[HN Gopher] Symbian Source Code ___________________________________________________________________ Symbian Source Code Author : thunderbong Score : 325 points Date : 2022-05-24 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | jerrygoyal wrote: | wow this gives me nostalgia. Symbian was probably the start of | the smartphones era. | btreesOfSpring wrote: | It feels like Garmin devices are still dependent on this era's | tools. When someone asks me about issues with using my Garmin | Edge 1030 for navigation, I often say it works fine enough but it | is sort of like using a Symbian phone in the early 2000s. | secondcoming wrote: | I think a fair amount of Symbian devs went to Garmin when | Symbian ceased to exist. | gendal wrote: | There's a great (and insanely detailed) book on the rise and fall | of Symbian by a guy who was there for most, if not all, of the | journey: | | https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkab... | | When I say detailed, I mean detailed... David Wood seems to have | copies of every email and memo he ever wrote when he was there... | and he doesn't hold back when it comes to sharing them. | | Required reading for anybody seeking to build a platform | business. | secondcoming wrote: | Find the post in that article by Dennis May. It explains Nokia. | The atmosphere in Symbian/Nokia towards the end was really bad. | leafmeal wrote: | I was looking for their implementation of T9, but haven't found | it yet. Would that be in here? Does anyone with more context or | Google-foo know where it is? | ARTeamer wrote: | A lifetime ago, I spent lots of long hours on reversing Symbian | apps, writing tools and tutorials for it. Any old souls here from | the reverse engineering community of that era will recognize my | username. :) | sydthrowaway wrote: | Was it a waste of time? | oflebbe wrote: | i miss epoc32 source | exikyut wrote: | This is a thing? | marcodiego wrote: | I have to cite Nokia N8 [1]. It had USB otg, mini hdmi, FM | receiver, FM transmitter, MicroSD memory card, TV out and Nokia | later released a TV receiver adapter for it. | | A friend of mine had one. He said he spent a few days in the | countryside watching films he copied to an SD card on an old tube | TV with it. He also told me how he could play MP3 files and | listen it on the old FM radio that was available in the house he | was in. It was also possible for him, once in a city a few | kilometers away, to answer e-mails and read news using WiFi. You | could just plug the mini HDMI to a modern TV, plug a keyboard on | it and use a Bluetooth mouse to get a fully functional computer | where you could even write and run python programs. All this at a | time when basically nobody even talked about "convergence". | | We've been walking backwards since then. These days the only | devices able to give similar power are the still unpolished | linuxphones. That's why we should support them or else we will | continue walking backwards. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N8 | seclorum_wien wrote: | > linuxphones | | A hacker friend of mine carries around his pixel, which he has | set up to use DAS KEYBOARD (ohne buchstaben) as his Linux | development workstation. | | This is a wonder to see, honestly. Truly a cyberpunk scenario | out there on the edge of linuxphones. | | Apropos, I flunk out with my PinephonePro+KB setup, which | doesn't work nearly as well as his rig. Grr, power management | "last 1%" .. | tjoff wrote: | Yeah, the fact that we call iphone/android smartphones is kind | of triggering. Especially in the early days they represented | the dumbest phones imaginable, with the only saving grace | having a better app-store to try and make up for it. | jillesvangurp wrote: | Originally the N8 was going to run Meego. The N8 should have | been a flagship phone running Linux. Instead they chickened out | and and went with Symbian instead; pretty late in the | development process. | | I had an N8. Really nice device. A 13 megapixel camera in 2010? | was pretty awesome and the aluminium body plus oled screen were | pretty amazing as well. It actually had a screen saver mode | that would stay on during the night where they'd only light a | few pixels to show a clock. | | But it was crippled by the OS; Symbian just wasn't great. And | of course it still featured the resistive touch screen instead | of a capacitive one (which Apple used). | | Meego eventually shipped via the N900 (nice but very awkward | form factor) and the only device that could have been great, | the N9. Except they launched that years late and with the | announcement that whole platform was being cancelled and the | phone was for developers only. A misguided UI switch from GTK | to QT, which Nokia bought to rescue Symbian did not help | either. | | Then windows phone started happening and and they | unceremoniously killed Symbian. Then they handed the keys to | MS. Somewhere in between, Nokia actually shipped a Nokia | Android device, which MS promptly killed. Nokia also had | another Linux platform (called Meltemi) under development aimed | at feature phones. But that whole department got layed off a | few months before the MS acquisition. I actually got caught up | in that particular round (despite never having worked in that | department). In the years after that, tens of thousands of | engineers were shown the door. Probably the most bizarre and | one of the largest layoff round of highly qualified hardware | and software engineers in recent history. | | Nokia had a great thing and they ran it straight into the | ground. Arrogance and incompetence lead to a