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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

Not saying it didn't exist, but that it wasn't mainstream. Ask your mother if she's ever heard of Symbian phones...

>Ask your mother if she's ever heard of Symbian phones...

Ask your mother if she's heard of Variable Valve Timing or the equivalent for her brand of car OR ask her if she knows Linux or... for that matter ask yourself if you know the OS on Nokia 3310? Most mothers don't even know what a OS is.

Edit: The OS is called "Series 40".

The difference is we're talking about a product category that has penetrated culture in a meaningful way, rather than tech that is meaningful to people with specialized knowledge.

iPhone was ground zero for the general public consciousness in this space, it made this product category mainstream. It's silly to argue otherwise.

Also variable valve timing was plastered on trunks of cars in the 80s so folks of a certain age should recognize the term, and Linux as a term seems pervasive enough that most people should at least have heard of it; they likely have no idea what those terms actually mean though.

She's certainly heard of Nokia phones, the majority of which (in later years) ran Symbian.

People associate Nokia with 3310. No-one associates it with smartphones.

That is a very US perspective. Nokia absolutely dominated the European market up to the 2010s.

Nokia brick phones dominated the US market in the early 2000s. I’ve never seen a Symbian outside of magazines and internet tech writers. Symbian lost to iOS and Android within 2 years of release.

Not to mention developers were never going to create apps for the platform.

What are you talking about? Symbian came out a decade before iPhone and was very widespread. Maybe you mean the Maemo operating system used in N900?

This comment could be improved by addressing parents rather than mothers.

>Ask your parent if they've ever heard of Symbian phones

definitely wasn't an improvement

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