The long-rumoured Symbian update, called Anna, has finally been made official by Nokia today, bringing with it a new browser, new icons, an on-screen portrait qwerty keyboard, and more. The Finnish Windows Phone OEM (sorry) also launched two new Symbian phones today.
The update includes new icons, a portrait on-screen qwerty keyboard, and a new web browser. The Ovi Maps application as also been updated, and several enterprise features have been added such as hardware accelerated encryption and several other additions related to security and messaging. Also: homescreen navigation is now real-time.
Nokia also announced two new Symbian phones today. First, the Nokia E6, which has a 326ppi display on a qwerty portrait phone. This device is squarely aimed at business users, and I can assure you, at least here in Europe these things are still incredibly popular. I had a E71 myself, and even in the days of the iPhone and Android, it was still quite pleasurable to use.
The second one is the Nokia X7, a 4″ touchscreen phone, which looks incredibly beautiful.
So, despite going Windows Phone, Nokia is still getting some Symbian updates out the door, which is good news for owners of the N8, E7, C7 and C6-01, who will be getting this first update over the coming months.
We are of peace. Always.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_vj2e1m7Hlgw/SvtVmi5ipfI/AAAAAAAAbDk/ahur8…
Putting the finishing touches on a now beautiful painting.
Then putting it in a vault.
Wonder how the developers must have felt working on this.
The phrase “lipstick on a pig” came to my mind first…
Maybe a bit unfair, they’ve been hard at work doing a lot of deep surgery in the OS. So maybe its like lipstick on a 6 million dollar pig-man? If you’ll excuse the seinfieldian twist to the meme.
You’re being a bit unfair. Symbian has got some wondrous structure on the inside, especially for an embedded OS. It’s just too bad that until recently they neglected the exterior side of things (GUI, SDK) so much, especially by releasing a touchscreen edition whose GUI was not yet ready.
And now they’re ditching it for something which can’t run on slow or touchscreenless hardware, slaughters battery life, but doesn’t have a pretty bad reputation on its back… Cowards.
I’d say just the opposite … their courage borders insanity.
Umm, based on what evidence? so far I’ve seen, apart form the usual suspects, the WP7 has been performing pretty damn well from a company who pretty much more or less dived out of the market almost 5 years ago. There are a whole host of reasons for why WP7 haven’t demolished iOS in 6 months and these are obvious to anyone who actually has tracked the market and carrier activity. Hate WP7 all you want but with Nokia’s reach and Microsoft’s software you’re going to see Nokia pull themselves ahead in the long term.
You have that backwards. WP7 will pull Nokia ahead in the short term, but isn’t a good long term strategy.
The reason I suggest this is because without offering a unique experience, Nokia will quickly become “just another phone OEM” and thus indistinguishable from the pack.
One of the reasons the iPhone sells so well is because it’s the only phone that offers iOS. Thus it’s not in direct competition with any other iOS handsets. Apple are well aware that good products sell well, but good and exclusive products will sell better. Same goes for Blackberry – their OS may have it’s (many) shortcomings and thus their market position maybe falling, but it’s wager they’d be losing market share more rapidly had they ditched Blackberry OS in favour for Android (ok, I admit this last example is highly speculative).
And creating a whole new operating system thus creating fracturing in an already fractured market really going to help them in the long term? There is iOS, Android, WP7, BlackBerry and WebOS – do you really believe that the market can sustain yet another operating system and then on top of that Nokia creating a vibrant third party ecosystem with the same level of depth and breadth whilst providing top of the line development tools to win over developers?
If you’re going to talk about OEM’s, it seems that HTC isn’t going too badly being an OEM for Android and WP7 for example. LG seems to be going fairly well with their WP7 handsets that they’re selling too.
…?
You do realise that -bar Blackberry OS- Symbian has been around a great deal longer than all of them and that until recently, Symbian was still the most widely used smartphone OS?
Symbian isn’t something new or niche. We’re talking about one of the last original heavyweights here.
That’s exactly the problem though. There are already 2 or 3 OEMs leading the Android and WP7 field and all the other OEMs are virtually nonexistent – or at least here in the UK. Even Motorola and Sony Ericsson have fallen out of favour here. Yet Blackberry -with an arguably worse OS- is still outselling Motorola, Sony Ericsson and even LG. Now why do you think that is if the smart phone market can’t sustain the number of mobile OSs on offer?
