If it were not for the Apple hype and Android hoopla, Nokia wouldnt have bothered!

Also, lets face it, Apple have raised the bar wth its UI very high. Its a breeze to use. (who cares whats inside?) Mobiles have become a way of life everywhere and consumers would just choose the best looks, usability, price, battery life, and reliability.(not necessarily in that order). There was a time for it (Symbian) and Nokia thinks its too much in the general domain to hold it close to chest.

As an example, I can think of IBM trying to hold on to its proprietary hardwares (Monopoly) in the 80's, till "IBM compatibles" came along. Look who stuffed them. Compaq & Dell and M$oft and Sun.

Way to go Nokia. They've seen the light now, earlier.

Cant help thinking Apples done it this time.

The last shreds have been picked off the carcass.

10 years and I still haven't seen a mobile spreadsheet with the functionality of EPOC's Sheet.

I'm off to buy the wife an iPhone to replace her Revo.

I've had a Palm 500v running Windows Mobile for the last 6 months and while it's nice and easy to use, the OS just sucks as it constantly crashes. There isn't a day that I have to take the battery out to restart the damn thing. I'm on my second one now and I'm losing SMS messages because it seems to die when a message is received, and fails to save it as it has a coronary. It's going back tomorrow in favour of something non-MS related. I could whinge about other M$ products till I'm blue in the face.

My previous Smartphones were all Sony Ericsson and still run a P990. The OS wasn't as easy to use as the P910 and there seems to be a real lack of choice for a good, robust Smartphone. SE really annoyed me with the speed that they pulled the plug on updates for the P990.

Apple can't offer a 3G solution yet, and I'm really concerned about useable life of the iPhone; my iPod got scratched up very quickly and I like my stuff to stay in reasonably good shape for at least the first 2 weeks!

Its fine and dandy bringing products to maket with all the bells and whistles, but if they are unreliable, then they serve no real benefit.

I think I'll stick my SIM in my old GH-688 and be done with it.

Comments enabled in an Andrew Orlowski article? I thought they were perma-off to prevent pointless comments like this with the Paris Hilton icon.

Good Article though, just like every other AO article.

I love Symbian. I quite like MS software, but nothing ever came close to the power of the Symbian OS. Nokia did it no favours in it's lifetime. SE with UIQ didn't do a bad job with the UI - but again it's wasn't perfect and had no "wow" factor. Under-the-hood it was amazing (think GPS, 5MP Camera +, installable apps, java support, latest connectivity, superb development environment, very 'hackable' etc.)

Then look at Apple. The iPhone has a truly great GUI. Now I hate Apple - but you can't fault the fact that it does have a pretty big "wow" factor. Just a shame that the guts are pretty wanky and the usual Apple marketing/fanboism come with what otherwise is a great UI.

I mean, just look at the N82..... pretty fast, 5mp camera with xeon flash, reasonable GPS, 8Gb removable storage, HSDPA, installable apps, web browsing, wifi, bluetooth etc. - all on a single platform. Amazing stuff - just a shame the packaging wasn't done better.

I always found nokias UIs consistent... Unlike other phones brands where it changed from

one instance to the other. They have good UI design ideas for the most part. But as anything

I can't wait for the Eclipse Public licensed symbian code and the UI so that it can get

customized to fit the user directly.

People want a phone to talk on, send sms, take the odd photo and listen to music with. Few want anything more than that.

The P990i is an unreliable pile of junk - my experience with it has forever turned me off to SE "smart" phones. It's hard to believe that Psion's wonderful Epoc o/s morphed into the Symbian o/s on the P990i. WIndows Mobile is useless for phones and Palm's o/s whilst nice & simple is creaking at the edges a bit through old age. I'm going back to s dumb reliable phone and a PDA. Convergence? A marketing man's dream.

As I type this on my nokia e90 i'm left wondering what ur all on about. It seems far from dead to me and I can't stand the iphone looks nice but no ssh,vpn,exchange sync I wont continue.

Long live symbian!

<blockquote>If it were not for the Apple hype and Android hoopla, Nokia wouldnt have bothered!</blockquote>

Verily, was there nothing the iPhone did not change?

Listen - on many levels this is a disturbing piece of news. We don't know exactly what Nokia wishes to do with several of the aspects of Symbian - or whether it now will be required to support for example certain UI conventions or systems that will make all of the new phones into s60+.

But the most welcome result from this is that the symbian stack at the bottom of the phones will be unified, as well as open. That would mean the core libraries to the non- UI bits will benefit from anyone contributing back to the project, while it will also be possible to deploy relatively large projects onto all the phones that use the basic and documented system stack. Something that would make fragmentation smaller than it was at the moment - specially for Nokia - and so open the road for real cross- platform development.

