Of Psion and Symbian | Hacker News Reader

Of Psion and Symbian

abortretry.fail

171 pointsklelatti60 comments

For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme.

Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson).

The other day I was rummaging around papers in the attic, and found a black and white printout of an internal Nokia presentation from 2001 outlining their smartphone and mobile data strategy. It was striking how well they anticipated what users might want in the smartphone, but completely failed to project the technological milestones that might make those dreams realizable. The 2001 outlook was entirely obsessed with the limits of bandwidth and what mobile operators would allow on their network (i.e. how Nokia could enable operators to get a cut on all the content viewed by users).

Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on. Apple was able to project the point where their desktop operating system (itself formerly a late-1980s workstation OS) could fit into mobile, and they also had the design capability to ruthlessly cut features to make that work. Nokia dabbled in all directions: bottom-up with Symbian, top-down with Maemo/Meego, but no commitment and no guiding vision except the managerial focus on cutting costs by putting the same old components a bit more cheaply into a growing range of colorful plastics.

"Pocket Terminal 2002": https://imgur.com/gallery/pocket-terminal-2002-r2sq4i0

Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were clear and logical, the code made sense, and the system was familiar. And then the App Store arrived with all the implications, such as a sudden mass market and less-obvious features like crash reports with stack traces from users. Apple was on an entirely different level than Nokia, and literally not a single developer wanted to touch Symbian anymore. It was effectively dead, even with millions of devices still in use, but it was obvious. Today I see a similar story unfolding, much more slowly, but the same thing is happening with Microsoft Windows.

I was in Espoo HQ, the week after the burning platform memo, which killed most developer love that was worked on during the previous years building up to Qt and PIPS.

Everyone I talked to wasn't that happy with management.

Meanwhile marketing made sure everything looked fine on the outside, still recruiting app developers to the platform they were planning on abandoning.

Wasted 2 years on that bitter, bitter lesson followed by prolonged depression.

Sorry about that, I was on the Networks unit, still I could follow most of the Mobile stuff from inside.

After the Metrowerks based, tooling, there were two attempts with Eclipse, the first wasn't that great and I no longer remember the name, the second one was Carbide.

Which is when then eventually acquired Qt, introduced PIPS to ease the pain, and started to make Symbian C++ dialect more friendlier, and closer to common programming without those strange two phase constructors, handles, and special suffix names on member functions.

So the community was starting to see the light of transition that was several years in the making, and out of the sudden, that "we are going Windows Phone 7" on a company that was UNIX first for several years.

When I joined, all network software was originally targeting HP-UX, for example.

So there wasn't much Microsoft love on the corridors.

That's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in the last years. Especially QML for the UI parts was well ahead of the competition, giving declarative and hardware accelerated UIs with great dev convenience.

At managerial level, only half of Nokia was onboard with Qt. The other half wanted to chuck everything and just adopt something developed elsewhere; I reckon most of these folks simply resented the size the company had reached, and wanted to streamline. The latter half won the political battle and brought Elop in to do the dirty work.

The problem was that right after the Symbian developer community decided to embrace Qt, the Burning Platform memo came out, telling them to dump C++, learn C# and target Windows Phone 7, with either Silverligh or XNA.

In a community that was largety anti-Microsoft, joking how bad Windows CE and Pocket PC used to be, versus Symbian handsets.

The majority of the Symbian community felt betrayed and went elsewhere, to Apple and Google.

It's always amuses me how people blame Elop, completely ignoring everything what was done before him.

>> No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph.

>> In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother with all the Symbian shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone market? Money was in Apple and Android.

>> Should I remind you what Elop's memo was a month later, in February 2011?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038979

There is a difference from random people around the Internet, and people that were actually Nokia employees at the time.

And yes, the board as well had its own share to blame, including hiring Elop in first place, with a big bonus payment clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobile business unit, which naturally he ended up doing as well, and created a huge scandal in Finland's press at the time.

> people that were actually Nokia employees at the time.

>> I was on the Networks unit

By the time the board hired Elop Nokia-tanic was already with a giant hull breach.

Sure, you can claim what your personal experience of an unrelated unit in Nokia gives you a proper visibility to the circumstances, but what Nokia actually did before the memo is telling what were happening there way better than your experience.

And... HP-UX? In 2010? Sigh.

See, by 2010, we were already focusing on Red-Hat Linux....

