I was working in the mobile phone industry just as smartphones were taking off. I saw the Palm Pilot rise and fall. I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then disappear. But the greatest tragedy of them all was Nokia and their Symbian Operating System.
Symbian was, for its time, a brilliant OS. It ran 3D games smoothly, had terrific hardware support, a decent ecosystem for developers. And it was bloody annoying for users.
Every few minutes, Symbian would interrupt you to ask “Are you sure you want this app to connect to the Internet?”
His final paragraph has a point.
The rose-tinted goggles are out in full force with this article. In my experience with Symbian (Nokia N95), it was prone to freezes and reboots. Moreover, it was nigh on impossible to find third-party software for it that was compatible with your specific handset. I for one was happy to see it go.
Quite a good experience with my Nokia N95, not really annoyed of the pop-ups (it was the norm). The problem was the thumbnail sized (240×320), non touch, screen and the browsing of a web page (even using Opera Mini) required a lot of patience (slow graphics) and dedication (T9 inputs).
Smartphones ? Minimum 480×680 4.5″ capacitive touch screen, realtime UI (remember iOS and their zoom in/out of an application at 60 fps ?), full sized on screen keyboard, etc.
No, seriously, it’s NOT the nag screens that killed Symbian. Don’t get people fooled by rewriting history.
> Every few minutes, Symbian would interrupt you to ask “Are you sure you want this app to connect to the Internet?”
This is because Symbian had a concept of ‘per app network connection/routing’, instead of allowing the system the one and only network route. Back then, it was far too expensive to have an always on connection, so apps, when needed, could ask for a network connection independent of other apps, connect to the network, do something, then disconnect.
Maybe I’m mis-remembering, or maybe the earlier N95 was different, but my last Symbian phone was the E52 (a *lovely* phone!), and I was able to turn off the pop-ups. The network connection settings were a little convoluted and included things like priority settings for when multiple connections were available, but I’m sure you could turn the warnings on and off for each connection.
i would highly recommend reading the book below
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkable-Symbian-ebook/dp/B00NAZTCTW
It describes the rise of Symbian from EPOC and really how clunky it was, which was not the fault of the developers but of managements indecision to agree on UI’s fighting between members of the Symbian groups Nokia, Sony etc..
I owned a few Symbian phones, Nokia’s E51, 6000’s etc.. My favorite was the Sony P900 and P910i i loved that phone, however the UI was horrible, all symbian systems were unrealiable with lock ups and app crashes. Software was a nightmare to purchase, find and install (handgo i think was the site i used to use). The apps were pretty crappy too, clunky and slow. However was it much worse than early computers? Win3.1 crashed, was slow and the apps were not great etc..
Symbian had to work with very slow processors, trace amounts of ram and slow storage memory chips. So yeah i think that if the symbian consortium has worked better together then they might have come up with something better instead of the infighting, i think they technology at the time contributed to stability, basically just growing pains of early computer systems.
Well, the N95 was a 600 MHz dual-core ARM, a little GPU, the 3D were at early Playstation level in 2008. A few crashed, but it was overall “slow” as hell, apps were sluggish to start. It did the job, but the alternatives (Android, iPhone, …) were progressing far far faster. Nokia was rigged by useless bureaucracy and open-space barons, there are tons of articles on the subject. When a company is wasting energy in deciding who is in power to be right or wrong, while the market is progressing further, the company is doomed. Nokia was doomed. By its stakeholders first. Then by Stephen Elop.
Symbian has won in the sense it was successful in an era. If you can achieve that, you won. After new era has begun and Symbian wasn’t competitive anymore. Still long way to go but i guess Nokia is making a steady comeback, with Android. I noticed their upgrade policy on future Android versions and prices in different segments are starting to look attractive again. But the competition is fierce and best to wait and see on how things will evolve in the future.
This isn’t that Nokia anymore. It’s other company with licensed logo.
In reality this is still Nokia, with a lot of R&D outsourced. I remember reading some key people form (old) Nokia are still involved. This is how a lot of business operates this days. For examples there are sunglasses and clothing companies and their customers (big companies) just put there logo on it and sell them as such. The company providing the logo usually still does influence the product properties, like design, quality of build, components, marketing, distribution channels …. I am currently looking at the Nokia 5.3 mobile phone, the price and specs are attractive. Another big plus is it is an Android One enabled mobile phone. Two mayor OS upgrades and security updates are guaranteed for the next three years. Competition is fierce but it looks like Nokia is starting to look attractive again in the (smart) mobile phone segment.
Ummm…. no. That’s wasn’t my experience with Symbian phones. Symbian asked before creating internet connections because that’s what all phones did back then, because mobile internet was hideously overpriced by carriers and very expensive.
When it came to everything else, Symbian was pretty much like Windows. You run the installer and hope the install scripts aren’t going to break something important, since installers can modify large parts of the system. I once had Route66 (a GPS app) change my system fonts somehow. I wasn’t sad to see Symbian go and see Android with its rootless-by-default apps and dependency-less package manager enter my life.
Symbian was horrible. I had one (maybe still do, I forget how far my old crap hording throw out has got to! probably an n95 but memory is…). Never used it beyond a phone. Still used my windows pda’s
Yes phones killed the pda market but it was a turn back from a x51v to the windows mobile phones with a smaller screen but better hardware. I saw the was phones needed to go much earlier. Be a “PDA” have abigger screen, Forget about the phone shit.
Win CE/Mobile 6 is still the best platform ever if you ask me. truely open enough and supported enough. Just was killed by moving from decent sized pda’s to shitty sized phones.
Now evern android is not open enough. IOS was never a good option. I mean 2G launch when 2g was dead? Yeah right. Yes the us was way behd, so why is worked there. It was no better than the win ce phone out at the time and quite frankly a stylus was a good thing for everything but gaming. I miss it still. But at least we get peddeled shit COSTLY free games eh?
Yes still on android, but retreated to the google devices, which yes have their issues. But have you seen the shit samsung try these days. Half your phone setup is de-fucking-samsunging it. (I have one for work). Nice hardware, needs stock os. (which is far too muc ha pain t hese days, and stock os is worse than google on pixel by far these days).
I still use my 808 as a multimedia device and – above all – a great, very pocketable camera.
I still turn on my N97 mini from time to time.
Symbian was good. Its last iterations from Belle onwards had very good UI fluidity in most parts of the system which at the time you could only dream of on Android, they had an Always-on display which Android phones would lack for >5 more years, low latency, support for QT apps. If you stopped using Symbian before Belle, you have no freaking clue how it could perform with some optimization on decent hardware (Nokia used crappy CPUs until the N8 – and too little RAM).
The story is over but the hate from some of you is totally undeserved. Symbian could have turned into a competitive OS if it hadn’t been delayed and then slaughtered by wrong business choices.
I’m still dreaming of a device using a MeeGo Harmattan-like interface on an RTOS like Symbian. But ok, that’s just me. One UI is tolerable ATM