Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

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"Both iOS and Android" misses a whole decade of mobile computing, though! Before the iPhone was even announced, Symbian had already shipped 100 million smartphones.

For an in-depth look into how the original smartphone OS came about, I can recommend David Wood's Smartphones and beyond: Lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian:

http://www.amazon.com/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkable-...

David Wood was an R&D executive at Symbian. He's brutally honest about the company's failings... But he also paints a fascinating picture of how the vision for smartphones evolved in the late '90s, when nobody had a clear idea of what the form factor could be and what actual people might want to do with the devices.

(There's a widespread belief that Symbian wasn't a real smartphone OS... Yet it supported 3rd party apps, multitasking and background services, 3G data, touch and keypad UIs, had a mobile WebKit browser before anyone else, GPU-accelerated OpenGL in 2005, and so on. In many ways Android owes a lot to Symbian, IMO -- for example the Activity lifecycle is fairly similar to the base concepts in Symbian.)

Let's also not forget about Windows Mobile. The first smartphones powered by it (marketed as "Pocket PCs which also happen to be a phone") started coming out in ~2002, with touchscreen and everything. I own a collection of phones with this OS, including a HTC Wallaby (the phone that the XDA-developers community was originally about), and even that old thing supported true multitasking, mobile data (GPRS), the best Internet Explorer they could put on such things at the time (it was Microsoft, after all), media player, handwriting recognition (inspired by the Palm devices, I believe)... in many ways it allowed one to do "smartphone tasks" well before Android or the iPhone came out. In fact, UX aside, when the iPhone came out, the Windows Mobile users I knew weren't impressed, because in terms of "technological possibilities" there was no news.

I used another more recent HTC device (Blue Angel), second-hand, for a couple of years as my main phone, from 2011 to 2013 IIRC. With WiFi and Bluetooth, decent web browsers available (Opera Mini and Mobile, plus some WebKit forks/wrappers), Google syncing through ActiveSync, for a long time upgrading to a newer phone and OS was not a priority. I only stopped using it for a Android phone two years ago (with the "appification" trend, a web browser is sadly no longer enough).

Coincidentally, the Blue Angel was an early Android target[0], and people have made it run versions up to 2.3 (at which point it's too slow to be usable by today's standards).

I doubt that Android owes much to WM, after all it was a closed-source OS and certainly there wasn't any motivation to do things the "Windows way". It's important to point out that platforms like WM and Symbian existed well before iOS/iPhone OS and Android even had their names decided, and failures apart, the idea of "smart phone" was not the result of solely Apple or Android Inc./Google. Unfortunately, even in many tech circles this is not the idea that prevails.

I also own a Symbian-powered Nokia phone (without touchscreen, forgot the model), and I have no doubt it is a "real" smartphone OS. I can confirm it allows for all that you described and certainly even more in the newer devices with touchscreen.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu-Yy0phw7U

> the best Internet Explorer they could put on such things at the time (it was Microsoft, after all)

Say what you will, the IE on my HTC Windows CE-based phone (I forget the model) was actually better than its contemporary IE in supporting standards correctly.

And you could always buy a copy of Opera Mobile if IE didn't get the job done.

Yep, sometimes it feels like a lost decade in terms of mobile technology.

I seem to have misplaced the url, but there used to be a video on Youtube from a mobile tech trade show where Nokia was showing off using one of their phones as a mobile office.

We are talking Symbian, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and video out to a TV. And this was when Android barely had bluetooth keyboard support (and you needed to use special OSKs to get anything but an American layout), and they had been doing it for years already.

I began developing apps for Windows CE 2.11 in 2001 (then, Windows CE 3.0, PocketPC, and Windows Mobile). Its name changed many times but it's still a mini Windows. I did like it at that time. I was not impressed by iPhone until I really put my hands on it. WM is good, but iPhone is revolutionary.

To go further down the rabbit hole, there's also http://www.osnews.com/story/26838/Palm_I_m_ready_to_wallow_n... Thom makes a point to dig up where a lot of the concepts of that era drew their inspiration from. I especially like the comparison with the speed and ease of pen and paper. It is a great read, and I recommend studying the history of Palm in order to understand mobile device history until 2007.

I had a Symbian UIQ phone years before the iPhone and it's remarkably similar in overall design. One big touch screen with no face buttons, rows of icons for launching apps, etc. All the pieces were really there.

But the Symbian OS itself was terrible; I coded for it and it was a mess. It was quite functional, didn't really crash, but it seemed like it achieved that through sheer effort and will rather than good design.

It was a sad day when UIQ closed down.

Really wish i had bought that Motorola Z8 (the Z10 never reached my part of the world).

Frankly it seems the major thing Apple did to the mobile world was to make everything into slabs of glass.

Android was influenced by all of these prior efforts, at least indirectly. I was at Orange prior to Android getting started (and before Miner left to join Rubin).

At Orange we had built apps for Symbian S60, UIQ, and windows mobile. We also had seen the limitation of these platforms, especially Symbian which was getting long in the tooth with its baroque memory management architecture. I personally had seen the limitations of trying to get something working on Series 60 working directly with Nokia Engineers and getting held up by the platform limitations (and Nokia's own internal issues).

Another player at that time was Savaje - they had built a completely java based phone OS and were trying to sell it to carriers. Unfortunately they were too early to the market (among other issues).

So Rich had seen all of these issues with early smart phone systems and the European smartphone ecosystem, and presumably applied some of the learnings to Android's development.

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