What is wrong with Symbian?

Yeah, from visiting a Nokia fan site or two and the usual suspects Engadget/TechCrunch, there's a palpable sense of disappointment and/or panic among the users. Everyone seems to suspect that either Symbian or Meego is getting the ax. Most likely Meego.

We'll see, I guess, but really, ever since 2009, the N97 and the initial botched opening of the Ovi store, the writing's been on the wall. This should be a surprise to nobody.
 
I personally don't want to see Symbian go, and I want to see what the deal is with Meego.

Nokia = Symbian in my mind, and, probably like many of you, I simply want them to bring it into the 2011; that means solid email client, solid text input, solid web browser, and stability/reliability.



Well said. It was a glimpse of what would be the future -- and it was ugly.
 
What's wrong with Symbian? It's not cool anymore.

Master Jobs has proved over and over again that coolness trumps over geekness.

It also makes you waste time with menus designed by engineers and not by cool er... practical people.

But... Nokia's problem were not created by Symbian. Symbian wasn't responsible for the N97's lack of RAM or small screen problems. Symbian is a result of Nokia's problems, which seem to be pervasive.

I think the burning platform analogy is good but still too rosy.

The platform has been burning for two years and you already got burned enough to lose a limb(S^3). Now you have to deal with two other problems besides the freezing water. How you're gonna swim without the lost limb(have crutch OS). And, what part of your defective brain didn't let you feel that your limb was burning(get rid of the morons).

I say Nokia should release a test phone (N9?) with every single OS available, except for the beatified one that will sue them for that, and go with whatever does better. That's how I picked my wife....:o
 
I'd say it started with the n80. It was the first 3rd edition phone, was incredibly advanced (one of the few that wasn't QVGA), and was abandoned when Nokia couldn't fix the bugs it had.
 
What's wrong with Symbian is all the changes they made from v2 to v3.

v2 had one single form factor and one single resolution, making it easy for developers to code for, and to predict how the interface would work. My 6620 was a great phone, and more functional than my Palm m125 or my Casio BE-300.

v3 had multiple resolutions, so you actually had to have the programs coded for each resolution. It also varied between QWERTY and 12-key.

v2 had no signing requirements, anyone could just make a program for Symbian.

v3 required the programs to be signed, an expensive and tedious process that killed a lot of promising projects dead in the water.

That's actually it on the Symbian side. Then there's stuff that Nokia screwed up, by making so many slightly different phones, each one missing out an important feature so you couldn't get your holy grail phone (cept for the N95 really...)

If Symbian were done at a fixed resolution and anyone could develop programs for it without having to get them signed or go through the Ovi store, then all that's really left is improving the interface a bit, but even that isn't such a big deal.
 
Um, just because resolutions differ doesn't mean that you need to develop different executable targets for different resolutions. There are things like layout managers in most languages/runtimes.
 
i thought that at first, the n80 was nokia's first instance of introducing a new hardware feature "wifi" that hardly worked.
But the n96 was nokia's first flagship failure, one that the it hasn't recovered from.
 
One thing from the memo that I haven't seen talked about is that this guy obviously has been in Nokia now long enough to see the development of symbian and It's dirty little secrets. No question that he's talked with engineers, coders, and everyone else about what it takes to develop, update, and produce symbian software. And he must have seen that It's just too slow, complicated, and non competitive.

Look at the recent update to the n8 and c7! All these months working on an update, and all they could get finished is the dialer and one other minor change? That speaks volumes. The entire OS must be too difficult, too legacy, too non competitive to deal with anymore.

He likely saw all this on the inside and it became clear its not the best strategy. I don't know. Why else is it taking Nokia so long?
 
It's not that the OS is too difficult, it's that it's almost infinitely forked. More specifically, it's a problem with the UI - the OS isn't in bad shape. This is an artifact of handling software development in a device-driven fashion instead of as an individual product that gets delivered to all devices. They have a trunk that they all fork from for each new device and that fork is handled virtually in exclusion of the trunk and of other forks for the life of the device. Not a lot of work makes it back onto the trunk because it's a monster kludge of legacy code that nobody understands or wants to touch.

