Interesting Slashdot Post on Symbian, Nokia, and the iPhone

R

Rosalm

New member
The folks here might be interested in this:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/6856C375-FE4E-4BC8-B753-B48AF3BD8B30.html

http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/07/02/05/139207.shtml
 
I'm somewhat puzzled by what the dev wrote in that article. Apple said clearly that they will not allow 3rd party apps on the iPhone, so why spend an article saying how great it is to make apps for the iPhone compared with Symbian when there isn't any use in doing that anyways. Plus let's not forget Symbian is way old, whereas Apple spent the time to build their own platform based on OS X. I think he's right saying Symbian has many problems, I heard creating Symbian apps is a nightmare, and it may be wise for Nokia to move on to something else (although on the stability front Windows Mobile seems much much worse), but it seems odd to compare it to the iPhone.
 
I read that article, and its somewhat ridiculous. Even though the author makes some valid points, his die-hard "iPhone is the answer" lets worship at the altar of Lord Jobs angle is annoying to say the least. He is a standard Mac devotee who is now paying attention to the mobile space only because Apple is entering the market. He has no idea of the capabilities of the devices available and clearly has little grasp on the fundamentals of wireless technologies (GSM, CDMA, HSDPA etc).
Valid points are always overshadowed when the slant of the article is so blindly biased.
 
The article is horribly slanted towards the iPhone, but the author makes a few valid points.

First of all, it's way harder than it should be to get any kind of Symbian development environment set up. When I first started work on JonnyChat I really wanted to do a native S60 version.

After 9 years of coding, I've installed more IDEs than I can remember. Some have sucked, some have been great. But after 2 evenings of fiddling with the Nokia S60 IDEs and emulators, I just gave up. I have never, ever come across a more poorly documented and badly supported development environment than that which is offered by Nokia. And that includes some of the most bizarre freeware and open source IDEs... even they're better than what Nokia offers.

I knocked together the first Java version of Jonnychat in an evening, using a free copy of the J2ME dev kit and NetBeans.

I think the gap between Windows Mobile and Symbian has closed to the point where it's making more sense to look at WM than Symbian when you're planning application support. One thing Microsoft has always done is make it easy for developers to get on board... one thing that Nokia has never, *EVER* done is make it easy for developers to get on board.
 
Stefan over at RingNokia had a writeup on this, and I commented there, but feel as though the comment would benefit here, as well.

The article, though I admit to having not read the whole thing, seems to look at things from a developer's point of view, and mentions that Nokia would like to get away from Symbian. However, I think it's important to look at things from a consumer's POV, as well. I've never touched a Palm or Blackberry, but I have tried Windows Mobile on 3 separate occasions, with 2 being non-touchscreen and one being touchscreen.

Finding apps for Symbian is easier.
Installing apps on Symbian is easier.
Actually using and learning the OS is easier with Symbian.
I've converted several friends to Symbian and they're able to drop their RAZR and pick up a N-series and have little trouble learning how to use it. OTOH, I've had enough trouble with Windows Mobile, just learning how to use the damn thing, that I've returned 3 handsets within a week of getting them.
 
I agree on all 3 points.

But that matters not an iota if developers find S60 a headache to code for. Given a choice of another viable platform, they'll jump ship faster than you can blink.

And the 'Symbian Signed' program has kinda made it harder to develop those 3rd party freeware/shareware apps, and has made installing apps a bit more of a pain in the ***, depending on whether your phone is locked down or not... so points one and two aren't as weighty as they used to be.

Keep in mind, I use an S60 phone. I like my S60 phone. And I'm thinking that Nokia has screwed up so badly (in a number of areas, not just with S60) that it could well be the last S60 phone I own. Which makes me sad.
 
I agree that the introduction of the Symbian Signed program, as well as (as I've heard/read) the implementation and execution of that program, has been a huge hindrance to the S60v3 devices. And yes, I recall when the E62 was launched with Cingular, most users (who were novices, really) thought either Cingular/Nokia had screwed them or they had a faulty handset, cause it was defaulted to not accepting unsigned apps. Few knew you could disable that limit.

I agree with your last statements, though not to the same end. I use a S60 phone. I love my S60 phone. I started a blog about S60 devices. However, I'm more disenchanted with their ignoring the US 3G market than I am anything else. If, at the end of this year, with so many new services and extended coverage, there's not a US 3G S60 phone available, I may be FORCED into another OS.
 
