Comments on: Symbian tries to crash Apple's WWDC party

The group is finally starting to get aggressive, trying to entice iPhone developers to learn more about Symbian at a WWDC-staged hack-a-thon.

[monkeyfun14]

The Starbucks serving up free coffee for the Apple conference made me a laugh a little.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Keep in mind that Symbian, not Apple, is giving away that free Starbucks coffee. Apple has nothing to do with it.

[monkeyfun14]

Oh yeah my bad lol

[slickuser]

but the Symbian OS is not fun to work with or write code for it. It is a boring OS like Windows CE

[monkeyfun14]

Who actually enjoys writing code for any OS O-o? Most people find coding to be a chore.

[forever4now]

I think you hit on the root of the problem. The iPhoneOS, Android & WebOS are what you might classify as "modern" smartphone OSes. Symbian & WinMo/Windows CE, while prolific in the marketplace...due to their age...are what you might classify as "legacy" OSes, even though they are being incrementally improved.

I worked in Silicon Valley for many years and it always seemed like the best & brightest developers migrated toward the emerging platforms & technologies. There was still a lot of money to be made on the legacy stuff, but they preferred to be "on the edge".

Symbian, like WinMo, needs a MAJOR update. Windows Mobile 7 is suppose to be that for WinMo. Perhaps Symbian has similar plans (Maemo?). For now, though, they are a tougher sell to top developers than the new kids on the block.

[dzankizakon]

Both users and developers know that Symbian is a mediocre OS. It's slow, ugly, unrefined, buggy and touch-challenged.

iPhone OS has been around for 2 years and it's infinitely better than Symbian, which is like 15 years old. Developers are not stupid, they can see that Symbian's got no future unless they totally revamp the OS.

Nokia makes great phone hardware, but Symbian is a disaster.

[seven7dust]

well the touch version of the O.S is a disaster
the normal version is decent actually a lot better than say Sony's UIQ

[dzankizakon]

But they are trying to compete with iPhone, not with Sony Ericsson.

Symbian's UI is just not fluid, it's unpleasant to use, it's also ugly and flickery. I'm not saying it's a total disaster, but it's just unworthy of Nokia's excellent hardware.

Just one example: Half the time time when you're opening a menu, "(No Data Found)" flickers across the screen for a short time before the list appears - in my book, that's just lack of fit and finish. A serious, multibillion corporation like Nokia is expected to do better than that, especially when its competition is showing off 3D, super-fluid, natural touch UIs.

[Synthmeister]

That has got to be the lamest flyer I have ever seen. They couldn't actually come up with a developer that has actually made money on the Symbian OS? They couldn't talk about the Ovi store? Oh, I forgot, that's run by Nokia, not Symbian. They forgot that the iPhone platform has 40 million users now, including the iPod touch. API functionality? 4 to 2? Money you can make? $$$$ to $$?

[Constable Odo]

Symbian has been around for years and they're still trying to catch up with the iPhone. I'm not sure if that's pathetic, but if it was so good, wouldn't the developers just go and do it. It's not like they're tied to Apple. It's just that developers aren't exactly stupid. They probably know the people that buy iPhones really like to use them and secondly, Apple has very good business sense and helps get top developers rich. Apple can put different apps on each iPhone in a retail store and get developers some attention.

I don't doubt that the Symbian people should try to point out that they have a large platform, but even Nokia doesn't have Apple's clout and certainly not even close in terms of business acumen. Apple has the whole package that sells big-time. Apple never said anything like they would steal developers from other platforms. They just put their SDK on the table and said, we think we can help (all) you developers sell your apps. And the developers came and are still coming in an endless flow.

[KMT09]

Beggars aren't choosers but they had promised Nokia 5800 and gave away Nokia E75. I was disappointed.

[m_p_wilcox]

Interesting comments, some of them showing the out dated perceptions that the new Symbian is trying to get rid of.

>> but the Symbian OS is not fun to work with or write code for it. It is a boring OS like Windows CE

I don't think even many die-hard Symbian fans would argue with this for native Symbian C++, but this is being phased out for application development. The hackathon was all about writing Python, Flash, or Web apps using JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc.

>> I think you hit on the root of the problem. The iPhoneOS, Android & WebOS are what you might classify as "modern" smartphone OSes. Symbian & WinMo/Windows CE, while prolific in the marketplace...due to their age...are what you might classify as "legacy" OSes, even though they are being incrementally improved.

But Symbian is getting a major update, go to the Symbian Developer website and take a look at the plans for Symbian^4 - Qt replacing the current application framework and a new touch optimised UI is being developed. Not as fast as some of us would have liked, but really good plans to renew the platform.

It's worth taking a look at how Symbian has changed and is changing before dismissing it as "old".

Mark

P.S. Maemo, is a completely separate Linux-based platform developed independently by Nokia (and the open source community).