You have no idea of what visibility I actually had, how Networks worked with Mobile, which buildings we shared, common lunch talks, nor I am going to disclose most of the NDA stuff.

So think whatever you want out of it.

> ou have no idea of what visibility I actually had

Yes.

But I have a very good idea of what products Nokia shipped before the memo and they were quite shit, compared to the other options on the market.

Just re-read the memo itself and explain with a honest heart how exactly Apple got to 61% in 2010? Was that the evil Elop doing things? Or that was Nokia and Nokia employees doing shit for years before 2010?

You are perfectly aware what to lose the market in 2010 you need to make shit products in 2007-2009, because you can't be totally fine all this time and at Dec 31 2010 BAM all the base belong to Apple.

> which buildings we shared, common lunch talks

Puhlease, lunch talks don't push a shitty products to the market. It's the internal bureaucracy, lack of the ability to take the responsibility and overall the bloated and entrenched corporate culture of Nokia what does that.

...and in the process forced the Maemo team to revamp everything again, delaying the shipping of an OS that didn't carry all of Symbian's terrible legacy, and ensuring that Nokia had nothing that was going to be competitive with the rest of the ecosystem (the follow-up to the N9 was heavily delayed because people got pulled back to get the N9 to ship on schedule, meaning there was going to be at least a two year window for everyone else to make progress while the new Nokia smartphone ecosystem stagnated)

QML just needed a decade of hardware advancements to make it usable.

Windows is being replaced by Apple? Or doing the replacing?

Native Windows was replaced by the web and Electron-style wrappers long ago.

Even many Windows-exclusive apps are wrapped now; see: Cortana, Copilot

Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on.

From what I learned in Losing the Signal, a great history of RIM/Blackberry, their engineering leadership had the same obsession. They were convinced the iPhone would crash any network it was on. To be fair, Cingular/AT&T had plenty of teething troubles, but the product was so compelling and popular, the market for bandwidth adjusted.

When I was just starting my career around the late 1980s, I wrote a program on the Psion for a chain store in the UK that had 21 stores. Basically a person would walk the aisles and enter the stock codes and quantities. When they were done they would plug the device into a serial device. I wrote this other program in MS Basic (DOS) that dialed up all these Psions and downloaded the orders into an IBM S/38 Order and Inventory management system. I thought I was the dog's. I loved those devices.

I wrote a lot of code for Symbian devices once.

The system was extremely efficient on low-powered machines (by which I mean both a slow CPU and a weak battery). As far as wringing maximum performance from hardware-that-be, I have never worked with a better system.

The learning curve of the API was insane, though (and the system dragged a lot of ancient pre-32-bit PSION/EPOC remnants within itself). So was the heterogenity of the devices. Every new device required some rewrite of existing apps, and Nokia pushed out dozens of them. On-device debugging mostly didn't work. Emulators were clumsy and bloated, but still lacked important APIs, such as sound.

At the end of the day, the system was so developer-unfriendly that everyone migrated happily to better pastures.

It was the most robust way to write c++.

Ownership model in Symbian lead to really good memory efficiency. The testing tools made it really hard to import open source code cos it brought out all the memory correctness issues in addition to the usual porting problems. This was the safest systems code before rust came along.

Most devs did not understand that it was a "take your medicine for healthier code" situation and hated the dev experience

> I wrote a lot of code for Symbian devices once.

I sympathize with you. The learning curve of the API indeed was insane. For example, here’s a description of its at least 8 different string classes (the intro mentions 7, but doesn’t mention RBuf) that you had to know about: https://www.developer.com/mobile/mastering-symbian-os-descri... (and that’s way better documentation than I remember seeing at the time)

It seems that every single Symbian development team that I knew developed their own wrapper around the insane Bufs.

What a loss of productivity, to do the same thing again and again.

Bringing in Qt, and PIPS (P.I.P.S. Is POSIX on Symbian OS), in a Eclipse based IDE (Carbide), helped make the development experience much better, but then came Elop and ruined everything, with management's board help.

PIPS made it very clear that the way-forward was a unixish kernel/base system - as Apple did, as Android did, and in fact, years before either, as Nokia did with Maemo/Meego.

It was pure facade to say "continue with Symbian because PIPS + Qt". There were a lot of strange quirks in PIPS because the underlaying system/kernel wasn't unixish. And there were a lot of things all unixish systems as of 2008 already did well (multi-CPU, large memory) which Symbian really struggled with. Some of the "small-system optimisation" in Symbian (the single global service message port / queuing system) made it very hard to parallelize/scale out.

