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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

I was working at a place trying to do smartphone type stuff with symbian way before it was cool and have been a MeeGo fan since the days when it was called Maemo so I'm about as a big a fanboy of both as they come.

But the truth is that Symbian had simply been stagnant for too long and would never catch up and MeeGo for all its potential was just another platform with even less backing than WP and even less ready to be sold. Had they decided to really go for it with on of Symbian or MeeGo a few years earlier and gotten on the smartphone bandwagon then I might have my MeeGo Lumia device I so wanted, but they didn't and by the time they realized their mistake it was too late. As much as I hate to admit it and as much as it didn't necessarily work out very well, going with WP was probably a good decision at the time

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Yeah, it's true that the stagnation was a huge letdown, but when N8 and later 808 came out, I strongly believe the OS was (and still is to a degree) competitive. Incomparably more so than WP7 devices which first came out around the time of 808 as well.

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean "smartphone type stuff"? Symbian has been a smartphone OS since its inception.

The iPhone set a new standard for smartphones. Symbian did not compare.

A new standard in "feed me entertainment!" perhaps.

At launch of iPhone Nokia had featurephones that were more capable.

You are maybe talking past each other a little. It wasn't case the case that the phones just lacked an app store. What really sucked about Nokia's symbian phones was the UI and the price tag. Now that's the fault of dysfunction within Nokia and not the fault of Symbian per se, but the fact remains if Nokia had just switched to Android it would likely still exist as a mobile phone company.

The argument against going Android was to avoid being another "me to" company. Back then the mantra of the Nokia leadership was "differentiation" (it was basically their response to why they could not open source the power management on the N800).

And if one look at the current Android market, they may be right. Samsung is only where it is right now because of a massive marketing push in the last few years.

@Sammi

Did not compare in speed/pretty animations, collection of "apps", and marketing. What else? Would you like me to list how doesn't the latest iOS compare to latest Symbian?

Did not compare in speed/pretty animations, collection of "apps", and marketing.

So you're saying it was slow, kind of ugly, had no apps and the brand was so tainted that nobody wanted it.

Don't you think those are good reasons for abandoning Symbian?

No, I'm not saying that. It's "slow" in comparison with whatever iPhone was out back then, but hardly slow in general. The same as Android is "slow" compared to latest iOS and WP. That argument is silly, sorry. Not to mention the speed was in part due to the low-performance hardware they used. I don't care about "pretty", I care about "functional". It had majority of necessary features built in. It wasn't tainted and nobody wanted it (the 808) because there was virtually no marketing for it and because it was simply unavailable on some major markets. Almost as if they didn't want it to sell.

So no, I don't think those are good reasons for abandoning any OS. Not for power-users anyway. iPhone is better in media consumption, that's it and that's what majority is after. And bandwagons, obviously.

Symbian may have been stagnant, but unless you are a Wall Street day trader you didn't much care. Symbian could demo capabilities that iOS and Android are just now sprouting (and the press is going gaga about it as if it is something completely new groan).

My best friend got an E90 shortly after it came out. I was so jealous of him for ages.

The dialer was particularly awesome. It was the first time I saw a dialer that a) had untrained voice dialing and b) had vocal caller ID.

I had untrained voice dialing IN GREEK for years on my Nokia 701. And it actually worked correctly!

My brand new kitkat-soon-to-be-lolipop device cannot even voice dial English names.

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