Inside Symbian: the Platform Nokia Secretly Hates 235
DECS writes "The Symbian OS runs the majority of todays smartphones, and is generally regarded as a solid platform. All is not well behind the scenes however. Here's why Apple ported its own OS X to the ARM architecture for the iPhone, why Motorola left Symbian for Linux, and why Nokia executives secretly regard Symbian with contempt. An inside look from Symbian developers: Readers Write About Symbian, OS X and the iPhone."
Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure Apple ported OS X for the same reason as Microsoft ported Windows CE. It was their OS.
My suspicion about the real reason they are not opening the iPhone up for development, is that they haven't really ported OS X at all. They've got a UI for the phone apps that looks and feels like OS X, but there are no Quartz libraries or any other libraries that third party developers would expect, the apps they have are all hand coded and heavily optimised. The device just doesn't have the power for a generic OS X like interface. Apple haven't released details about the clock speed or the CPU other than what company they are buying it from, but a quick check of the company's website shows that they sell two processors, both running at less than 200MHz. If they haven't made a secret deal for a chip that hasn't been announced yet, expect the iPhone to run at the speed of a PDA from 5 years ago.
Java ME (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:no brainer (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm an ex-symbian dev and Symbian is by far the worse platform I did work on it. WinCe is better, windows xp and 2k is better, solaris/linux is better and even win ce is a lot better.
Symbian (in c++) is the first platform that I saw where the thread didnt share by default the application's heap. Also kernel development was a pain in the $%$%/% and the doc and/or support was inexistant.
Re:iPhone not smartphone (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not enough CPU? (Score:3, Interesting)
What a lousy bunch of badly written negative artic (Score:2, Interesting)
Symbian has grown a fair bit over the years. Its still as easy to use as ever.
I've gone through the certification of apps a couple of times (for personal usage), and its ridiculously easy.
There are 4 distinct variants of Symbian - S60v3 and S60 prior to v3, UIQ and the Japanese DoCoMo releases.
On the more popular S60v3 platform (on new releases) there is a huge array of full blown office apps;- wordprocessing, spreadsheets, extremely workable GPS applications, some stunning games (that easily look as good as, if not better than the DS equivalents).
There is absolutely no way that anyone can justly state that the iPhone is 5 years ahead without having tried to develop on it. S60 has a large number of developers actively working on it, its considerably more mature than any other smartphone OS.
i don't normally get wound up by these things, but this ones just got me fuming. Feck feck feck. Had to get that out. Sorry.
Re:Oh, RoughlyDrafted.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, why wouldn't they use MacOS X? If RoughlyDrafted's sources are to be believed, programming under Symbian would be a huge pain, Windows Mobile would look like a defeat and PalmOS is years behind the times.
I know RoughlyDrafted's author is very pro-Apple, but I don't think he's a liar. After all, simply looking at screenshots confirms that PalmOS is way behind the times, Windows Mobile has inherited Microsoft's ugly gene, and Symbian phones don't look particularly modern, either. So really, if you look at things impartially, or try to, his analysis seems sound.
I would have liked to see him discuss RIM, since RIM's phone and OS look to me like the best on the American market today other than the iPhone. But I can sympathise somewhat because it seems pretty hard to find information about RIM's OS.
Just looking at the iPhone confirms that it uses something very similar to the Quartz transparency effects and built-in anti-aliasing in MacOS X. They could build something super complex themselves that emulated these effects, or they could just use MacOS X. Seem to me their decision would be pretty simple. They just waited until phone processors and technologies caught up to the extent that MacOS X could run.
Remember, MacOS X runs quite well a 400mhz PowerBook and an iPhone has a small fraction of its screen size. So is it likely that a 200mhz processor could give good performance on a phone? I would think it would be. And is it likely that a 10gb install of MacOS X could be cut down to phone size? Sure - alternate language fonts alone take gigabites of that, and drivers and built in applications take the bulk of the rest.
Remember, Windows Mobile isn't really Windows; it's a descendent of Windows CE, which was meant to be quite different from Windows itself. So the iPhone's adoption of MacOS X could be revolutionary, as the first phone with a no excuses, fully powered OS.
People who have used the iPhone praise its responsiveness, so that's impressive by any standard.
D
Eran = Fanboy BUT... (Score:5, Interesting)
iPhone in my mind is just the MacMicro, which is the logical extension of the Mac Mini. The phone function may not be the most important feature for a lot of users, including my wife, and her friends. My wife has 30 years of friends in her 1.5" thick paper address book, and her interior designer friend has about 3000 phone numbers from 35 years in her business. They both panic when they think they have lost their "book". The iPhone, for them, will be the reason to move the paper lists into the 21st century. This seems old hat to a programmer or heavy computer user, but lots of people just don't find it EASY to implement computer based records as an individual.
Apple's iPhone is on the right track, and since it is totally software driven, applications are virtually free to implement actions free of mechanical button constraints.
Apple does have a history of delivering on innovation:
1. Easy to use interfaces
2. Logical consistent icons/dialogs
3. Programming ease delivered to developers
4. Pretty good hardware all things considered, including the bum items (I've owned a lot of them)
5. Hardware that is nearing 8 years old still humming along just fine on OSX.
6. Recognition of what is needed to keep the user experience successful to drive adoption
7. Delivering basically what they said they would on OSX
I think that once iPhone is delivered, we will find that if an individual developer wants to implement his own application, say an HP 15 emulator, that it will be a straightforward process to get it certified and offered to iPhone users.
Apple collectively is not dumb about involving developers, and with the volume of phones in the world, they know they need them for localization & specific industry, hobby & connectivity issues.
I like Apple (& use Windows too), but think Apple is far and away ahead of the game in mobiles, because of the way they set up OSX and its developer tools.
Power (Score:3, Interesting)
Stripping down OS X, simply means gutting further down to a BSD core. Like a phone running Linux, what is so strange about it? It would be a huge mistake to create a stop-gap OS simply to get it out the door, when an optimized core is probably already available. The OS that is X should be able to run on just about anything by now...
Re:just another pro-Apple site (Score:3, Interesting)
In short... could you be more biased?