Really - you think that a OpenGL ES view on top of a laughably simplistic and limited OS had anything to do with this? The problem, o "tech nerd" is that the manufacturers so far have all been too interested in exactly what the iPhone for the immediate moment excels at. I.e., they've been gunning for ring- tones, blinking flash- imagery, and silly UI improvements for years. And neglecting anything that might've changed the trend.

But noo - here comes mr. Insider Analyst and tells us where the country is at, and how the Smartphone is dead. *shakes head* Where have you been for the last twenty years?

The article is about the past not the future, it’s clear that Symbian need make a big step forward, next gen phones will need substantial development of the OS and this makes it possible now. This should see the OS reach its true potential and I am excited to see the top 7 manufactures standing side by side making the announcement.

Perhaps AO should stop thinking in the past and lamenting over smartphones - or did he have one too many schnapps last night and totally miss the point.

Andrew H

Or is it? You seem to have forgoten nokia's other bit of 'freetardware', qtopia. A qt4 desktop can make a mac look like dated and there is no reason the 'freetards' at trolltech can't do the same for phone handsets. By the sound of the article you seem to have dismissed the whole idea of open source as stupid and pointless without ever considering anything other than software royalties. Mac didn't chose BSD as a base for nothing, doing all that work in house would have cost them a fortune and by the looks of it the work they have done wasn't quite up to the same standard as the base they started from. By the same token both nokia and google know that if they can attract open source developers then they can have the best platform for the least cost and clean up doing the 'polishing' work needed to turn a solid, stable 'in development' platform into a finished system suitable for the end luser to get their gruby hands on and start trying to break, and when they are in that position trolltech and the work they do are worth an awful lot of money for a group of 'freetards'

cheers

Wait a second. Because UIQ is cutting staff, Symbian is doomed because Nokia acquired Symbian and gives it away for free but doesn't use UIQ in their phones?

Well. Okay. Right. How many pints did we have while writing this article? And not a single mention of SonyEricsson who actually DOES use UIQ.

Perhaps the Symbian Foundation should recruit retired Psion engineers! No joking, Psion not only had innovation but they had engineering as well. This important mix seems to have left companies like SE & UIQ a while ago. Perhaps the demise of UIQ is a good thing - hopefully by a process of natural selection Symbian will give rise to some truely great prodcuts - its not too late. Who will run the Foundation? We need a leader with Vision and passion - again perhaps some old Psion people :-)

I was recently issued a Nokia e61 3g phone and it is simply awful. I don't blame Symbian, as you said it is the horrible user interface. E-mail is woefully slow, the keyboard is pointless. Everything just takes an age to happen. Even the web browser is useless and I am sick to death of having to wait while the phone decides to finish whatever the hell it thinks it needs to do when I am trying to make a call. Not that Windows Mobile phones are any better.

I have played with an iPhone and Apple really gets it. A slick, useable interface done right and when you need to make a call it lets you. All of the other smartphones forgot how to be phones while trying (and failing) to be internet devices.

The Symbian based phones that are now coming out are, as noted above, amazing devices. I've struggled with the usability (I much prefer Ericsson's approach) and responsiveness of my E65 for the last 10 months but there's no doubt it is a technoogical marvel crammed with applications, the most impressive of which is TomTom but Adobe's Acrobat is very impressive if only sadly lacking in the tagging stuff on the Palm version which means I still use my Palm m500 to read books. And, of course, Opera works great as well. NB. all of these apps can be running at the same time while music is playing and the battery will only get really hammered if I keep Opera in the background to be able to keep up with the cricket. In all the iPorn euphoria most people forget to mention that it runs *one* application at a time. A restriction that isn't going to be lifted with iPorn 3G. An Ericsson G700 for me it is. Now where's the symbol for wanking over my gadget?

What, those nice pictures of wholesome Finnish people? They aren't social freaks - well not any more than you might expect after all those beatings with byrch twygges.

I still have a P800 in use and, although I have a K800 as well, I do like the handwriting function of the older phone, makes text messages a breeze compared to all the keybashing. However, the email handling of the newer one is better. I've never really liked the Nokia smartphones, and I've always avoided anything with MS software inside. Friends who haven't are always complaining of crashes and poor battery life, whereas my old P800 with a several-years-old battery still lasts longer then what they've got.