Plus why should Nokia even settle for being just as good as HTC? They were kings. Being an OEM will only ever make them just as good as the next best OEM – which is only a fraction as good as they could be if they own the whole layer and do it well.
The only reason Symbian sold so well was because it did not face any competition. Symbian has NEVER been a good smartphone operating system, despite what everybody’s been saying. Windows Mobile was better, PalmOS was better – iOS is better, Android is better, WP7 is better, and WebOS is better.
Symbian is being slaughtered, and rightfully so, because it is simply not fit for the task. Despite years of development, despite years of Nokia throwing money at it, it STILL DOES NOT COMPARE. How many more years must Nokia throw money at this trainwreck before people like you finally accept it’s simply not budging?
The drop in market share for Symbian is staggering, and the rise of Android and iOS is unheard of compared to just about any other technology market. This is not a coincidence – it’s a sign that people do not like Symbian.
I can’t speak for PalmOS, but I really didn’t like Window Mobile. It was an ugly thing and horrible to navigate. It was just about tolerable on a PDA but as a smart phone OS it was terrible.
Edited 2011-04-13 14:18 UTC
Basically think of iOS but slightly less stable and bit uglier.
That is the kind of hate I talked about earlier. You seem to hate Symbian but you have no valid reason. You point out market share drop to comfort yourself in your hate, although you don’t know what it means. For your information, every single mobile OS had a market share drop when Android entered the market, the worst being Windows Phone. This is the mathematical effect of a new player entering the statistics. It does not mean what you think it means. Symbian is actually the 2nd fastest growing OS after Android. Android started from 0, that is why it has a fast growth.
I have owned several Symbian phones over the years, until very recently. Do you want me to list my problems with it?
– application load time is slow
– UI responsiveness is terrible (typing really fast is impossible because the UI needs to catch up)
– nested menu after nested menu
– settings are all over the place
– application quality is abysmal
– browser is a piece of shit
– the email application is an exercise in frustration
And that’s just from the top of my head. Please, don’t call my dislike of Symbian irrational. It’s based on YEARS of experience.
It’s based on 2005. You obviously didn’t try Symbian on a E7, let alone Anna. Symbian has evolved since 2005, as well as the hardware.
– application load time is immediate
– UI responsiveness is immediate (typing fastter than the UI is impossible because humans can’t type faster than the Phone can handle input)
– the maximum number of nested menu level is 2. The vast majority of menus are one level deep (no nested menu at all).
– settings are centralized in the settings menu, 2 levels deep.
– application quality is on par with other smartphone OS. What do you expect from fart apps exactly?
– there are several browser. Opera mobile is pretty good.
– the email application is very simple to use. GoogleMail on Symbian is faster than on Android. Better network stack?
Edited 2011-04-13 14:41 UTC
It’s based up until late 2009 (November), when I got my iPhone (WP7 since a few months). We’ll see if this update fixes anything, but the first reports are not encouraging. It’s better, yes, but still not as good as the competition.
Give me Nokia’s hardware quality (exceptionally good) with a decent operating system, and I’ll be over it like a bee over honey.
Was ^3 available in 2009? 2009 is antiquity. You should try ^3 on a E7 to make yourself an opinion.
As for the reports, do you take engadget as a reliable source?
Edited 2011-04-13 14:47 UTC
Ummm ok, let’s see.
1) That would depend entirely on the application and please remember that most symbian hardware is very low-end as a feature. I really don’t see how you can say application load time on the N8, C7 is slow with a 680 MHz ARM11 processor. If you want to buy a Nokia topend device to compete against these snapdragon class devices, you weren’t alone. But, complaining about your Honda not being as fast as a Porsche is absurd.
2) That would depend entirely on the application.
3) Your UI taste is idiosyncratic, but there is little doubt that the Symbian UI failed to keep up with consumer imagination/expectations.
4) I’d say billions of downloaders disagree with you. And generally speaking 90% of all mobile apps on every platform marketplace, android, iOS, Ovi, bb are crap. You only use a small fraction of those apps on a regular basis and those apps are of extremely high quality on just about every platform.
5) lol, browser renderer has been based on webkit 525 since version 7, webkit 4 prior to that. If you are complaining about the “features” of the browser application and not the html rendering, you do realize Opera provides an extremely capable alternative browser.