lot of bad | decision making. The N8 is probably the key moment it went | wrong for Nokia. They had all the solutions ready for market | and then they chickened out and stuck with Symbian. There was | more than a little bit of anger inside the company about that | decision. The Symbian camp won and killed the company. | Absolutely nothing they tried in the nearly three years that | followed worked out. | kerpele wrote: | Not sure where your information that n8 was supposed to run | Meego comes from, but I remember working with the Nokia s60 | team already early 2009 and they were using n8 protos at the | time. It's definitely possible that there were two parallel | projects though. | | On the other hand, Maemo, the predecessor to Meego, required | a pen-like pointer to comfortable use at the time as the UI | elements were designed to be small. Only after they | completely overhauled the UI (and renamed the Linux based OS | Meego) it could have worked on the N8. | cycomanic wrote: | I still belief Elop was a MS trojan horse to somehow get the | Nokia phone devision to Microsoft. The whole "burning | platform" memo together with hamstringing the N9 which was a | great phone (I used one until the battery died some day) and | OS (maybe we would not have this IOS/android duopoly if Nokia | would have really pushed Meego), it all seemed incredibly | unprofessional and more like the actions of someone | competitor not what the CEO would do. | jillesvangurp wrote: | He was appointed by a Nokia board looking to sell the | business to MS. He was a patsy. Most of the bad decision | making happened before Elop. And they appointed him to | finish the job. The fault lies with the Nokia management | and the board, including their former CEO, Jorma Ollila. | birdman3131 wrote: | It was capacitive touch. The catch was it was not bonded to | the lcd like more modern smart phones are. This meant that it | was a 5 minute job by a smart 13 year old to replace the | digitizer without needing to replace the lcd. | | I loved my N8. Built-in FM transmitter was awesome. And don't | get me started on how many times it got dropped and laughed | it off. At least 50 times onto concrete and such. | jillesvangurp wrote: | Ah true, I forgot about that. The N8 was one of the first | devices where they fixed that. | JohnBooty wrote: | It's funny how the top two comments on this article are (1) | yours, talking about how far ahead of its time this phone was, | even compared to modern phones in 2022 and (2) another post | from a Nokia engineer talking about how frustratingly limited | Symbian was thanks to cooperative multitasking, etc. | | Of course, both are simultaneously true. | | As you say, this phone was definitely ahead of its time as an | open computing platform. | | I had no idea that it even had an FM transmitter and support | for composite video as well as HDMI. Thank you for sharing | that. | pavlov wrote: | Symbian wasn't actually limited to cooperative multitasking. | The kernel certainly supported preemptive multitasking, and | apps could use multithreading if they wanted to. The POSIX | threads API was available too. | | However since everything in Symbian was designed first and | foremost to minimize power use and memory requirements, the | framework actively recommended against use of threads. | Instead they asked you to schedule things on the app's main | thread which gave the framework more control over when to run | your callbacks. This wasn't a terrible idea at all, but the | implementation of this system as a C++ multiple inheritance | contraption was pretty confusing as I recall. | secondcoming wrote: | CActiveScheduler ran your CActive::RunL(), IIRC | rollcat wrote: | > That's why we should support them or else we will continue | walking backwards. | | I would love to, but the reality is that unless you're in the | Android/iOS duopoly ecosystem, you're increasingly unable to | participate in some parts of society. Talking to people, | banking, food delivery, parking, public transport... | marcodiego wrote: | Linux on the desktop was similar to that in early 2000's: | hardware, software and services were frequently not | compatible. The IE monopoly made things even worse. Pioneers | suffered, there are still some problems, but the landscape | changed drastically because of those people. Some pioneers | must be willing to change the world and pay the price for | that. | dm319 wrote: | As other's have already mentioned, Symbian traces it routes | back to the early Psion Organisers, which ran a pre-emptive | multitasking operating system before Windows did, and was | thought to be Microsoft's biggest competitor back then [1]. | I've used the Psion II, and had a 3a, which you could program | in their basic-like OPL language. The 5mx looked like Win95 in | a palmtop and was a great pocket computing device with a | reasonable keyboard, terminal, email client and internet | connectivity. I remember back in 1998 or so looking longingly | at the expensive phones that came with a built-in modem (Nokia | 6210 and Ericsson R320 from memory), so I could use email and | web on the go. Nokia took EPOC and became the lead in the | Symbian consortium, using it on spiritual successors of the | Psions - the 9300 and 9500, and when the E90 came out with a | magnesium case and built in keyboard I had to get one. | | That was in 2007, around the time of the first iphone, but was | so much more capable. Incredible at that time having all that | power in your pocket. I never got lost in foreign cities | because I could just get a GPS lock on the train station and | find my way