Nokia somehow was so uncomfortable with the idea of an opensource "base" that they rather bet on / sold out to Microsoft. But then, this is water down the river, and we will never know whether "alternatives" to the bet they made would have had better returns.

By the time I worked on Symbian, devices were far more powerful than what the Symbian API was designed for (and this was still before the iPhone). It made you jump through hoops that you didn't need to jump through anymore. I wrote a wrapper around their "7 kinds of buffer" API that made it at least a little bearable.

The burning platform memo was entirely accurate although Elop probably shouldn't have Osborned his company with it.

I often think about this article[1] from the Register that claim that the Paion MX5 was the last computer built by one team hardware and software. [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/26/psion_special/

Yes, that's a favourite of mine, too, and was before I worked there.

I started with a Psion 3 and later a Psion 5MX and now 30 years later I still remember how good the user experience was. The agenda, de contact database, the way you could make your own database with data that you wanted to lookup while on the move, it all just worked. At some point in time I even had a mapping tool, I think the precursor to what is now TomTom.

Personally I think that today an only iphone/macbook with just the default software (mail/contacts/calendar/etc) comes somewhat close to the same user experience. A Windows machine, while having a million different programs available at your fingertips, does not feel as a cohesive user experience.

That would have been Autoroute. Written in the UK, the software house, Nextbase, was bought by Microsoft in 1993/94 and the Psion release was called "Microsoft Automap" - the only Microsoft release for that platform!

And yet... I worked for a small software company (STNC Ltd.) that was acquired by Microsoft in '99. One of our customers was Psion, and then Symbian, we definitely shipped releases to them after the acquisition, so there was (or could be) Microsoft software on the Psion

On a different not, my understanding was that Psion had paid Cygnus to work on Arm support for gcc. So essentially Psion was responsible for gcc having arm support.

The tool chain was bizarre, writing c++ in the Microsoft Visual C++ ide, and building with gcc. Which was crazy in the 90s

> Symbian operated as a consultancy where they could take a reference design and adapt it to a customer’s hardware and give it a unique look and feel

If the author is referring to what I think he his, it was only a certain part of Symbian that did this. No other Symbian employees had access to that part of the building. Normal Symbian employees never actually got to see the phones that were being developed. All work their was done on an emulator (x86) and H2/H4 (armv5) reference boards.

This book details the politics that went on until the end https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkab...

I had the 3c and the Revo. The Revo was initially a revelation. I paired it with an infrared modem connected to a Nokia that enabled me to surf the internet and get driving directions on the move 7 years before the iPhone. Alas working with the iMac was a pain and the Revo would randomly lose memory due to a power system design flaw. At that stage I ditched Revo and Psion for a HP WinCE device. More of a downgrade. I purchased the Gemini PDA when it came out. It was marvellous but expensive and fragile. I now have a DIamond Mako and a 5mx that I play with occasionally. In hindsight the best Psion was the 3c. It was affordable, robust and just worked. It got stolen on a bus in Chile in '97. Otherwise I bet I would still be using it.

Your experience sounds eerily similar to mine, especially the hacky workarounds to preempt smartphones (I peaked when getting online by Bluetoothing a Clio to a Sony Ericsson). Your comment about the robustness of the 3c reminded me about when mine fell out of a pocket when I was cycling and a car drove over it. It emerged unscathed.

When I got my dad's old Series 3a, it was one of the coolest things I ever saw. We had a computer at home, so I knew MS-DOS and then Win 3.1, but it was another thing to have a computer in your pocket!

Then, when I was in high school, my dad was developing applications for the national gas and water utility companies and they used Psion Workabouts with printer attachments, since they were rugged and basically only device approved for working in places with gas. He wanted to get out of the business, so he basically said if I would take over the devleopment and clients, which I did. I rewrote the code for the Psions and wrote an app in Visual Basic for windows machines (I cannot recollect which database I used) so they could download the client readings via the serial port and print it out.

I never really got into "professional" development after that, sticking mostly to product design, but I still like to dabble in code. I guess the thrill of working on a product from start to end and have it used by so many people still gets fills me with joy.

Fun times and to think that this has to be more than 20 years ago is crazy!

I loved Symbian, because it was hackable. It had mShell and PyS60 that gave direct access to everything the system had. I remember backing up text messages and contacts using mShell.