This means that ever new device has integration difficulties and issues that result from old bugs that were never fixed and that keep getting fixed over and over on each fork. Moreover, some groups will see something on one fork that they like and take that so pieces of this or that end up here or there in some willy-nilly fashion. Add to this a situation in which each regional variant and product code has some unique attributes that need to be integrated and developed and you have a situation where each fork itself has forks, and they all takes a great number of people and a great deal of time.

And this is in addition to feature applications like Maps or the browser or the store which are developed by independent teams in various parts of the world who often create solutions to problems in isolation and only find out later that there are UI or behavioral or integration inconsistencies.

And then this is all compounded several fold by the need to add new features and a bureaucracy of managers trying to put their fingers into all sorts of places. All of this is done on a team or manager basis, not with strong direction from the top.

It's 100% unmanageable. A problem of basically fractal forking.

Think of it as a cable. At the center of this cable is a solid copper wire. That's the OS. It's pretty robust. Then, around that solid copper wire is a braided shield with hundreds of interlocking individual strands and then that shield itself has some other shield on top of it with its own hundreds of interlocking strands that connect to the inner shield in some random way. And then there is another shield and another and another and as you progress along the cable it becomes this exponentially fat and tangled web of crap around the OS.

The solution is very difficult. I think that the plan with Symbian^3 was to create a master fork that would be the new trunk. A body of software that could be developed independent of device at a much more rapid pace and with fewer people. Unfortunately, the device-centric model of software development didn't change so the new trunk is already experiencing the same issue.

I think that the real solution for Symbian is:

1. Completely scrap the AVKON/S60 UI. Start from scratch with a new Qt-based UI and break all legacy ties. It must be done.

2. Massive middle management purge. Very substantial employee purge. Thousands of people. Most of them are running in circles doing the same work independently of each other for different devices.

3. Develop the software as an independent product that is deployed to a reduced number of devices. Destroy the concept of regional variants. Deliver features and bug fixes to the trunk. Take forks and only perform integration tasks to deliver software. Take updates by forking future versions of the trunk.

Or scrap Symbian altogether.
 
PR 1.1 update

Officially:

http://www.conversations.nokia.com/2011/02/04/software-update-1-1-for-new-symbian-devices/
"Most of the updated features are not directly visible to end users, but together, they will enhance the user experience of each Symbian device. Both the quality and the stability of the devices will be further enhanced. In addition to numerous tweaks and fixes, there?s also some new content.

1. Meeting requests can be accepted directly from email invitations;
2. Maps integration in email, which means people can view the meeting location on the map when the address is mentioned in the location field in the invite.
3. For Nokia N8 users:
a. New Quick Office 6.4 editor version, which offers editing possibilities and allows zooming in & out in Word documents."

Unofficially:

http://forum.dailymobile.se/index.php?topic=41297.0
"HERE IS THE CHANGE LOG:

1.Better ram management (previously, even if I opened NFS Shift with Assassins Creed & Opera, the phone would go on but it would lag & sometimes crash, now one of the games/apps exits automatically according to their priority but phone doesn't crash now as often, or lag now),
(EDIT:Also now Angry Birds does not exit abruptly during calls, I read it here in another thread & tried it out)
2.Faster camera,
3.Smoother zooming in both still capture mode & video mode,
4.Quick office 6.4 (editing also),
5.Adobe reader update (nothing much here),
6.Landscape dialer,
7.Smaller fonts in music player & certain other apps so that you can now read the entire title of the song & song number (I couldn't previously, as the song number would be seen like " 1576/25.." etc, etc)
8.Photos is now only three columns as opposed to four previously,
9.Photos does not crash as often,
10.Browser feels a little more faster,
11.Key lock does not screw up like before (Previously the key lock would not switch off the screen sometimes if the phone is used when it just boots up, you had to reboot & wait for a few minutes)
12.A little more ram after start up (not much, 5-10mb increase)
13.Log does not crash, when you go to log from the menu and select the right tab (though it still has a bug takes some time to scroll fully if you have set it for 30 days)
14.Smoother video recording (maybe due to better ram management)
15.Faster Off button (When you press the Off button to change profile inside any game the menu shows up faster),"

"17.USB OTG works better, problems with 16GB Flash Drives etc solved"
 
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