back, without using very expensive data in a | foreign country. It was a strange thing being able to access | the internet anywhere back then. In some ways it was a better | time - social media networks hadn't cottoned on to the ability | to deliver dopamine from the pockets of world's population, so | the device felt powerful, but not like a ball and chain, or | distraction-device like my pixel does these days. | | [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/why-is-bill-gates-so- | scar... | jw1224 wrote: | Got a lot of nostalgia seeing OPL being mentioned... | | Twenty years ago my grandfather gave me his old Psion 3c. To | a curious 10-year-old, the novelties of a world clock, | spreadsheet and diary grew old after a few hours -- but OPL | caught my imagination... | | Here I am now, two decades later, programming professionally | full time as a startup founder -- all thanks to a dinky | little BASIC-like language on a pocket organizer from the | early 90s :) | [deleted] | pavlov wrote: | I also had a Nokia N8. The UI was absurdly bad compared to | iPhone at the same price. | | It's not obvious in Nokia's carefully crafted screenshots, but | the N8 UI was very static, slow, and unfriendly to touch | actions. It was fundamentally designed around menu navigation | on phone keypads. That's not something you can simply fix by | making the menu items touchable instead of using arrow keys, | yet that's basically what Nokia tried to do. | flaviojuvenal wrote: | Besides the awful UI, it missed several key third-party apps | that Android and iOS had. Also the GMail integration was | pretty bad. | oofbey wrote: | Looking through some of this code is a painful reminder of the | time when lots of people thought XML was a good idea. | | <math result="sf.spec.sbs.numberofjobs" | operand1="${env.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS}" operation=" _" operand2= | "2" datatype="int"/> | | instead of | | numberofjobs = NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS _ 2 | | Talk about a headwind to productivity. | seclorum_wien wrote: | I cringe at the places I've used XML for things like | declarative programming, its just too obnoxious to think about. | | However, as someone who is currently pushing bytecode on the | wire in place of such things, because reasons, I can only tell | you the madness is just a toolchain away. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | The example he gives may just be a config file. XML was very | popular for holding configuration, replacing the ancient | property name/value pair system. | lproven wrote: | It is odd to see people talking about how Symbian was so early | on, in the smartphone era. | | It's considerably more mature than that. :-) (For the avoidance | of doubt: this is a _good thing_.) | | Symbian was a rebrand of the Psion 5 and 5MX OS, which was called | EPOC32. It also ran on some other hardware, including the | Ericsson MC218, Oregon Scientific Osaris, and Geofox One. | | The first EPOC32 device was the Psion 5 in 1997: | | http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/5300/Psion-Series-5/ | | Succeeded by the 5MX: | | https://uxdesign.cc/psion-pda-how-does-it-look-today-327e01b... | | https://thenewstack.io/retrocomputing-in-modern-times-redisc... | | In other words, this OS was out there in the real world, in use | by hundreds of thousands of people, _five years_ before the first | Symbian device (Nokia 7650). | markb139 wrote: | The first Symbian based Nokia device was the 9210. I helped | integrate the fax functionality - was amazing to see the first | faxes sent and received :) | lproven wrote: | Fair enough! I defer to your superior wisdom. | | So, four years earlier, not five. :-) | | I have seen comments from people who worked at Accenture in | the last days of Symbian, about the difficulty of putting | together the build system today. Apparently bits need a | specific MS C++ compiler that only runs on WinXP. | | I think it would be _wonderful_ to see this resurrected and | ported to the RasPi or something. Symbian was capable of SMP, | and there were a lot of 3rd party apps back in the day. | | One of the things that crippled Symbian in the market was the | range of UIs, all incompatible. I owned devices running | Series 90 (Nokia 7710), Series 60 (E90 Communicator), and UIQ | (Sony-Ericsson P910i). There was also Series 80 (earlier | Communicators), and MOAP and OPP in Japan only. | | AIUI all needed different programming tools and apps from one | couldn't run on the other. | | Frankly, none of that matters any more. Whatever is in this | FOSS release and can be used with modern FOSS tooling is all | that matters. Nobody needs early-noughties phone apps on a | RasPi. Just something that can be used on a desktop with a | mouse and keyboard. | | I suspect a few old Psion and Symbian enthusiasts would | appear and enjoy modernising their own apps to get them | working again. It's not _that_ long ago. | | EPOC32 and Symbian were great OSes to use: fast as hell, | stable, and low-resource. On a RasPi 4 I think it'd stomp all | over Linux, and it's vastly more modern than RISC OS. | | C++ has come a long way, too, since Psion chose it. The rough | edges have been smoothed away. | [deleted] | gjvc wrote: | Thank you for that summary (and I have an email in my drafts | folder for you! will send it soon, honest :-)) | miohtama wrote: | Do you think there is anything useful for modern day programmer | in the codebase? Any value on this code for anyone, anymore? | | Or do we have better alternatives and rewrites for everything | that can be found in this