I accessed a heart rate monitor via BT using PyS60. Both were pretty straight forward.

With Android, termux comes close.

I had a colleague who worked in Nokia, on a TCS contract. He explained how the team was devasted upon hearing the news that Meego would be abandoned and Windows OS would be used.

I was hoping for Meego/Maemo before 13 years, then Sailfish and then Ubuntu touch. I don't know if there is any hope of mobile Linux (not Android) anymore.

The problem is majorily a limiting hardware, than the software itself. We had a Sailfish mobile in India, but the hardware was very disappointing that evev if you could live with the limited software ecosystem, the hardware was not really useful.

I see the same trend with PinePhone and Librem.

I developed a program for the Organiser II which interfaced with a light sensor on the expansion port to record "shadow profiles" of tree crowns which were used to generate tree health statistics for use in forestry. You told the program what species you were going to profile, then walked at a regular pace in a straight line from one side of the crown shadow to the other and it would record a profile to storage, calculate its deviation from the average for that species and use that to produce a health score. Repeat this for a given number of trees per hectare and it gave an indication of the health for that section. All this was based on a theory (which I had my doubts about) of one of my professors and who better to implement it than the one computer nerd who happened to be studying forestry at that university? I don't think the scores were all that useful and remote sensing was starting to take off anyway but it did give me a chance to work with this device. At the same university we used everything from PDP-11's, VAXen plus all matter of other DEC hardware - DEC Rainbows instead of clones, etc - plus a host of HP stuff. Add the Acorn Archimedes a few years later, the Amiga I got for next to nothing 'because it did not work' (a single small electrolytic capacitor had blown its guts, I had one lying around so a few minutes later I had a working Amiga for the price of a good meal. I also rebuilt a CGA (digital TTL input) colour monitor I had lying around by designing and including an analogue RGB input, somewhat to my own amazement it worked just fine) and pretty soon I was doing mostly tech stuff.

Sometimes I would like to have a small laptop with black and white screen or maybe 8 bit color that would have extreme (measured in days) or almost unlimited battery power (solar cell?). Something that would have a C compiler for happy hacking, though I would like to have a Linux kernel on it. I am not sure about connectivity though.

We made huge efficiency and battery chemistry gains, but software is lacking. Though it would be probably a quite expensive device that only a few want.

You mean something like the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra ?

https://ewritable.com/tablets/onyx-boox-tab-ultra/review/

Not sure about the battery life : since it's one of the higher powered e-ink tablets, it can probably only last a few days ?

Check out this Android tablet, which would support running gcc through Termux I think.

https://daylightcomputer.com/

Very nice concept, but I'm afraid this device running on a MediaTek SoC will never run a main line Linux so I expect to see 2-3 years of support.

I would prefer for the device to be inherently hackable and that requires running on a main line kernel.

I got to meet David Potter and his journalist wife when I was working at the Royal Free Hospital. He funded the Potter Chair position which my prof Dr Kleta filled as a nephrologist for many years. I have a picture of myself holding a Nokia N900 and shaking his hand.

At the time I thought he was the reason that the phone existed at all, not quite knowing the delicate politics between Symbian and Maemo at the time.

Still he smiled amicably enough and it's a treasured photo of mine.

Halcyon days ... interesting devices, ideas, and I loved my psion 5mx ... I remember hooking up to the internet while waiting in line at a concert and thinking I was damned business magnate cum console cowboy

I followed the story of Nokia, Symbian and Psion closely after that and the whole thing just felt like one of the biggest dropped balls in corporate history. Sad ... too many cooks, maybe ...

Oh man, I remember connecting my 5MX to a Nokia slider (the “The Matrix phone”) via the infrared port. Supreme geekery, ridiculously expensive, just to check that POP3 inbox.

> He was aware of both CPU and Sinclair Research, and he called them up.

This is one of those sentences that make abortretry.fail articles feel slapped together from other sources without attribution. Who is “CPU” in this sentence?

Context and a little digging reveals it is likely a reference to another early British company in the PC space, Cambridge Processor Unit Ltd. , described in the History section of the Acorn computer Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers

This random reference to a random company never goes anywhere is never properly explained in the first place. It gives the feel of something that has been quickly adapted by the author without much thought or understanding.

Yes, that struck me, as well.

I think he does a lot of cribbing from Wikipedia and does not acknowledge it.

