her directly. It's the modern evolution of classic spying: in the past was those who surveil to pay, install, maintain spying gears, now they just made them attractive like a drug and their target do the rest.

Of course when you are able to form such big cohorts of junkies it's hard not abusing them too much. Some have a certain understatement and control their behaviors, some do not.

Oh BTW be happy, because your next smartphone have 4 wheels, can kill you or someone else and it feature more cameras, mics etc.

apple is also fanatic about battery life. it's just that the "phone" is no longer a phone, it's a mini-computer which by accident also does audio connections over a certain wireless technology ...

Maybe the MuditaOS for the Mudita Pure phone based on FreeRTOS is free (GPL) succesor ?

https://github.com/mudita/MuditaOS

Palm os based Sony Clie PEG-SJ20 Handheld is the most comfortable, handy and effective personal digital assistance I've had so far.

iPhone is still yet to keep up in some tiny but crucial UX and usability details (like auto context menus for contact names in any text field, amazing cursor management etc.)

But they lost in other aspects. So it doesn't make any sense to say "<software/company/person> was right".

< And they were fanatic about battery life, security and reliability and customisability of Symbian OS. They use to go an extra mile to see to it that the development of the OS does not affect these basic requirements

To clarify, what we the right about? “Going the extra mile”?

not really fair comparison to be comparison OS running on various devices with OS optimized for specific hardware

if you wanna compare Symbian with other OS, you should compare it with iOS

Yes, I am aware Symbian was also on other than Nokia phones but that was rarity and rare experience.

i just want my qwerty tmobile sidekick back :/

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