repo? | atleta wrote: | I used to work for Nokia Research during the mid 2000's. I | remember how hard it was to get the source code for this back | then as internal employees... One of my colleagues was working on | a research prototype that needed tighter integration with the | system than what you could achieve with a deployed app. So he | needed the source code and the build environment for the OS. | | And for that he needed quite a few people to agree and he had to | sign an NDA (again, as an employee, not a subcontractor!). Then, | of course the whole thing was pretty hard to make work on his | machine. | | Later on I did some work with the (public) SDK as well. The build | system was based on the GNU toolchain. More precisely, a windows | port of the GNU toolchain, so it would only work on windows. But | even on windows it had a lot of warts (because these tools were | build for unix in the first place, so e.g. drive letters and back | slashes were problematic). As far as I can remember, a lot of the | build tools were written in perl. There was some script to | generate makefiles for your project and even that, as far as I | can remember had a front end script. (I remember something called | MAKMAKE.BAT, but I may be wrong.) | | The whole thing was a pretty frustrating experience. And we | haven't talked about the libraries, the OS (cooperative multi | tasking, everything is a callback) or memory management | ('descriptors' that made trivial string operations a pain). No | wonder it couldn't keep up with android and ios. Now, to be fair, | the OS was based on a core and concepts created in the mid 1990s | to allow software development on devices with 64k of memory or | something. But even with several megabytes of RAM (so the early | 2000s), that programming model was obviously way too | constraining. | jillesvangurp wrote: | One of my colleagues in Nokia Research Center actually created | and maintained the python port to symbian. He was dealing with | some crazy stuff. NRC actually ported quite a bit of oss to | Symbian. You could actually run a webserver on the device which | you could share to the internet with a reverse proxy. So, you | could host your own photos from your device or use it as a | webcam. Php, apache, mysql were part of this effort if I | remember correctly. Another team in the same lab was | responsible for porting Webkit to Symbian. This actually | shipped when the iphone was nothing but a rumor. Ajax websites | running on a smart phone. In 2005 when Ajax was still a new | thing. Amazing stuff. | | Of course all of this was labelled as research and wasn't taken | too serious by the business units until it was too late. A | pity, because a lot of the stuff that NRC produced wasn't bad. | There was a thing called friendview that existed before | foursquare was a thing where you could share your location on a | map with friends. The team that did that also did another app | that allowed people to share photos. Instagram was not a thing | yet back then. Another team was doing a thing called sports | tracker. These were tiny teams doing amazing things. Sports | tracker basically was allowed to take their software outside of | Nokia and create a company around it. Nokia shipped a lot of | stuff like this via Nokia Betalabs. A lot of that stuff came | from teams in Nokia Research Center. | exhilaration wrote: | Confirming that I was able to run a webserver on my Nokia | 3650 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 back in 2004. | Those were the days when T-Mobile USA actually gave you a | public IP address! It was pretty awesome to be able to | download photos from the phone via the web - even if only at | GPRS speeds. | teknolog wrote: | Sports Tracker was awesome. I used it for years before it | stopped being competitive with Strava and more modern | offerings. | miohtama wrote: | I was working on the mobile web server project. The project | was heavily subcontracted to a company in Oulu, Finland, | where I worked by the time before starting a career in open | source and Python consultancy. Mobile web server was a Series | 60 web server, based on Apache, some glue and reverse proxy | gateway (written in Java). You could deploy your own "apps" | that could be accessed by anyone, running on your mobile | phone. | | Unfortunely, the project did not have a real business use | case. People believed that peer-to-peer is a thing (XMPP, | BitTorrent, IRC) and this would drive mobile-to-mobile | interactions. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be true. | | Later me and my friend ported Python to Series 60 with our | own rewrite, as Nokia's official port had many issues. | Unfortunately by this time Series 60 was already losing | market share for iPhone and Android. Furthermore we found | that because of module import delay, Python will never be a | good run-time for mobile applications, unless you do some | sort of a binary dump/prewarmed up interpreter. | liuliu wrote: | Binary dump / prewarmed up Python interpreter would be | amazing even today. Could enable a lot use cases with | Python. | AceJohnny2 wrote: | > _The whole thing was a pretty frustrating experience. And we | haven 't talked about the libraries, the OS (cooperative multi | tasking, everything is a callback) or memory management | ('descriptors' that made trivial string operations a pain)._ | | My understanding, as someone who was peripherally in contact | with Symbian in 2007-2011, is that the multitasking concepts | were based on the Actor model [1]. This is indeed a kind of | callback-based cooperative multi-tasking, but it fits very well | in Symbian's tasks-as-C++-objects concept. | | C/C++ strings are a nightmare from a memory-management and | reliability perspective, so I can't blame them for doing it | differently. However their tooling was indeed not up to the | challenge. