[Ste_Evans]

Nokia's problem was their UI, which was not controlled by Symbian, not the underlying OS. Hundreds of Symbian-OS based phones were on the market from 2001, including in the Japanese market which had the most testing. The p800 and p910 had a UI similar to iPhone and Android in 2003, 3 years before the iPhone, on 3G networks. The second version of the Symbian OS kernel from 2003 was real time i.e. a comms stack could be run together with the apps off the one CPU. Are the Linux kernel or iOS kernel real time now even?

Android OS and iOS are hacks of desktop OSes so are optimised for performance rather than battery life or memory usage; Symbian OS was designed as a mobile OS from the beginning optimising power and memory management.

It was the timing of Google's IPO which scuppered Symbian. Google were able to spend billions getting Android in place to capture Symbian's market share and customers as iPhone buzz grew the market.

[edderly]

No, the OS was a mess. The UI split was the root of the nightmare.

Nokia were "running" (perhaps should read ruining) Symbian well before they bought it. They were only one of the four or was it five co-owners, but they ran rings around the others when pressuring Symbian leadership. They were the only phone manufacturer with a dedicated product support org, and their pre-prod devices were available in core engineering teams unlike Moto et al. Nokia were the key players to create a Symbian OS core without a coherent UI (Techview lol), no TCP/IP stack, no telephony stack. They helped reduce Symbian OS to swiss cheese because they were so concerned with with recouping their investment from gen 1 SOS products and terrified their competitors at the time got a tiny leg up.

[secondcoming]

Techview was a barebones UI used by Symbian devs on the x86 emulator and ARM reference boards (TI OMAP H2 and H4). It never appeared on any phone.

[edderly]

Indeed. So imagine doing performance profiling on a 90s UI framework from Psion and then getting feedback from S60 three months later after an integration cycle that you have a core perf or latency problem.

[jillesvangurp]

You are right that there were lots of Symbian manufacturers. Notable is that most of those were gone from the market by 2010. Windows CE eroded the market share and Nokia being so dominant meant most of its competitors did not want to be second in line for OS updates and influence. When Ericsson gave up being a phone manufacturer (they had their own UI platform for Symbian), the rest of them disappeared quickly.

By the time Nokia took ownership of Symbian, it was effectively the only company left still depending on it. The complex ownership of Symbian was one of the reasons it took many years to get operating system releases to market. Because first Symbian had to release a new version, which would only happen every few years or so and featured a lot of design by committee style decision making. And then it's users/owners would design products around that, which also took years.

It did not help that Nokia was a hardware company ran by electrical engineers that did not realize it was being bottle-necked on software. So, you would get new S60 products featuring bugs that had been fixed in other S60 products because they literally forked the same code base those were based on but before the bug had been patched. It was beyond stupid. And S60 was indeed a dumpster fire. One of the (many) issues with it was that it did not actually have any touch screen capability because Nokia killed that off around the time the rumors about the iphone started swirling. They then rushed out a version of S60 (v5.0) to "compete" with the iphone that re-created some of that. But then they also still had lots of v3.0 S60 products in the market for several years. Which did not help the messaging.

5.0 was a rush job and the initial products tanked hard. First there was the tube and then the N97. Both were products with lots of software issues. And subsequent efforts to fix it did not improve things. Most of the fixes amounted to too little too late.

[pavlov]

Nokia did their best to kneecap other vendors using Symbian by fragmenting the base OS, which was a terrible strategy in retrospect.

But somehow they also managed to do it internally. The Series 90 Symbian UI could have been a real contender. This is a touchscreen smartphone from 2004:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710

But Nokia canned this advanced Symbian UI as soon as it shipped, and instead they started bolting features onto the already terrible keypad-driven S60 UI. Oh, and they also spun up a Linux touchscreen effort seemingly to ensure a total lack of focus and clarity about Nokia’s software strategy.

[LightG]

Karma.

I was so disppointed (as a customer) at the trajectory at the time. It could have been so much more and I was willing it on.

[sergers]

I imported a Panasonic x800 from japan to Canada in 2005.

Ran Symbian 2.0

I didn't even know Symbian was available on non nokia

Was very advanced for the time, everyone was impressed here as there werent any similar devices locally available.

This was my last phone before moving over to blackberry to get on the BBM bandwagon(after the x800 fell, and hit the push button opener and popped open the screen and cracked... With no locally available parts wasn't worth it to fix....).

Never had to do anything from the dev side, but the usability/functionality was steps ahead at the time

[secondcoming]

And we know now that Google wanted its own OS so it could scrape all the data it could from phones. That wouldn’t have been possible with Symbian.