10 years and and still haven't found anything else that fits in a jacket pocket and has a usable keyboard. Sigh.

know exactly what you mean. Sounds like my old t-moblie mda vario, barely usable with a memory card, and even worse should it fall out or stop being read or something... The day I lost it was such a great day... I almost didnt mind I only had a Moto c115 as a backup...

Compare that with the iPhone. Seven months in, and I've only had to restart it two or three times.

Symbian is an awesome OS. But why Symbian smartphones never reached their full potential is that for all the data integration points within the device OS (SyncML, bluetooth, USB, IMAP client, etc), users were never provided with a viable corresponding server-side presence for managing their data (which is what the smartphone was all about - mobile tv never took off and mobile internet access was a banal and expensive process).

With Symbian, there were either exchange connectors for enterprise users, or ad-hoc silos for personal users, but never any agreed form of open standardisation for managing total personal information between device and arbitrary server provider, with the same level of success that something like IMAP (for the email subset) have had. Windows Mobile is of course no different in this respect.

The new iPhone appears to be trading the same ground with mobileme etc, but most Apple users are too blind to see through the Steve Jobs Reatility Distortion Field.

So why is Nokia now running scared? Because they see Android and realize Google are not about to make the same mistake they did. The device is just a gateway to where the real useful stuff is - on the server-side.

Having written for the Symbina platform, I certainly hope that Symbian disappears... it is an absolutely awful API, cumbersome to use and exceedingly easy to create buggy, inefficient code (descriptors,cleanup stack, screwy asynchounous API, f-tard IO API, the lsit goes on and on) Before Symbian I handle the closed OS on older Nokia phones, ISA, which, though had its issues and macro hell world, was much easier to write for than Symbian and had much less bloat attached to it (the bloat of Symbian comes from it's framework, mentality and the "Symbian way" of writing code). The difference is not about the C vs C++ holy war, just the API (Symbian is C++, ISA is straight C). Symbian C++ is not your typical C++, no STL, wanky, wanky, types for handling arrays, forced 2 phase construction, the list goes on of its screwiness.

Hopefully as time goes by, a quasi openish C/C++ style API will be available on smart phones besides the f-wad of Symbian and its screwy frameworks and internals. My hopes for a smart phone using Linux as the kernel together with Qt and some extra love for the platform.

This could be a real revolution. Anyone can join the Foundation, even Google! This offers the phone manufacturers a compelling platform. It will also unleash the geek army. Prepare to see lots more Symbian applications coming along.

Let's not forget that the it is called the "Symbian Foundation". The name is not dead. This is a tribute to the company and staff.

I think your problem may be partly due to your Palm, rather than the OS, certainly my WM6 Vario III runs fine, until you open up a few too many applications at once, then it can crawl for a bit until you shut them down.

Other than that, WM6 can certainly do with a lot of improvement, however I don't find it particularly hard or irritating to use.

"10 years and I still haven't seen a mobile spreadsheet with the functionality of EPOC's Sheet."

I have - and as a former 5mx user, I know Sheet quite well.

Nowadays, I use Planmaker from Softmaker on my Pocket PC. It is at least as good as Sheet.

As long as the underlying system is stable and secure, for me it is all about the applications.

If android can use even 10% the linux / open source apps out there today - then we will be in for some fun. (This is not 1998 when open source apps were crap).

I work within the open source world, developing bespoke applications and giving Linux based consultancy. I make enough money thank you very much, pay my taxes and contribute code (and money contributions) back to open source projects.

Your continuing use of the word "freetard" is not only very insulting to a hard working and committed section of the software industry, it is a form of FUD intended to put down open source software and hence discourage users from using it rather than paying vastly more money for commercial products that may not be any better.

Using open source software does not make you a leech on the community, stupid or to be content with poor quality software. It means that you care about having software which is free to use by everyone and which can be contributed to be everyone. It also means using software that you can trust (as you can view the source code) rather than closed source software which could contain trojans, time bombs or other nasties. It is also the direction in which whole software industry (including Microsoft) is slowly but surely moving.

IMHO making Symbian open source is great news for the industry as community members (such as myself) will be able to improve and contribute to a better version of Symbian and it may well now end up on other embedded projects which might have used either embedded Linux or Windows CE. Using the Eclipse licence is not perhaps as good as using the GPL but at least it will be open source. Time will tell as to whether Nokia will fulfill their obligations (I have some reservations) but it would seem to be a positive thing.

Well written article, but absolute clap trap! The N95 and succesors ALONE accounted for the majority of UK mobile sales in the past year.

Gautam, I whole-heartedly disagree with your comments, i guess you own an iphone!

