[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.

[hcho]

The real fragmentation was in the UI level for a long while. Remember UIQ and S60? This led to half assed ownership of documentation and developer relations. Funny how business models have impacts on products.