This is not flamebait, I'm a S60 supporter as well. But... for all three of these the BlackBerry and Palm blow away Symbian (I have/had them all, still have an E60, Treo650, and Pearl). I recently decided to check out this whole BlackBerry thing to see what it was all about, and if you know me from around HoFo I'm kinda tech nerdy. I have been duly impressed by this Pearl, and am not leaving it any time soon.

To answer the above in BlackBerry terms:

- any generic midp j2me app, or custom (j2me + bb custom apis) can run on the device. Lots and lots of stuff from GetJar.com just works (and a lot doesn't ). Let's throw in dev; anyone can download Netbeans, Eclipse, whatever and have a nice IDE to start programming in with nearly zero effort.

(note: for those curious, nearly the entire device is J2ME based from what I've been able to discover. I think it has some sort of unix-like boot ROM initially that then hands the chain loader off to a kernel, who bootstraps the JVM then loads all the actual code. Still looking at this.)

- let's do a head-to-head scenario here. Symbian *unsigned* SIS/SISX file installing OTA from your own webserver: no, cannot do it in S60v3. (E50, E60). J2ME/BlackBerry unsigned applet install OTA (.jad/.jar) works without any problems. BlackBerry wins that round. Both are as dead simple with a desktop install (Nokia Suite, etc.).

- using and learning: tie. They're both vastly different in the UI category, but they both tend to hide options and configs in strange places that can take you forever to find them. However, as far as available tweaking/setups I'll have to hand this to BlackBerry, there are a lot more knobs to twiddle. Example: on a Pearl you can type ALT+NMLL (really ALT+NNMLL) and the signal strength indicator flips from bars to an actual dBi numeric. Lots of knobs like that to mess with.

So, I hold truth in the article having some valid points (I echo the IDE problems, I too try to work with it but gave up -- it's horrible, epoc this and setup that...wtf?!) and I can see how people think Symbian has room for improvement. The complete abolishment of Symbian Signed and a firmware upgrade to all handsets to get rid of the crappy security lockouts (basically revert to S60v2) would be a good start...
 
To be honest, you may not want to stay with S60 anyhow, because here's what's going to happen.

S60 is becoming a 3rd class citizen. Part of that is because of the absolutely horrible support Nokia provides to developers. Part of that is because the Symbian Signed thing is a *****. But most if it is due to the simple fact that coding a Symbian app is about as much fun as smearing yourself with meat and running into a den of starving pit bulls. And I say this having coded palm apps in a previous life. It's that bad.

The newest Yahoo To Go is... a java app. The S60 version has disappeared. Why? Because it's much easier to write a J2ME app than a S60 app. And if you use something like J2ME polish you can, ironically enough, produce a better looking J2ME app than a native app.

It's even easier to produce a J2ME app that integrates into the phone now than it was a few years ago. PIM/Contacts integration? File System integration? Touch the actual hardware to take pictures/play music/movies? It's all there. Why would anyone screw around with the horrible symbian tools when it's easier to just go cross platform?

Nokia needs to do a better job supporting their tools, and they need to do it like 2 years ago. They've wasted so much effort and resources on pointless measures like the web browser... why on earth they did that rather than just license Opera is beyond me... but the fact is the Nokia Web Browser is a cool tech demo, but as an actual usable mobile browser it's more annoying than... Pocket IE used to be. Notice I say used to be... because even MSFT has cottoned on to the fact that it's best to display pages in one large column when dealing with size constrained devices.

S60 is already losing steam... right now it's up to Nokia to reverse it, and do it soon. If they bleed much more they're not going to be able to stop it.
 
Slowly. You think J2ME is dog-slow (it sure is on S60v3, we all avoid using J2ME apps on here) until you go to another platform (like the BB) where it's blindingly fast and works great. S60 native apps are where it's at, but then we're back to square #1...

Let's also mention that I had a lot of problems getting generic J2ME to work on my E50 and E60 (I hear the N's are better), they would not run a lot of apps that generic phones would. booo. I blame the internal Symbian (S60?) JVM infrastructure, even a S40 device runs J2ME faster.
 
I do think that, that is the stupidist thing that I have ever heard of especially comming from Job's, but I have heard that he changed his tune now saying that 3rd party apps. will be allowed on a signed/monitored basis.


That can be a yes or no answer. Some of the new widgets that I have on OSX are very complete and are like mini applications.
 
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