There are 2 markets for phones in the UK, dumb, and smart, dumb phones are becoming more and more enabled but there is still a clear line of contrast between the two, and therefore, you have two constrasting demographics with new tech purchasing power, smart phone user but smartphones because, suprise suprise, they sport the features they find attractive, as most people tend to but things with features they like, how can you dismiss a whole market just because another company has produced a nice looking and easy to use redundant tech phone.

There are things you can do with UIQ and Symbian other mobile OS's won't come close too, mainly because of al the enthusiast angles you have input coming from.

Nice to see peoples views, but in this case I think you're pissing up the wall.

"Perhaps the Symbian Foundation should recruit retired Psion engineers! No joking, Psion not only had innovation but they had engineering as well. We need a leader with Vision and passion - again perhaps some old Psion people :-)"

Charles, is that you? :-)

On the one hand I have a vario 3 with WM6 and it does the job, lots of annoyances but merely my own and what I want from it, not what it does.

I went to it because I wanted a work phone that does word and email and the one on the nokia were just annoying and not up to the task. Or far too expensive for the keyboard carrying equivalent.

but the symbian software being free and open source should enable it to go leaps and bounds, certainly the latest offerings from nokia are more stable, more user friendly than they used to be.

.... are far from dead. faster and better processors have been around for a couple of years now, and yet manafacturers try to flog intensive applications on outdated chips. phones like the n82 and e51 work quite well. the e71 looks very promising. and all of these are based on ARM11 cpu's. even that is a generation old. in the meanwhile my 9300 works quite nicely thank you. nothing beats the experience of typing with your thumbs.

and the thought of linux on say a dual core cortex based processor, with oodles of ram, a better display..... mmm imagine connecting to a linux server over wi-fi, exporting your display to your phone, writing scripts, and reviewing the results later.

Good article - I agree with the author. Why should anyone give code to Symbian now, when it only makes Nokia stronger?

Sony Ericsson has sold millions of Symbian phones and it's given up on UIQ and Symbian. If Sony Ericsson can't be bovvered, I don't see why anyone else should.

Maybe Nokia fanboys have been holding their phones too close to their brains.

Re Nokia's competitors self-destructing, this isn't necessarily a problem. If competitors can't tell posterior from humerus/extract digits from orifices, it isn't Nokia's fault. Motorola, for example - they coulda bin a contenda. But they pissed away their lead. They're just now trying to figure out what to do, and credit to them for that (even though the part of Moto I work for is being "downsized"), but letting themselves get in the situation of having 13 internally-competing software platforms in the first place (I kid you not!) is not exactly clever strategy.

Unlike the Microsoft/Netscape situation (and various similar situations with Microsoft), Nokia haven't actively undercut their competitors. Sure they're releasing this to the world, but their competitors already have equivalent software platforms so this isn't going to make a difference. What they don't have is (variously) software platforms which can be coded for easily, or apps for those platforms which are designed to be useable, or handsets which people actually want to buy. UIQ isn't going to change that, except that if competitors adopt it then some of the first two problems might go away or at least become easier.

There's nothing wrong with a monopoly, except when the monopoly uses its power to stop other people competing with it. But if your competitors are busy clubbing themselves in the nuts with their own baseball bats, you hardly need to deliver any more of a shoeing than they're already administering to themselves!

Symbian will disappear over the next two years. They have too many people for a (non-desktop) phone OS. Either you want a pseudo-desktop OS, with the associated functionality and compatibility, or a nicely optimised RTOS. Symbian falls in the gap.

Symbian, with their massive expansion, seem to have forgotten how to keep things simple. Even when mistakes are realised, there isn't the will to break compatibility to fix them. Hopefully that will change but, TBH, it's rewrite time.

You seem to know a lot about Symbian OS, which in terms of lines of code, is bigger than Windows 3.1 (which didn't have the ability to make calls, WiFi, USB etc etc). So, where should the rewrite begin? As for not wanting to break compatibilty, sometimes it has to happen but you need a really good reason for it. You really are underestimating the importance of maintaining BC. This is something that MS does really well too.

While I cant really comment on Symbian having never used it. I can say that Windows Mobile is a work in progress. Much like everything Microsoft does! One day they might even get it right but don't hold your breath!

As for Apples iPhone it has all the style but none of the substance. The 3G iPhone still has no mms, and no you cant send those embarrassing pictures of your mates, or the latest and greatest song via Bluetooth on it ether. If you want that go out and buy a bargain basement Pay as You Go phone for £25 instead.

Smartphones still aren't that smart enough I'm afraid. Shame really.

