In an ill omen for Symbian fans, the publisher of Symbian-Guru is abandoning the platform: “As of today, I will no longer be updating Symbian-Guru.com, and will be purchasing an Android-powered smartphone – my new Nexus One should arrive tomorrow. I’ve been a Nokia fanboy since 1999, and a Symbian fanboy since I got my Nokia 6620 in summer of 2004. Since then, I’ve personally owned 10+ different Symbian-powered smartphones, and have reviewed nearly every Symbian-powered smartphone that’s been released in the past 3 years or so. I’ve tried to use all of Nokia’s various products and services to the best of my ability, and I just can’t do it anymore.” His post continues with an exploration of the sorry state of Symbian and Nokia that only a once-true-believer could have written.
Over the years I have used the Symbian based Sony Ericsson P800, P910 and P990.
I’ll be migrating to an iPhone in the future.
It’s a good thing Symbian (S60 at least) is essentially divorced from Nokia’s complete control. I’m hoping the Symbian Foundation do something awesome with Symbian again, I’ve got a Symbian-powered S63rd handset right now and it’s my favorite phone. Stable, responsive, fully multitasking, and with a battery life to put any modern Android device or iPhone under the water… and it still does everything those devices can do! Until Android gets the battery life I get with this baby, they can keep it.
I’ve heard horror stories about the UIQ variant of Symbian, but I’ve never used that one so can’t comment. As for the blog in question, I can’t honestly say I’ve ever read anything from it so guess I won’t miss it much.
UIQ was awesome since it’s actually designed for stylus/touch use. Only problem was that apps were not cross-compatible with S60, and since relatively few phones had UIQ that meant a smaller choice of apps. Still all the important stuff was there and everyone I know who has a P1i (the last and best UIQ phone ever made)–including myself–loves it and has been getting great use out of it for years. By today’s standards it is slow and clunky, but the fact remains that this phone can do almost everything the iPhone 4 can do (with the exception of run iPhone apps and GPS), and still handles text input better–even though it was released 3 years ago!
Edited 2010-07-05 22:56 UTC
Sametime they lose probaply 99% phone support not to mention money. How can foundation which has no major support compete against giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple or Intel/Nokia? How many Symbian phones we will se in 2011 or 2012, most likely ZERO! Seriously Nokia leaving Symbian is kiss of death whole platform.
I heard this guy has a tendency to quit websites in frustration every now and then.
Symbian has one big problem – absolutely shitty developer experience. Development used to be very expensive and painfull, so it was impossible for hobbyists to get an application out. Most people working with Symbian for living hated the OS (so a guy putting up a fansite probably wasn’t a symbian programmer).
Luckily, that is being supplanted by Qt, so the symbian of tomorrow will be different from what we have today. Also older symbian devices are able to run Qt, so you’ll actually get apps on those.
You’re right – it wont have a pulse.
To be honest I’m more interested into Meego.
This thing running on an old vax, your netbook, and smartphones, that’s pretty cool. It’s also more like a true Linux compared to Android.
Symbian had it’s time but it looks aged, user-interface wise, Nokia’s attempts to resurrect it didn’t not work out very well.
Edited 2010-07-05 22:03 UTC
I just switched from a Nokia 5800 to a Nexus One (now running Android OS 2.2 ‘Froyo’) and the difference between the two devices is like night and day. The only drawback I can so so far is the less than stellar battery life of the N1 compared to the 5800. But the wealth of Android apps and the fact that I’m running a Linux powered phone makes it all worth while.
Symbian’s user experience suffered a lot of neglect under the stewardship of Nokia. With primary focus for a long time solely on making cheaper handsets to grow their marketshare, Nokia have let the S60 user and developer experience stagnate for many years.
It’s hard for developers and end-users to get excited about things like realtime performance good enough to run baseband stacks and 3D virtual machines. That sort of stuff excites Nokia who get to increase their profit margins, but does nothing for developers or end users who got those features literally years ago from manufacturers willing to use separate baseband chips and 3D chips because they weren’t trying to shave cents off the price of manufacturing,
Nokia realised too late that their swathes of nearly identical phones competing on lowest price and technical minutiae weren’t really what was most profitable, Instead – great hardware, applications and user experience now derive the greatest profits in the mobile market and Nokia are left trying to turn their Symbian juggernaut around.
Even Nokia don’t think it’s possible to make Symbian truly compelling in the time they have available and are reaching out to Intel to partner with them to bring their Meego mobile platform to fruition.
So where does that leave Symbian? In the end I think Symbian is never going to rival the likes of iPhone, Android or even Meego in terms of user experience, but will continue to play an important role in the cellphone industry at the low end. Particularly in the developing world where S60 devices are already often the only computer in a household,
MeeGo didn’t happen because Nokia needs Intel to make a good phone – it happened because it’s better use of resources to co-operate, and third parties prefer a bigger ecosystem than either Maemo or Moblin alone would have been.
Symbian won’t really be a liability as far as making nice UI goes (it’ll be all about Qt for both MeeGo and Symbian). You could argue that MeeGo can be more compelling for developers because it’s based on well-known Linux components.
I’m suggesting that time is of the essence when it comes to creating a platform to compete with iPhone and Android, and Meego is likely to reach parity with those platforms sooner than Symbian. Nokia feels it’s so important to build their new platform quickly that they’ve thrown their lot in with someone who could soon be a major hardware competitor. I think that shows a bit of desperation to get Meego to market quickly.