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model | usr1106 wrote: | I would claim that something 50% of the application developers | writing code for Nokia (internal or contractors) could not | handle strings correctly. It was in theory C++ code, but | because compilers were not very good at the time when EPOC32 | was developed and memory was pretty limited there were special | implementations to work around all the limitations. Programming | was not easy, productivity was low, and buggy application code | was the norm. | | I vaguely remember in the very late days there might have been | some simplifications, but the train had gone already at that | time. | OnlyMortal wrote: | Didn't Symbian Ed up using a version of CodeWarrior? | Unfortunately, a Windows version of memory serves. | teknolog wrote: | They did for a long time, but they eventually switched to | an Eclipse based system. I believe there was a Nokia team | in Dallas that built that. | usr1106 wrote: | First it was Visual Studio, second CodeWarrior and then | obviously Eclipse (I probably never used the latter, | jumped ship a couple of years before the infamous burning | platform.) So every 3-5 years they changed the | development environment. Can probably also seen as a sign | that Symbian development was tedious and not much fun. | cycomanic wrote: | Maybe I'm remembering wrong but didn't the iPhone not have | multitasking for apps for a long time as well. I recall that | essentially the OS did something like a snapshot of every app | when one switched. | baybal2 wrote: | pjmlp wrote: | I was on the Networks side between 2004 and 20011. | | I painfully remember all the hoops that Symbian went through | during those years until the last days of Carbide. | | Yet, sometimes I still miss it when comparing with NDK | development experience on Android. | marcodiego wrote: | > a windows port of the GNU toolchain, so it would only work on | windows. But even on windows it had a lot of warts (because | these tools were build for unix in the first place, so e.g. | drive letters and back slashes were problematic). | | About a decade ago I worked on a project for a South Korean | cellphone vendor whose name I'll not cite for somewhat obvious | reasons. The build system was similar to what you describe: a | poor port of unix tools for windows that required windows xp | which was already obsolete in 2011. I asked why don't we use | linux since the build was probably more adequate for that | environment. The answer was something like "because they spent | a lot of money and time to make this port so we can use | windows." Korea was mostly a windows-only country at the time. | They had to change because of android, but for them it seemed | already too little too late. | melony wrote: | Is Odin still a thing? | 3boll wrote: | Yep, but a bit out of date... | | https://www.odinflash.com/odinchangelog | marcodiego wrote: | I don't know. Last time I re-imaged a Samsung phone, I used | Heimdall[1]. It is open source and runs on linux. | | [1] https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall | heurisko wrote: | It works well, compiled and used it last week. | | LineageOS said it was out of date, but it worked for me | on Ubuntu 22.04. | sonicggg wrote: | Now that nobody cares about this crap anymore, they release the | source code. | distances wrote: | Symbian was open sourced in 2010. | https://www.wired.com/2010/02/symbian-operating-system- | now-o... | zamalek wrote: | Wow. I did a quick random sample of their code and it's _really_ | clean, which is especially impressive in the bare-metal domain. | miohtama wrote: | Here are the release notes for Symbian kernel | | https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.os.kernelhwsrv/b... | | 1998 - 2010 | HidyBush wrote: | If anyone's interested here's [0] a Mediafire archive of Symbian | developer sources of all kinds, from compilers and SDKs to | manuals. | | [0] | https://www.mediafire.com/folder/79jhy594xb3uk/Symbian_Devel... | secondcoming wrote: | Don't forget to `abld reallyclean`! | anta40 wrote: | Thanks. I wish I knew about these back to high school days | 2001. Instead, I learnt J2ME and.... weill still a Java dev | until today :p | distances wrote: | For what it's worth, I took a mobile software dev course in | University, and it targeted mainly Symbian. I learned that I | definitely do not want to do that. It was a painful | experience. | | I ended up doing mobile development anyway, but not until Qt | was a viable option for Symbian. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | Any way to get those onto archive.org? | doppioandante wrote: | Thank you, this is _gold_. I have discovered a couple of nokia | phones in my drawer and I was wondering how the hell I could | develop on them. Since then I have discovered the whole | "cooked ROM" scene, which has of course died in the meantime. I | hope that archive will answer my questions. Btw, if anyone | knows, is a special piece of hardware needed to flash the | firmware of a nokia symbian phone? | secondcoming wrote: | Symbian devs had their own flashing stations/cradles but at | some point it became possible to flash newer phones over USB. | The software tool was called Phoenix and used regularly be | leaked. | cja wrote: | Repo seems to contain personal data of employees. I won't post a | link to it. | magicloop