2 new symbian apps stable and old symbian apps can co-exist

Now that Symbian is "in the wild" and anyone can tweak it, how long before someone releases it on a laptot?

It seems ideal, it has the connectivity, and it has the apps, plus it's already designed to run on low memory, low power kit.

I give it a month before the live CDs hit Distrowatch.com, and by next year, the first atom laptots running it are released.

(If I'm turns out I'm right, pre-emptive "Told ya!" If I'm wrong... Well, look who's talking.)

Symbian is stale, Windows mobile is stale. Apple's interface is faster, slicker, better designed (soft keys being the main weakness).

Symbian and Microsoft have been milking people for years with their antiquated interfaces. Clunky, dumb and poor usability.

While I like my Nokia 6110 navigator, the interface hasn't changed since the days of the 7650.

Apple should be congratulated for giving Symbian and Microsoft a kicking.

Shocking - Andrew Orlowski actually letting people respond to an article.

Got to disagree with a few of the comments on here to be honest. Especially the "nobody buys smartphones!" ones. Over a year since its launch, and the N95 is still being pushed by most networks/retailers. Massive, massive market share/influence.

Symbian is stale, Windows mobile is stale. Apple's interface is faster, slicker, better designed (soft keys being the main weakness).

.

Apples and oranges....

Symbian is the the whole shooting match (OS etc..) with Apple you are simply refering to the interface/front end.....It could be a dog underneath all that candy

I suspect one of the reasons to open source is to kickstart some new UI's

I couldn't agree more Tom! i've had a nokia smart phone since the 3650 and have upgraded every year. Nokia phones have been getting better and better. Today I have the n95 8gb and it SMASHES the iphone to pieces. Name one thing the Iphone has aside from a novelty UI that the n95 doesn't. My phone had a 2mp camera about 3 years ago.. It feels like a downgrade to go for the I-phone. Obex file transfer over bluetooth?!?! not on your i-phone you won't!

""By Tom

Posted Wednesday 25th June 2008 10:00 GMT

Well written article, but absolute clap trap! The N95 and succesors ALONE accounted for the majority of UK mobile sales in the past year.

Gautam, I whole-heartedly disagree with your comments, i guess you own an iphone!

There are 2 markets for phones in the UK, dumb, and smart, dumb phones are becoming more and more enabled but there is still a clear line of contrast between the two, and therefore, you have two constrasting demographics with new tech purchasing power, smart phone user but smartphones because, suprise suprise, they sport the features they find attractive, as most people tend to but things with features they like, how can you dismiss a whole market just because another company has produced a nice looking and easy to use redundant tech phone.

There are things you can do with UIQ and Symbian other mobile OS's won't come close too, mainly because of al the enthusiast angles you have input coming from.

Nice to see peoples views, but in this case I think you're pissing up the wall.""

>>Symbian and Microsoft have been milking people for years with their antiquated interfaces. Clunky, dumb and poor usability.

Giles Jones. Symbian doesn't code the UI. The phone vendors provide that part. The Nokia purchase of TrollTech completed this week. So they now have access to the highly talented QT developers. KDE on a phone anyone?

The iPhone just got competition.

Well like I said i've always been a nokia man. My contracts due in october. Anyone have any idea whats going to be kicking off around then? APART from the IPHONE which I have no interest in, something more comparable to the n95 8gb aside from the n96.

<snip>

and your instant response is in my Inbox, where it's read (not ignored, like Comments are).

</snip>

oh my world is shattered

Anyway I live in the US where 3G is still a pipedream and my new phone is a disappointment but works well as a phone.

BTW Nokias; Americans call them NO-KIA's (like the car) not knock-ee-rr's

"Having written for the Symbian platform, I certainly hope that Symbian disappears... it is an absolutely awful API, cumbersome to use and exceedingly easy to create buggy, inefficient code

...

"Hopefully as time goes by, a quasi openish C/C++ style API will be available on smart phones besides the f-wad of Symbian and its screwy frameworks and internals"

That's the elephant in the room. Symbian's weakness is it's mental APIs, but they have to stay the same in the new version to support existing apps and for it to remain "Symbian" at all. No amount of contributions from the open source community can change the fundamental design decisions upon which the OS is built. It will still be slow and expensive to create Symbian apps and developers will be able to get their products out far faster on other platforms. If it's cheap enough to develop an app on Android or iPhone, it won't matter that they have a smaller share of the market. And if other platforms are seen to have the innovative apps first, Symbian will start to look like yesterday's news.

Symbian is a "basket case" because its going open source. OK, we really needed to know that, now go back to kissing Bill Gates ass.