Again, I don’t think Symbian is beyond salvation, just that time is of the essence, and even Nokia don’t think their plan to save Symbian is going to come to fruition quickly enough to save their share price.
My guess is that Symbian will continue the current trend of being late to the party when it comes to the features of more modern mobile platforms, though it may never stagnate in the way Nokia allowed it to in recent years.
And it’s that delay that is going to see it relegated to low end devices, even if Qt wallpapers over many of the quirks of Symbian’s programming model.
What does Symbian miss exactly?
The only thing I can think of is an organic UI to make it look cool but the UI is not part of the OS in Symbian (although there is a reference UI). I believe that it comes with more features than other “modern” platforms. I can’t think about anything it does not have and other mobile platforms are still catching up. iOS just got multitasking.
If anything, MeedGo initiative is slowing things down in short term (due to alignment work); next MeeGo device we are seeing is what was initially supposed to be Maemo6 device (wholly developed by Nokia). MeeGo is a long term ecosystem play, and we’ll see the alliance paying off in mid/long term.
It does provide a much more interesting platform for community involvement, as “nokia only” community is not really the same thing.
Edited 2010-07-06 14:46 UTC
Wow, I read his frustrations with the N97, and that is truly a terrible phone.
This is the personal rant from someone I never heard before. His ad revenues are probably down so he tries to get some hits. OSNews probably has revenue sharing plan with him so they echo his rant. Unfortunately they guy says nothing interesting.
The article is very long and the guy still complain about the N97 (although it is not sold anymore) and says he will never try the N8, that Nokia does not advert in California and that OVI sucks.
Edited 2010-07-06 05:56 UTC
By closing down the site? Wow, great logic.
What a cunning plan. Kudos for uncovering it!
Precisely, it’s perfectly logic. The site never had hits and now it has. What did you miss?
Seriously, have you ever heard about this site before today? I’m interested in Symbian and I regularly check news from many sites and I have never ever even heard about symbian-guru. Look for symbian news on google and it doesn’t appear anywhere.
The site could have been made yesterday.
Edited 2010-07-06 09:56 UTC
OSNews more than likely has no such thing with this guy, but feel free to keep throwing unwarranted accusations around.
That was not an accusation, barely a speculation but feel free to keep defending OSNews against imaginary enemies.
Hrm, it looks like he has some valid gripes with Nokia’s dysfunctional approach to the smartphone market. So rather than deal with that, I like your idea, to nullify the messenger.
I have ONE friend who likes Symbian… Whether the rest of us like iphone, android or windows mobile we all laugh at him.
It’s crap plain and simple.
Because all you have a larger ego than him?
I’ve yet to see iOS and Android offer all the features that Symbian has had over a decade. For starters, Android still lacks bluetooth voice dialing and iOS does not offer OBEX file transfers.
Majority of the ragging I’ve have seen about Symbian are from the uninformed and fanboys of competing platforms.
From what I could glean from the Symbian-Guru article, most of his grief has to do with Nokia selling under-performing hardware as flagship products. The out-of-memory errors are a good example of the poor amounts of RAM Nokia has been delivering with their devices. Furthermore, Nokia’s justification of using outdated ARM11 CPUs as they are more power efficient than ARMv7 cores are also untrue. The i8910 from Samsung had been delivering up 2 days worth of moderate usage while running on an OMAP 3430.
It seems to me Nokia is doing more damage to themselves by delivering cheap hardware as flagships than using Symbian. Just as there are bitter users who’ve suffered the poor hardware of the N97, there are also those who’ve also had good experiences from the E-series.
Or you’re all idiots, and he’s not good at arguing. We’re talking about cellphones, after all, no matter how they glorify themselves as “mobile devices”, and Symbian is much better as a cellphone OS than the OSs you mentioned. Here’s three examples that show why :
1/You carry your cellphone with you, but not its power adapter. If you forgot said adapter when going out for a week-end, you’ll be facing the wondrous 1.5-day battery life of iOS/Android/WiMo-“powered” devices. A mid-end Nokia E63 lasts 4 days under heavy use and 1 week under moderate use, so battery life is almost never an issue. Win for Symbian.
2/Phones are essentially used to communicate with other people, so you want this to be done extremely easily and at lightning speed. Symbian devices again are a big win in this area : you type the beginning of the name, press the right arrow, and then you just choose how how you want to communicate. Texting and e-mailing are much easier too, thanks to the physical keyboards that most Symbian devices provide. Symbian wins again.
3/In terms of ease of use and efficiency (after all, your cellphone is your slave, and not the reverse), Symbian devices win again. One example is the home screen. On Symbian, you have instant access to your preferred applications, incoming agenda entries, missed calls, incoming messages and e-mails, with setting up all of that being dead easy. No other current mobile OS can provide this level of efficiency and empowerment, though Windows Phone 7 sounds promising in this area. Physical buttons improve ease of use and efficiency even further by allowing quick access to even more commonly used features. Third win for Symbian.
Sure, Symbian is a poor choice when you have gadgetry (games, fart apps…) to mind. But if what you want is a powerful cellphone, an efficient tool, Symbian is much more interesting than iOS, Android, and WiMo at the moment…
Edited 2010-07-07 14:49 UTC
… this thread needs something like the first comment in this article: http://www.osnews.com/comments/18853
Some dude shuts down his blog… so what.