

Symbian-Guru.com Is Over - prabodh
http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2010/07/symbian-guru-com-is-over.html

======
hello_moto
I worked as an intern at one of the Nokia's branches (won't tell you where,
but it's in N.A.) in a city where there are quite a few Symbian software
houses. I talked to a few Symbian developers and they absolutely hate it with
passion. We're not talking technology for technology sake but more like
"Business wise, it's not worth it unless you'd want your workers to suffer
productivity nightmare".

My (short) time at this particular Nokia branch wasn't glowing with roses
either; they just laid off several hundreds of their employees and slowly but
sure inserting contractors, moving some part of their departments to 3rd world
countries.

Their development process was really slow: they'll get their Baseline (I never
really sure what it consists of even after I talked to quite a few people but
I'm guessing it's the Symbian OS with some standard API/Libraries/Framework
toolkits) from Finland once every 2 weeks. Then they would have to merge their
code to this Baseline and deal with whatever problems come up.

During the last 2 weeks I was there, some high-level management guy came from
Europe. He would gathered everybody to a room to do some sort of All-Hands
meeting. In this meeting, he would announce some organization structure
"roadmap". I find it strange; instead of talking about the products, this
roadmap discussed the company's plan to expand to China and India (DING DING
DING!). Of course the guy would immediately told us all that "there won't be
any lay-off". But you get the idea...

Here it is... the outcome of such environment: unhappy customers.

It's hard to beat Android that seems to operate in a more Agile way where the
workers are far more enthusiastic and passionate.

~~~
pavlov
After some 8 arduous years of dicking around with the horribly broken
Symbian/S60, Nokia finally realized in 2008 that their software process sucks
and is fundamentally unable to deliver a competitive mobile app platform.
Their solution was to purchase a smaller, nimbler company with a ready
product, and let the subsidiary produce the user-visible framework more or
less independently of the suffocating Nokia structure.

After two years, they've finally shipped the first SDK which targets existing
devices with the new framework. It's actually pretty nice:
<http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt>

However, these transitions simply take a long time. Apple purchased NeXT in
late 1996, and the first usable Mac OS X release appeared almost five years
later.

Nokia has split their "OS X moment" into two separate operating systems:
Symbian^4 and MeeGo. But neither is ready yet. Meanwhile Nokia investors are
getting very antsy: over the past decade, Nokia's stock has lost over 80% of
its value, or something like $200 billion in market cap... If the Qt
transition stumbles, heads will roll in Espoo.

~~~
hello_moto
I never follow the company anymore ever since I left. While I have no bitter
feeling since I was there only for 4 months for the fun, name, and to know
what's inside, it strikes me that they don't have a very strong grasp of
anything. The market, the talent, the process.

I do think that they need to trim down quick. I know that might have hurt
their stocks like a kick in the groin, but they've already lost a lot of their
stock values. They should do some sort of reboot and becoming an underdog.
Slim down that confusing offerings. Back then, they have tons of numbering
systems that confuses people who happen to have interaction (reading news,
chat, or whatever) with other people that live in different countries.

In Country A, the model might be called E1234, in different parts of the
world, the model might be called E1235. The capabilities differ by tiny
margin. It just doesn't make any sense. It might be because of regulation or
whatnot, but very confusing.

If Microsoft offering is confusing, you should check Nokia's.

Currently, they have nothing other than cheap cellphone to be sold to Asian
markets. I happen to be born in another part of the world. Back at my home
country, Nokia is still strong because they sell cheap unlocked cellphone
(coincidentally, the providers aren't operating like N.A. providers). Having
said that, the mid-to-upper level economy population are full of BB users
(weird isn't it, not Android, not iPhone, but BB).

BB at least has this "PIN" thing (I don't have a BB so I don't know much about
it) where I noticed that most of my high-school friends are exchanging PIN, or
exchanging stuff within BB. So I'm assuming there's some sort of ability for
BB to have a "soft" vendor lock-in. Nokia has nothing other than cheap price.

I think they're almost done.

------
SingAlong
I too feel bad for Symbian. I did my first mobile dev on my Nokia N70 phone
which I still have (bought my HTC Desire a week ago).

I can only see 2 reasons here...

1.) Too much fragmentation. Fragmentation in android is nothing compared to
slaughtering in symbian phones.

2.) No unified app store for developers. And that's probably due to #1

And #1 and #2 made it pretty easy for others to compete after apple showed the
way.

All the above is not true for India though. Nokia seems to very popular even
today. HTC is almost non-existent. And the BlackBerry only with the executives
at corps. Palm is unheard of. iMate was once popular among the rich and classy
and it's almost dead.

Nokia, Samsung and Sony can still happily sell their non-Android phones here
and people would grab it happily.

Whatever, the nokia label would take a while to fade here in India until
Android phones or iphones become goat-nut cheap. We've been having a slew of
low cost manufacturers of phones with high-end features (touch screen,
accelerometers etc) with products almost half the price of a nokia low-end
smart phone. And still a lot prefer Nokia.