wrote: | Great to see the code up there on GitHub. So many cogent points | made here. It brings it all back to me. What happened there from | Symbian to Nokia and then Accenture ought to be taught in MBA | programmes as a Greek tragedy. | antiverse wrote: | For anyone wanting to play Nokia N-Gage games (S60? I forget), | there is already a lengthy walkthrough and setup of how to | emulate the games on Windows that is available on The Internet | Archive; complete with a torrent/zip of all the games on the | system. | unlivingthing wrote: | Links, please. (: | networked wrote: | No LICENSE files. Is this official or a leak? | bobajeff wrote: | Pretty sure these are from when they open sourced it in an | attempt to drive adoption. | thomasjudge wrote: | I just looked at a couple of the files, it looks like license | info is inline | nickdothutton wrote: | Fond memories of running my day to day (email, diary, expenses, | task management) of a Psion 3a with 3xAA batteries and a | modem/cable to my Nokia mobile. | DeathArrow wrote: | My first smartphone was a Nokia running Symbian. | protomyth wrote: | Is it all licensed as Eclipse Public License v1.0? | substation13 wrote: | Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many | hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see | the pieces out in the open though. | t_mann wrote: | I vaguely recall Symbian being adopted/developed(?) by Nokia. | It's incredible how early Symbian was, but what's most | remarkable is that it wasn't even Nokia's only shot at a | smartphone OS, they also had Maemo. | FridayoLeary wrote: | It's a shame Nokia is now throwing away everything they know | about Symbian. The new nokia OS is shockingly crap. Some | functions straight out don't work and other functions such as | T9 text are awful. It's a shame when you realise that their | old Symbian phones work perfectly well and there was no need | to change it. | dancek wrote: | The even older DCT3 generation of Nokia phones worked much | better than Symbian ever did. Nokia 6210 is still a great | phone if you only need to call and receive SMS. But | anything with a color display from that era is really | showing its age by now. | distances wrote: | Nokia hasn't been making phones for a long time. They | license the name for HMD Global and the modern devices have | nothing to do with Nokia itself. | cortesoft wrote: | It is the destiny for most code written. | whartung wrote: | Anyone who has been in this business for any length of time | will look back at a long legacy of retired, obsolete | projects. Very little in this space lasts. The high profile, | long lived projects we see are just an tiny fraction of the | software that's created, used, forgotten, and deleted. | | I like to look back and note some of the companies I helped | in that little window of time I could contribute, but those | contributions are long gone. | | We don't build bridges in this business, thats for sure. | mulmen wrote: | I have friends who ask me how to set their kids on a path | to a tech career like mine. I tell them they may not want | that at all. This is a good job, _today_. But I don 't | think it is so different from building pickup trucks in | Detroit in the 1960s. Nothing lasts forever. Including | those trucks, and those jobs. We can't know the future, | only that change is inevitable. | | Software Manufacturing is a term that best captures my | impression of the industry today. | fps_doug wrote: | Especially if it's something you used and liked. But yes, I'm a | big fan of releasing these things to the public, for archival | and for the curious. It's crazy how even big companies lose | source code of old software, or at least only have it | accessible in a completely chaotic state, with a missing build | system, missing instructions, etc. Recent example would be 3D | Movie Maker by Microsoft. People got it to compile eventually, | but it apparently was a wild undertaking: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXTzlDZmhU | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtKHPwTWsc | danuker wrote: | Indeed. Every time someone builds a walled garden, effort is | duplicated needlessly, both in building it, and in using it. | nomoreusernames wrote: | im still using workbench. | atleta wrote: | Quite a few of those hours were wasted and contributed to | Nokia's demise. They should have switched away from Symbian | waaay sooner. I think clinging to it is a classic case of the | sunken cost fallacy. By ~2005-2006 it was obvious, at least for | some of us, developers, that continuing to invest in Symbian is | a huge mistake. | | By then, Nokia had been working on a Linux based OS for years. | (That would become Meego.) But, if I'm not mistaken, at least a | thousand people were working on Symbian and Symbian based | products. So switching away from it was simply out of question. | It would have been too bold a move. (Especially, since Nokia | was dominating the market and these products brought in a very | nice profit.) | kjellsbells wrote: | wasnt this pain the premise of the infamous "burning | platform" memo [1] and the eventual switch to Windows Phone | as an OS? | | [1] https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/memo-nokia-ceo-stephen- | elops... | perryizgr8 wrote: | Nokia earned billions from this code. I bet those hours were | paid back many times over. | usr1106 wrote: | No, they probably didn't earn billions from that code. Their | biggest cash cows were feature phones (non-Symbian) that sold | 10-50 times as many as Symbian phones and were developed with | many times smaller budgets. While