Online a few people have pointed out big holes in this story. Small ones, like the Organizer IIXP did not have a backlight: no Organizer model had a backlight, nor did the MC or the Series 3 or 3A.

No mention of the Odin or Crystal phones.

https://www.oocities.org/epoc_32/odin

No mention of the RIM lawsuit (the Canadians though they'd invented email on the move.) No mention of Charles Davies, employee #1.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/06/25/charles_davies/

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270209...

No mention of Psion Xchange running on other 68000 OSes as well as QDOS, and on MS-DOS. Little mention of the award-winning Psion games and some of the superstar developers.

Author here.

I don’t use Wikipedia at all.

Generally, I read old magazines, books, and occasionally old websites in the Wayback machine when I can’t find other stuff. I then write.

I don’t make citations as my work is meant to be neither authoritative nor academic. I research and write for my own enjoyment.

As for Davies, I didn’t bring him up because I didn’t have a ton of material on him. For Xchange, I again didn’t have a ton of material. For the games, that early period wasn’t my focus. I really wanted to read/write about their mobile hardware.

Now, for the backlight part, I will need to make a correction to my work. I recall reading it was present, but I was clearly wrong.

Edit: as for CPU, covered that on my site already: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/mips-for-the-masses

Edit 2: also, honestly, writing about anything in the UK is somewhat more challenging. I grew up in the USA. Unless people present did interviews I can find, or if I can find books/magazines about it… I won’t have much to go on as I’ll not have experienced it.

Thanks for replying!

May I suggest publishing some kind of contact info? I have gone far out of my way to try to contact you with corrections before, including doing WHOIS requests on your domains, emailing `abuse@` as a common catch-all address, and so on, with no success.

Citations are one thing, but "more info..." links are good.

I had various Psion models in the 90s. Several of the people involved in the design of those things went to do modern-ish devices with Psion series 5-style keyboards, including the Cosmo Communicator. I was curious enough to back the Astro Slide 5G project, which attempted to "reverse the clamshell" to make a device with Psion series 5-style keyboard that closes to resemble a modern standard all-screen rectangular slab. It appears to have gone horribly wrong during final manufacturing at a Chinese factory that closed down during COVID, with thousands of IndieGoGo backers not having received their Astro Slide devices after several years (I am one). A shame. Anyway this article shows the Psion 5 and the Communicator side-by-side. That's a way out of date device now running ancient Android on a slow CPU, and sadly the refresh project seems to have died on the vine :-(

https://www.zdnet.com/product/cosmo-communicator/

[Edited for typos]

I feel your pain. I'm in the same boat as you (backed the astro slide - didn't get one).

I used the original Planet Computers device with psion-like keyboard, the Gemini, as my daily driver for a few years. The keyboard was no gimmick - it really felt like a quasi mini-laptop. A brilliant device, even considering the weak cpu (as compared to similarly priced phones)

Such a shame ...

(btw, had a psion 2, psion 3, psion 5 & sharp zaurus back in the day, so you can say I'm a sucker for these things)

Surprisingly, they are still taking orders:

https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/astro-slide

I suppose this means that they still have a firm intention to produce eventually, hopefully even with an updated chipset given that the original parts are lost ("ODM is effectively unwilling to release remaining produced stock and the pre-purchased chipsets"!) Obviously you know all that, fellow backer, but just in case anyone else is interested in this debacle:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...

At this point I think of it as the Delorean of handheld computers...

Great, so that means someone will hack an astro slide into a time machine. Ok, I'm game

A great story from the dawn of the idea to the realization of the Nokia SymbianOS phones.

The subsequent M$ purchase of that Nokia phone division was one of the biggest damages done by Microsoft to the computing world.

Symbian Developers - quick question, if anyone here remembers. I think I saw something in their API docs a long time ago, that had some sort of pointer compression thing for linked lists, which look interesting at the time. It wasn't XOR linked lists, it was something else IIRC. Please can anyone shed some light on this?

I learned how to program on that PSION II! My dad brought one back from the UK (must've been '93 or maybe '94) and I got hooked. I still have BASIC (or I guess OPL) scribbles from when I was like 7 years old in a notepad. Nostalgia overload :)

I found my dad's Psion 5mx in a drawer the other day. They were really fantastic devices

I really loved my Series 5. That keyboard was awesome! I still have it, but the ribbon cable is broken.

I'd take a computer with a color screen, Bluetooth, running Linux and that keyboard - it could be fun for ham radio stuff.

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