IMHO I would surely credit Nokia and Symbian for making some of the first easy
to use devices. My mom who's been using a Sony phone for the past 6 months
still can't figure it out quickly like she did the Nokia 1100 (!!) a few years
ago. And I loved my N70 (S60 2nd edition FP3) when I first bought it. But
again I have similar experience as Rick mentioned in the blog post - poor
Memory and processor. And when I had 100 songs, the music player took ages to
open. Like around 10 seconds.

I'm forced to mention that HTC, which has released the most number of Android
phones has a clear website. Clean, simple to navigate and use and no
conflicting pages offering different info on the same topic like Nokia's site.
Takes only a 2 clicks max to reach the support page of my phone on the HTC
site. The same would take a minimum of half a dozen clicks on Nokia's site
even after going thru google.

P.S: Offtopic - just check out <http://www.imate.com/> for some fun. I have on
idea why iMate has been busy making a phone that meets U.S Military Standards?
:P (or am i wrong and every phone in the US has to meet U.S Military
standard?)

EDIT: Wikipedia says i-mate is now defunct
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mate>

~~~
Maktab
FWIW, i-mate was never a phone manufacturer, it just resold phones made by
others. For most of its existence, the company sold HTC phones under licence
in some of the territories where HTC did not have a brand presence. This ended
once HTC started selling phones under its own brand.

And a minor nitpick, but Symbian was limited to Nokia's smart phone range,
their low-to-mid-end phones run either Series 30 or Series 40 which are far
more basic yet far more responsive software platforms that are not based on
Symbian, unlike Series 60. To be honest, I've never been impressed with
Nokia's smart phones, as I've found their implementation of Symbian to be slow
and buggy with a clumsy UI. This is in sharp contrast to their S30 and S40
phones, which quite justifiably have a reputation for performance and no-
nonsense ease of use.

~~~
bnr
Symbian wasn't limited to Nokia phones until they took over the whole project
and created S60. I had Symbian UIQ3 on my Sony P1i.

~~~
Maktab
Which is why I referred to it as Nokia's implementation of Symbian, by which I
meant S60. At the time the N70 was released Symbian was not controlled by any
one company, with both Nokia and Sony Ericsson controlling the majority of
shares in Symbian Ltd, although Nokia had strong control over S60.

Aside from a few half-hearted attempts from Samsung and LG, the only really
ambitious attempt by a company other than Nokia to use S60 was Siemens with
the SX1. Unfortunately it was not much of a success, due in no small part to
the odd keypad layout. So for all intents and purposes, S60 equalled Nokia.

UIQ, similarly, was driven primarily by Sony Ericsson although it was owned
(till 2007) by Symbian Ltd. Unlike S60, which was in some ways a scaling up of
Nokia's dumb phone interface to a smart phone, UIQ was designed from the start
for stylus-based touch input. But both co-existed, with the SE P800 and the
Nokia 7650 having launched as far back as the second half of 2002. I always
preferred UIQ, to be honest.

Both S60 and UIQ were abandoned when Nokia bought out the other Symbian Ltd
partners in 2008.

------
obiterdictum
I worked on a Symbian application a few years ago. Symbian C++ IDE (Carbide
C++) costed 1,300 euros in 2007. Some S60 APIs are only available to Nokia
partners (costs money). Now combine it with antiquated and poorly documented
API, and the most godawful SDK and the simulator known to man.

Is it any wonder that Symbian has stagnated as a platform without any hope of
recovery?

I know the IDE is now free and the simulator is about to be replaced with a
new QEMU-based one, but it's a little too late.

------
StudyAnimal
I understand that. I have an N97 and it is a dog. I hate it. 32 Gig E: drive
which is plenty, but the C: drive has around 100 Meg or so, around 50 free,
and after using it for a week it is straight down to 10, after a month it sits
around 5 and you get errors all the time and you have to do a hard reset which
takes it back to 50 so you can use it again.

I don't even use it as more than a phone anymore because it is not worth
installing anything and using up the c: drive.

I intend to switch to Android.

~~~
yardie
<em> I have an N97</em>

I feel so sorry for you. A few years ago I really wanted one but the people
that already had them told me not to do it to myself.

~~~
SandB0x
Second example of funky italics I've seen today. You want to use _asterisks_
:)

See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>

------
blub
I've used Nokia for a long time and I can't remember a phone that didn't have
SOME annoyance. My e72 has several.

I'm looking forward to MeeGo, a true Linux mobile computer. Neither Android
nor the iPhone cut it for me so far. The iphone is great fun, but too locked
up and hyped, I hate hype and fashion. I don't like Android because I think
that it's just one more piece in Google's plan for world data domination.
Still, they are both compelling pieces of tech.

Ultimately, Apple, Nokia and Google are all corporations. Feeling attachment
for them is a mistake.