6) write your own. I did. Wanna buy it? Never mind you’re like the last customer I would ever want.
And from YEARS of experience, Windows Mobile was WAY slower than Symbian, and WAY more unstable, freezes often, constant signal drops, much worse unresponsive UI, drains battery like mad, and basically downright sucks on a phone. Compared to Windows Mobile, Symbian was like a beautiful angel.
And don’t say Symbian faced no competition, it sounds like you haven’t used a smartphone before 2007. Symbian faced a LOT of competition from Motorola (Linux), HTC (Windows Mobile), Palm, Blackberry, etc. etc. It dominated the market because it was a great smartphone OS back then, heck it’s still a great smartphone OS for non-pseudo-tablet non-touchscreen phones.
I like iOS, I like iPad, but I dislike iPhone, since its touchscreen input is simply not working for my big hands. iPad’s big screen provides sufficient space for touchscreen input, but iPhone’s small screen and the non-physical nature of the touchscreen input mechanism just makes it hard to type. I still want my phone with big keys on a keypad instead of tiny keys on a QWERTY keyboard, or worse, tiny virtual keys on a touchscreen.
I’d switch to iOS and Android phones if they can provide something good with the good old keypad and clamshell form-factor, I can type text messages MUCH faster with the old Nokia 6290 than my friends with iPhone or Milestone.
Most Symbian phones have much less powerful CPUs than today’s Android phones, hence a slower program load time. I’ve not had any UI responsiveness problems on my E63, except in Ovi Store. The nested menus aren’t too nice, but they’re not worth hating. The browser is bad, but then you should be using Opera Mini anyway which shows what a good Symbian program can be like.
And hey, that’s just whatever version of Symbian came on my E63. It’s probably improved since then.
Symbian is the only smartphone operating system. ios, Android, WP7, etc are operating systems for tablets, the devices are small form factor tablets where phone is just another application among others.
I agree, Symbian has always been my least favorite of the smartphone OSes, below even WinMo. Hell, I still miss my old Palm Treo 650, it was probably the best smartphone I’ve ever owned. It was highly customizable, had threaded messaging before anyone else did, excellent email support, a decent browser, and rock-solid dependability (the only time it ever crashed on me was when I tried obscure apps). It had access to the vast repositories of Palm apps — some of them going all the way back to the 90s — before the iPhone was even announced, much less the App Store.
All that and more in a touch screen phone with a physical keyboard, and the only two issues I ever had with it were the thickness of it (about the same as my N900) and the external antenna. It’s too bad Palm OS died such a horrible death.
Damn, now I’m tempted to troll eBay and murkier sources for an unlocked Treo so I can have a retro alternative to my N900 and Nuron.
I don’t hate WP7. As an iOS competitor, targeting internet-centric phones with a large touchscreen, a small battery life, and limited programmability to toy with, it does its job reasonably well as far as I’ve tested.
However, I hate Nokia for *solely* choosing the WP7 path, and taking an active and major part in the death of diversity in the mobile phone industry.
Nokia used to be a brand where no matter what you were asking from your phone, as long as it didn’t include a touchscreen, you would find it. But now, in a pure WP7 future, they’re becoming yet another OEM manufacturing legions of lookalike 3.7″ touchscreen slabs differing only by their version number, their internal storage capacity, and the number of megapixels from their camera. And although I’m perfectly fine with that happening on laptops, I find it really sad on phones, because for such small form factors, I think that generic hardware is a massive failure. But well… The market has chosen, hasn’t it ?
Edited 2011-04-13 13:06 UTC
I agree. People thought that Android’s “opennness” and OEM ecosystem would result in more device diversity. Instead, all we see is a new black-slab, all-touchscreen phone every other week with the only difference being the iterative improvements you mentioned. While it’s nice to see new devices to some extent, I actually think it waters down the platform as a whole. With iPhones and Blackberries (to a slightly lesser extent), at least you know that if you buy a phone today, it will be a relevant model for at least several months, if not longer.
I don’t think the market has necessarily chosen… I just think the OEMs assume that iPhone look-alikes are what most people want, and while that might have been the case 3 years ago, I think some of the iPhone lust has settled down, and people realized the need for different form-factors catering to different needs, such as physical keyboards, long battery life, etc. However, we’re limited in the options to choose from just like before the iPhone.
