Oh, I got a Symbian phone when I was 16 (I think?) and of course I did try writing native apps for it. Yes, the SDK was horrendous. The C++ dialect was so weird I was never able to make sense of it. (I probably could with my current experience.) I just remember that there were many, many methods that ended with L, this meant "Leave", and this was some bizarre replacement for exceptions, apparently. There were more types of strings than I could count. The naming conventions for things were very weird. The hello world consisted of something like 5 classes and took a minute to build. When you wanted to actually run the thing you made, you had two options: running it in an emulator that took several seconds to process inputs, or running it on your phone via some connector app that only worked 1/3 of the time.

I didn't get very far with native Symbian development. J2ME was just so much easier, and ran on everything under the Sun (pun intended).