

Symbian OS - one of the most successful failures in tech history - pavlov
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/11/08/guest-post-symbian-os-one-of-the-most-successful-failures-in-tech-history/

======
aphexairlines
Waning, maybe, but it powered boatloads of phones, employed armies of people,
and made David Potter insanely rich, so I'd say Symbian hasn't been a failure
at all.

~~~
rwmj
I remember PSION from _really_ back in the old days.

<http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0008953>

I often wondered if David Potter himself wrote that?

Edit: And I spent far far too long playing PSION Flight Simulator.

------
bjelkeman-again
Symbian will be around longer than one would expect, due to the fact that it
will receive life support in the shape of Euro22M (US$33M) from the EU. Or as
burst out when I saw that "WTF? Symbian gets 22 M Euro from EU... What a
colossal waste of money."

[http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/11/02/symbian.gets.3...](http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/11/02/symbian.gets.31m.european.rescue.in.project.form/)

~~~
edderly
That's peanuts compared to amount of money Nokia put into the platform.

~~~
pavlov
Indeed. 22M € is not a lot of money compared to ongoing handset development
tracks within Nokia that will keep the market flooded with Symbian devices for
the next few years, even if nobody particularly wants them in 2012.

(Nokia has recently introduced new devices with Symbian S60 3rd Edition --
that was their cutting-edge smartphone OS in 2006! They run a slow-moving
ship...)

By the way, the EU-funded Symbian-centric research project is aimed at
embedded devices. I don't think it will produce anything that benefits
handsets much...

Some research kids in Eindhoven and Helsinki will manage to load Symbian onto
some kitchen gadget, connect it to a vacuum cleaner over Bluetooth, and the
result will be presented as _"Euro-Home 3.0: Vision of an interconnected
domicile"_ at some Symbian conference in 2015. Everyone involved will be
pleased with such concrete outcome from this ambitiously forward-looking
international research project.

~~~
jacquesm
> Everyone involved will be pleased with such concrete outcome from this
> ambitiously forward-looking international research project.

How I wished you weren't 100% spot on with that.

~~~
stygianguest
Well, at least we will end up with a few kids that can build such a thing. If
it's spend on education it isn't all wasted. I worry more about the part that
is spent on administrative meetings in Brussels.

------
motti
> The browser was always a second class citizen, a third party component

Before the iPhone, the browser in Nokia phones was almost cuttting-edge, based
off a version of Webkit shortly after it was open-sourced. Unfortunately, it
stagnated as Nokia neglected to track the Webkit trunk.

My Nokia E71 could render the iPhone version of Google Reader, with all it's
AJAXy goodness, perfectly and far better than (say) a Blackberry. That's how I
read most of my feeds for about two years. (I now have an Android.)

Nokia is now pouring a lot of effort into QtWebkit and the Symbian mobile
browser, which should resurrect that part of the platform and bring it up to
this decade's standards.

They're also basing their JavaScript application platform ("WRT") off
QtWebkit, with hooks to allow access to native O/S functionality, and it's
being heavily promoted as a development platform on equal footing to Qt C++.
Much of this development is going on in the open
(<http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/secure/BrowseProject.jspa>), so you can track
this progress.

------
zokier
For all the flak Symbian has recently gotten, it was actually great OS at a
time. I had a phone in 2005 which did multitasking, copy-paste, ssh, python
scripts and web browsing. Yes, it was dog slow, and the browser wasn't that
great, but still it was quite a feature set, and the phone wasn't even that
expensive.

~~~
enjo
No it wasn't.

It was a marginally functional OS full of unbelievably quirky behavior. The
underlying subsystems were so fundamentally broken (and poorly written) that
Symbian itself couldn't actually fix them. There is a reason messaging never
quite worked right. The installer was perpetually broken as well. I never seen
a project that introduced more regression from release to release than
Symbian.

Fundamentally it was a C++ based OS that was introduced before C++ really
existed as a standard. They independently invented and implemented a number of
features that would eventually become standard within C++ (exceptions spring
to mind).

Either way, Symbian is a mess. It's seriously a warning about the dangers of
Object Oriented development gone terribly wrong. Huge class hierarchies? Yep,
Symbian's got em. Convoluted multiple inheritance with indeterminate behavior?
Check. The list goes on and on.

Symbian was (and is) so fundamentally flawed that while your phone did all of
those things, it also failed far to often at installing apps, providing usable
interfaces, and actually getting messaging and things to work.

*note: I'm a bitter refugee from the Symbian world having been principally involved in one of the most widely distributed apps written for the platform.

~~~
rospaya
Your comment is from a developer perspective, while zoiker was talking as a
user. I agree with both of you, but there is a difference.

------
shaddi

        iPhone too, uses FreeBSD at its lowest level ...
    

Wait, what? Is this just a reference to OSX's BSD heritage or something that
I've missed all this time?

~~~
protomyth
OS X has a lot of FreeBSD code, but it isn't a OS running on top of FreeBSD.

------
corin_
Related: <https://twitter.com/ruskin147/status/1654943823953920>

"Breaking - Nokia and Symbian making "major announcement" at 1530 GMT" tweeted
by BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones.

~~~
bsk
"That "major" announcement from Nokia - "Nokia reaffirms its commitment to the
Symbian platform"

~~~
edderly
Also, wrapping the Symbian Foundation into a 'licensing operation':
[http://www.symbian.org/news-and-media/2010/11/08/symbian-
fou...](http://www.symbian.org/news-and-media/2010/11/08/symbian-foundation-
transition-licensing-operation)