I actually was happy to hear about MS/Nokia deal as it I think it might help lift WP7 out of the “me-too” land that Android phones seem to be in.
Exactly what I’ve noticed in the browser world with other browsers copying Chrome (which I don’t use).
May I ask what on Earth you are talking about?
A microkernel structure, with a client-server model and a capability-based security, all that implemented using mainly a high-level language, and it still manages to roll over most other modern mobile OS kernels in terms of computational power it needs and energy it consumes, and to achieve good responsiveness to network events…
That’s a pretty unusual combination in the embedded world. Even in the desktop world, we are still mainly stuck with monolithic kernels and user-based security, even though SElinux and the modularization of the NT kernel are steps in the right direction.
Yeah, thats sort of what I meant by my post. Its ugly on the outside. Sorry for the late night lack of articulation.
Really, lipstick on a corpse is the more appropriate phrase. As beautiful as symbian may have been at one time in its era: its dying out.
Symbian is not going to a vault any time soon. There will be a series on new (more radical) updates, and series of new, much more powerful devices coming up to run this software.
That said, Symbian was always “going away”. Before feb11 it was going away to make space for MeeGo.
I think I might actually get an E7 now if the price comes down a little.
So they have addressed the critics. The GUI is now on par with Android. Still, there will be irrational people who will trash it. There is a lot of hate that I can not explain. A lot of people seem to want Symbian to suck for no real reason. Or maybe this is because of memory. Their mind is stuck in 2005 and they base their opinion on what Symbian was in 2005.
I believe Symbian is the best smartphone OS, even before this update.
Edited 2011-04-13 06:07 UTC
I’d put WebOS first, Symbian second.
It’s sad to see Symbian go away with the WP7 deal.
My old Nokia E63 was a really nice phone to use. Theoretically my HTC Desire should poo all over it, but there are days when I wish I still had a physical keyboard, a consistent strong signal (I’m still on the same network, BTW), good call quality and a battery that will last days. The Nokia N8 appeals to me too because it’s got a decent camera and a proper flash.
But I heard that WP7 doesn’t support physical keyboards. The hefty processor requirements of WP7 will impact on signal strength and battery life. And I don’t like the WP7 interface – I think the UI on the E63 is more attractive, and that’s really saying something. The E63’s home screen is more useful too.
So, either it’s a Blackberry, or find an Android phone that’s Telstra Blue-Tick (for exceptional signal quality), has a physical keyboard, a massive battery and (preferably) a camera with a real flash. And a better speaker than the Desire.
I’m hoping that Nokia continues to develop low-end smartphones based on Symbian, but I think Microsoft might put the kibosh on that.
You heard wrong. There are several WP7 phones with physical keyboards.
Edited 2011-04-13 13:33 UTC
I’m pretty sure someone said that WP7 didn’t support physical keyboards, but then I thought I remembered seeing one with a keyboard. Thanks for the correction.
Someone earlier said that Windows Mobile was better than Symbian. Definitely not the case. My mother’s got a WM6.5 phone and it’s really pretty terrible; the UI stops working properly, or the phone freezes up entirely every couple of weeks. The included programs are pretty awful too. Apparently most people who buy this phone do so because there are a lot of people selling it (cheap, to get rid of it), and you can put Android on it. Cheap Android phone with good hardware.
I also don’t agree that palmos was better than symbian. palmos on the treo 650 was horrible. Both of my parents had multiple treos and they suffered from constant freezes, dropped calls, poor battery life, and towards the end even random reboots. The app quality was very low, and stability horrible. S60 was much better.
I do wish that Symbian is not shelved for WP7. I like diversity and I do think that Symbian is still viable. Though weird as it may sound after the first statement – when Nokia finally releases a WP7 phone I do want one. I actually want to see a Symbian^4 and MeeGo phones but alas that is not to be.
Edited 2011-04-13 18:47 UTC
If you accept Harmattan for MeeGo, Nokia will most definitely release at least one Harmattan phone. This has been repeatedly confirmed by Nokia senior management.
Their N900 successor will have Meego and their bargain-price phones will keep Symbian 3 for several years.
it seem the new nokia ceo and his execs are having some conflicting view on the company’s future direction. i would expect some resignation announcement from nokia soon.
It looks good to me. I am pretty sure that you can browse the internet and send sms messages. What else do you want? A super computer to call Mom?
-t