some Symbian phones were | pretty good for their area, there were probably at least as | many failed projects as successful ones. | perryizgr8 wrote: | I don't have any data to back this up, but I think they | sold hundreds of millions of high end (and expensive for | the time) smartphones running Symbian. Remember the N line? | The E line? Communicators? All running Symbian, all | bestsellers for years. | usr1106 wrote: | No, I remember attending parties when 1 or 2 millions of | a model had been sold. At the same time Nokia sold over | 100 million of feature phones a year. | | Edit: | | As you write they were expensive. So while Nokia was the | undisputd leader in the segment for a couple of years the | absolute numbers were not that big. I remember some year | the worldwide phone market was 400 million a year. Nokia | had over 100 million of them, but smart phones (Symbian) | only single digit millions. | perryizgr8 wrote: | One model, N95, sold 10 million units. It was priced at | around $500. That's 5 billion revenue from one model | alone. I'm sure feature phones sold a lot more, but | that's irrelevant. | usr1106 wrote: | Yes, 10 millions for the N95 sound possible to me. But | that was after 10 years of development with many 1000 | developers. Revenue is not earnings. The orginal claim | was that they earned billions. | markb139 wrote: | Just before the iPhone, I think Nokia were shipping about | 70 million Symbian phones a 1/4 and had about 50% of the | market profit. Then, it didn't | [deleted] | spyremeown wrote: | Not really... it had its use. Code vanishes so quickly. | pavlov wrote: | Symbian, the Ozymandias of smartphone operating systems. | | They had a lot of the right ideas very early. They started | building a high-resolution graphical mobile OS for 32-bit ARM | in the mid-1990s, when most phones barely could display two | lines of text and receive an SMS. Many concepts in iOS and | Android today were pioneered by Symbian. | | IMO, the biggest failing of Symbian was to disown the UI and | focus on the lower layers of the operating system. Symbian's | licensees like Nokia, Motorola and SonyEricsson wanted to | control the GUI layer themselves, so they had annoyingly | incompatible GUI libraries for Symbian. The platform was | already hard to develop for, and then you had multiple vendors | piling gunk on top like Nokia's Series 60 which was a terrible | piece of work. | | In a parellel universe Symbian would have acquired the BeOS | team in 2003 and kept them in Silicon Valley, tasked with | building a truly excellent mobile GUI on a five-year time | horizon independent of Nokia's meddling. A well-designed high- | level UI framework in a reasonable language could have made the | embedded C++ underpinnings of Symbian mostly irrelevant -- | basically shipping Android a couple of years before the fact. | msh wrote: | I think as long as it was companies like nokia who liked to | create smartphones that where primarily phones with texting | first and computers a very distant second Symbian did not | have a chance. | | I know that they made stuff like the 9x00 communicators but | they where never intended as mass market products. | | Nokia was never able to craft a desirable product that | brought applications to the mainstream user, most people who | got their smartphones only used them as phones. | tuukkah wrote: | Third-party apps for Symbian may not have been mainstream, | but third-party games definitely were. Even before that, | Java ME games were popular on feature phones. | klaussilveira wrote: | TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias | ff317 wrote: | Also one of several instances where the Breaking Bad | writers put a lot of thought into amazing episode themes | and titles: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad) | orev wrote: | Before the iPhone, mobile device companies were held ransom | by wireless carriers. Carriers dictated _everything_ about | the phones, down the Verizon demanding Bluetooth file | transfer was disabled to force people to use data minutes to | send pictures. | | This is one of the things that I think modern techies have | forgotten. No matter what you think of Apple, they were the | only ones with enough market power to force carriers out of | that position (Apple having been newly minted at the king of | digital music) . It's why the iPhone was exclusive to AT&T -- | because Verizon was the market leader and AT&T _had_ to make | the deal to get the iPhone. And Jobs wouldn't make the deal | with any carrier that insisted on adding crapware to the | phone. | 8ytecoder wrote: | This was true in the US. I don't know about Europe. But it | wasn't true anywhere else. Even in the US it was dominated | by Motorola (and BB) as a result. Motorola didn't have much | success outside of Razr in the rest of the world and Nokia | and Sony didn't have much success in the US. So it was | really a tale of two worlds. I really liked the Sonys and | Nokias of the era. | | Symbian didn't screw up the UI and it certainly was "too | open". It was so common to have malware and viruses on | nokia phones. Bluetooth was scary. | | The biggest issue of all was the incompatible app | ecosystem. Each phone and OS and sometimes even models were | different. Some were Java, others were Symbian and then the | whole world of blackberries and windows. