In my opinion it's the best phone first os .
Tried it a few years ago and it was perfect
Happy it's been opensourced
interesting forks out there as well www.github.com/squaklabs/miraicat-kernel
Tried it a few years ago and it was perfect
Happy it's been opensourced
interesting forks out there as well www.github.com/squaklabs/miraicat-kernel
Nokia actually opensourced it around that time as well. Symbian has been open source for well over a decade. This looks more like the retirement of what remains of that effort, which included the Symbian Foundation. Presumably, by now there are very few; if any, commercial users of Symbian left. So, they are parking the source code at Github for whomever still has some use for it. As you can see from the commit logs, development has been dead since 2010. I seriously doubt that is going to change.
Granted, I never tried developing for it.
Android OS and iOS are hacks of desktop OSes so are optimised for performance rather than battery life or memory usage; Symbian OS was designed as a mobile OS from the beginning optimising power and memory management.
It was the timing of Google's IPO which scuppered Symbian. Google were able to spend billions getting Android in place to capture Symbian's market share and customers as iPhone buzz grew the market.
Ran Symbian 2.0
I didn't even know Symbian was available on non nokia
Was very advanced for the time, everyone was impressed here as there werent any similar devices locally available.
This was my last phone before moving over to blackberry to get on the BBM bandwagon(after the x800 fell, and hit the push button opener and popped open the screen and cracked... With no locally available parts wasn't worth it to fix....).
Never had to do anything from the dev side, but the usability/functionality was steps ahead at the time
By the time Nokia took ownership of Symbian, it was effectively the only company left still depending on it. The complex ownership of Symbian was one of the reasons it took many years to get operating system releases to market. Because first Symbian had to release a new version, which would only happen every few years or so and featured a lot of design by committee style decision making. And then it's users/owners would design products around that, which also took years.
It did not help that Nokia was a hardware company ran by electrical engineers that did not realize it was being bottle-necked on software. So, you would get new S60 products featuring bugs that had been fixed in other S60 products because they literally forked the same code base those were based on but before the bug had been patched. It was beyond stupid. And S60 was indeed a dumpster fire. One of the (many) issues with it was that it did not actually have any touch screen capability because Nokia killed that off around the time the rumors about the iphone started swirling. They then rushed out a version of S60 (v5.0) to "compete" with the iphone that re-created some of that. But then they also still had lots of v3.0 S60 products in the market for several years. Which did not help the messaging.
5.0 was a rush job and the initial products tanked hard. First there was the tube and then the N97. Both were products with lots of software issues. And subsequent efforts to fix it did not improve things. Most of the fixes amounted to too little too late.
But somehow they also managed to do it internally. The Series 90 Symbian UI could have been a real contender. This is a touchscreen smartphone from 2004:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710
But Nokia canned this advanced Symbian UI as soon as it shipped, and instead they started bolting features onto the already terrible keypad-driven S60 UI. Oh, and they also spun up a Linux touchscreen effort seemingly to ensure a total lack of focus and clarity about Nokia’s software strategy.
I was so disppointed (as a customer) at the trajectory at the time. It could have been so much more and I was willing it on.
Nokia were "running" (perhaps should read ruining) Symbian well before they bought it. They were only one of the four or was it five co-owners, but they ran rings around the others when pressuring Symbian leadership. They were the only phone manufacturer with a dedicated product support org, and their pre-prod devices were available in core engineering teams unlike Moto et al. Nokia were the key players to create a Symbian OS core without a coherent UI (Techview lol), no TCP/IP stack, no telephony stack. They helped reduce Symbian OS to swiss cheese because they were so concerned with with recouping their investment from gen 1 SOS products and terrified their competitors at the time got a tiny leg up.
The Symbian UI was extremely clunky. I am not sure it even had touch screen. They had whole keyboard, but you had to navigate menus with arrow keys. Why not give user the full power of the keyboard, like Emacs or Vim? Why can't I have menu options on hotkeys?
I think people forgot about how bad phone UIs were before Steve Jobs' heavy focus on UI. And I am no fan of touch-based controls, still want a proper keyboard.
There’s probably a business lesson in there somewhere about how your biggest customer can become synonymous with your actual product, and you get ruined by association.
QML remains to this day superior framework to native Android UI development. Only Jetpack Compose, and SwiftUI on iOS, are starting to come on par with what Nokia had with Qt/QML over a decade ago.
Nokia actually had all the right pieces (Qt, Maemo/MeeGo, Symbian for feature phones, unparalleled engineering and manufacturing talent) for continuing their world domination, but their management was just laughably bad. It was all lost to in-fighting between teams and an inefficient middle manager heavy corporate culture it seems.
And years later they are still terrible. At least Android looks like an interface designed by people who have never seen GUIs before: GUI elements (warning) obscuring other GUI elements with no possibility to move them.
"Hey let's take GTK3 with all it's problems and love for empty space and put that on a phone..."
I missed that phone when it died, but Android on the Dell Streak was great step onwards for me.