~~~
snom370
You do realize that being anti-hype and anti-fashion is fashionable nowadays?
;)

~~~
blub
I dislike hype and fashion because it is not rational, promotes strong
emotions over judgement and it is costly for us as a society.

You could almost feel this guy's soul tear while writing this. For what, a
phone? A corporation?

When the market slams Nokia in the face, they will feel it, not when a fanboy
jumps ship. And Nokia is getting slammed pretty badly right now.

They need to control the Os less they become a comodity producer like Htc and
Moto already are. Sony didn't go full-android, but they're a shadow of
themselves. We'll see...

Nokia have their hopes set on Qt and MeeGo and that looks fine to me, even if
I don't know whether they will ultimately succeed or fail.

~~~
snom370
I agree, the point I was trying to make was that deciding to _not_ buy a phone
because it's fashionable is a fashion statement in itself. If the iPhone 4 is
good, why not buy it regardless of how (over)hyped it is? Then again, I do see
ideological/technical reasons not to buy the iPhone, for instance due to its
closed nature.

I think Nokia could have challenged Apple if they had fully focused on Maemo
when they first released the 770, and developed a culture of making better,
more bug-free software. Now, I'm not so sure. Android has taken the place that
Maemo could have had. Steve Jobs was actually right when he said that
smartphones had "baby software" during the iPhone introduction - and the
mobile industry didn't realize it at that point because _everyone_ were making
baby software for their phones until Apple came along.

The people complaining that Apple didn't use the Newton OS for the iPhone
doesn't realize that Apple would have been in the same position if they had
(regardless of all the innovative features of the Newton).

------
p0ppe
I had a talk about a year ago with a developer working for Nokia, regarding
the future of Symbian. There seems to be some understanding within the company
about the issues facing Symbian, which is why we've seen Maemo and Meego.
Nokia does, however, seem to lack the nimbleness and daring to really abandon
Symbian quickly.

------
loewenskind
People always trash Steve Jobs over the "walled garden" of the iPhone, but
this looks like _exactly_ what he wants to avoid.

Of course if all the problems he was talking about came from apps that are
part of the phone then I guess my point doesn't apply to this specific article
(though I could see this happening if the Nokia apps were good but the
downloadable ones weren't).

~~~
latortuga
Total false dichotomy, you don't have to become nokia if you open your garden.
It may be what he wants to avoid but it's not true that opening the garden
will automatically result in customer dissatisfaction (otherwise why would
Android market share be growing?)

~~~
sapphirecat
> (otherwise why would Android market share be growing?)

Because it's the least-awful alternative if you don't want to go to AT&T.
People will live with bad things or bad situations quite well, if they believe
they have no choice.

ETA: Of course, for them to have 'no choice' but to go Android, they have to
perceive AT&T and/or an iPhone as unacceptable, as well as the other
alternatives.

~~~
pavs
How did you come to that conclusion? I can only speak for myself.

I have been using iphone for 2 years now and I don't see myself getting
another one. When I do get another phone (mine working just fine right now) I
will move to android based device as soon as my contract is up.

And no I am not leaving because of AT&T, unlike most people my coverage has
been fairly good even here in NY. The main reason I am leaving iphone is
because I don't like being told how I can use my phone and what I can install,
putting artificial limitations. And most importantly, I love having more than
one choice.

------
SandB0x
Symbian, Palm (HP), Microsoft, even BlackBerry. In the long run it doesn't
look like these guys stand a chance any more, does it?

~~~
nailer
I wouldn't write of BB. Exchange clients are commoditized: BES clients aren't.
BB would never release a phone requiring holding in a particular way - they
take things very seriously. They also know they've fucked up on web browsing
and have the brains to scrap their old shit.

------
mnz
One of the biggest problem with Symbian development is strings. I mean what
the @@@@, do the C++ programmers have less string types to deal with that they
introduced six of their own? That scared me, only reason why I asked my boss
to switch me to other non-Symbian project. It was a complete nightmare.

------
maxharris
"I also can’t continue to support a mobile operating system platform that
continually buries itself into oblivion by focusing on ‘openness’ while
keeping a blind eye towards the obvious improvements that other open platforms
have had for several iterations."

I could not agree more!

------
BrandonM
_Like watching your favorite sports team lose game after game after game.
Eventually, even the most die-hard sports fans have to find a new team._

Apparently this guy is not a Cleveland fan.

------
mkramlich
after reading his piece I did the obvious thing next:

checked android-guru.com

Yep, somebody's running there! Getting a 404 though.

------
rick_2047
Heart filling post. I never owned a nokia phone neither did I read the blog.
But something about the two authors losing there passion for something they
loved so dearly makes me feel sad.

Its funny that this got posted here. My friends and I were discussing just
this morning. Everybody agreed that all nokia phones were sluggish and had
ugly interface. My personal opinion is that fastest phones are released by
Samsung(this might be biased as I use a Samsung Corby) and the best quality in
accessories like camera and music is from sony ericsson.(Remember that we were
talking about low budget phones so that rules out Nexus One and iPhone). I
have used N97 myself and found it sluggish and ugly. Sure I was first excited
by the hinged slider screen, but apart from that there is nothing special
about it.

BTW the nokia phone I like the most would definitely be 1108. Sure its black
and white but its fast, it has high quality of signal and it so reliable that
even if I throw it on the wall and put the pieces back together it would
bloody _work_.