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | > was so common to have malware and viruses on nokia | phones | | I never experienced that and don't know anyone who did. | Was it really a thing? | miohtama wrote: | I don't think this is true. I worked extensively in the | mobile industry back in the day and all Nokia apps had | more painful signing process than iOS apps have today. | distances wrote: | It was not true in Europe either. You could of course use | any device, and in many countries bundling a device with | a phone contract was even expressly forbidden. Carriers | had no control at all. | | Insert the usual disclaimer that Europe has a lot of | countries with different legislation, but the carrier | stranglehold was a US specific problem. | pmontra wrote: | I've been working for a carrier in Italy in the first | half of 2000s. We designed some phones with manufacturers | but any phone could work on our network AFAIK. There was | not much choice at the beginning because we only had a 3G | network and there were very few 3G phones (only one at | launch.) | teknolog wrote: | Heh. Worked on that in a previous life. | crb wrote: | 'sup seb | umarniz wrote: | Symbian was the era that trains you to never be afraid of | debugging the hardest problems and understand how big of a | blessing documentation is. | | A few examples of my childhood experiences making a game for | Symbian: | | 1) Debugging that one problem which would cause the whole OS to | crash | | The crash log didn't help cause it wouldn't flush the logs to | disk in time. My under developed concepts of multi-threading | didn't help much either not that I know much more today 10 years | later. | | 2) Overriding OS memory safety to read accelerometer data from | memory in phones that didn't have APIs for it | | The patience and creative thinking you learn tackling with such | high levels of uncertainty and painful problems is incredible. | | I am not aware of how engineers learn engineering (I am self | taught) but this kind of patience and endurance does shape a lot | of my engineering skills today. | abcd_f wrote: | Earlier Windows versions shipped with the same wonderful | developer experience. My favourite was a bool API function | returning 2 under certain circumstances that you'd better be | aware of. | | And by "earlier" I mean from Win 3.1 and up to W8 era or | thereabouts, when the documentation finally started to improve. | grishka wrote: | Oh, cool. I remember trying to write native apps for my Nokia | 5800 and the SDK being... not very good. Also I lacked experience | and a sufficiently powerful computer. Also I don't think the | thing was documented much, either that or I didn't know where to | look for the docs. And the bizarre class naming scheme. And the | bizarre dozen types of strings. And the most bizarre custom error | handling mechanism (iirc it was called "leave") instead of C++ | exceptions. | | I do wonder if this code is enough to build a working firmware | image for a Nokia phone, but most probably some of the required | parts are missing. | rhubarbtse wrote: | It is not, unfortunately. It's missing plenty of proprietary | middleware etc that you need to run it on Nokia phones. | | IIRC you are supposedly able to build and run this source dump | on some BeagleBoard. | | I was there, coding multimedia stuff for the last generation of | Symbian smartphones. I remember this dump was originally | released on Gitorious (later acquired by GitLab) some 10++ | years ago. | | Fun fact: the source was originally supposed to be licensed | under a different roll-your-own open source license (I think it | was named "Symbian Foundation License" or something like that) | but Nokia switched to Eclipse Public License 1.0 before the | public release. | pm2222 wrote: | This reminds me of those android tv boxes. Their spec is pretty | good to run linux. Is there generic way to convert them to say | arch/ubuntu linux? | deno wrote: | I've played some with those and it's not pretty. It's all the | pain you get with commercial SBCs except: even less support, | much lower quality hardware, and terrible thermal solutions | (ventilation holes under the case with no feet and tiny/non- | existent heatsinks). | | In the end what killed my interest in them is that the cheapest | you can get those is like 30 USD and for that price you can | also get X86 thin clients that are just better in every single | way. | | Still, if you want to get your feet wet I suggest you start | with RK3318. Those boards are much harder to brick than AmLogic | and are the only ones with at least some support from Armbian: | https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17597-csc-armbian-for-rk3318... | zozbot234 wrote: | If they can be boot-unlocked and run a custom ROM, you could | look into supporting them under postmarketOS. That's the | closest we get to a clean Linux install on AOSP-native devices. | lproven wrote: | I think you will need to be specific. Which particular | make/model do you have in mind? Have you looked to see if | someone's already done it? | tjstankus wrote: | Wow, memory lane here. My first programming job was working on | Symbian apps. I think I had a 1MB heap and something like an 8KB | stack to work with. Good times! | kevsim wrote: | Spent some time at Nokia when I was fresh out of university. The | thrill of getting "hello world" on the screen in Symbian/S60 is | not something I'll ever forget. Took ages of battling CodeWarrior | and I think even a simple app was something like 6 files, but | seeing code I wrote running on a phone in 2004 was pretty | awesome. | ingenieroariel wrote: | "Battling CodeWarrior": back when N95 was exciting to mention. | secondcoming wrote: | The moved on from CodeWarrior to Carbide, which was based on | Eclipse. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-24 23:00 UTC)