I worked at Nokia when management stubbornly kept flogging the dead horse that was Symbian. It didn't work. It just wasn't good enough. Android, even in it's early versions was hardly perfect but still ran circles around Symbian. Android at the time had issues with stability, features, performance, etc. But it was a breath of fresh air compared to Symbian devices which had even more of those type of issues. And of course the iphone redefined what a smart phone should be around the same time.

Nokia actually opensourced it around that time as well. Symbian has been open source for well over a decade. This looks more like the retirement of what remains of that effort, which included the Symbian Foundation. Presumably, by now there are very few; if any, commercial users of Symbian left. So, they are parking the source code at Github for whomever still has some use for it. As you can see from the commit logs, development has been dead since 2010. I seriously doubt that is going to change.

I don't know, Nokia C7 was pretty good in 2011, Android was nowhere near it.

Granted, I never tried developing for it.

Yeah, I had a Nokia E65 (2007) and with Opera mini I was able to browse the real web normally. That's why I never quite understood what was all the "revolution" around iphone (except the touch part, but that seemed to me to be a really bad idea at the time, as someone could not stand fingers on screens ^^)

Nokia's problem was their UI, which was not controlled by Symbian, not the underlying OS. Hundreds of Symbian-OS based phones were on the market from 2001, including in the Japanese market which had the most testing. The p800 and p910 had a UI similar to iPhone and Android in 2003, 3 years before the iPhone, on 3G networks. The second version of the Symbian OS kernel from 2003 was real time i.e. a comms stack could be run together with the apps off the one CPU. Are the Linux kernel or iOS kernel real time now even?

Android OS and iOS are hacks of desktop OSes so are optimised for performance rather than battery life or memory usage; Symbian OS was designed as a mobile OS from the beginning optimising power and memory management.

It was the timing of Google's IPO which scuppered Symbian. Google were able to spend billions getting Android in place to capture Symbian's market share and customers as iPhone buzz grew the market.

I imported a Panasonic x800 from japan to Canada in 2005.

Ran Symbian 2.0

I didn't even know Symbian was available on non nokia

Was very advanced for the time, everyone was impressed here as there werent any similar devices locally available.

This was my last phone before moving over to blackberry to get on the BBM bandwagon(after the x800 fell, and hit the push button opener and popped open the screen and cracked... With no locally available parts wasn't worth it to fix....).

Never had to do anything from the dev side, but the usability/functionality was steps ahead at the time

And we know now that Google wanted its own OS so it could scrape all the data it could from phones. That wouldn’t have been possible with Symbian.

You are right that there were lots of Symbian manufacturers. Notable is that most of those were gone from the market by 2010. Windows CE eroded the market share and Nokia being so dominant meant most of its competitors did not want to be second in line for OS updates and influence. When Ericsson gave up being a phone manufacturer (they had their own UI platform for Symbian), the rest of them disappeared quickly.

By the time Nokia took ownership of Symbian, it was effectively the only company left still depending on it. The complex ownership of Symbian was one of the reasons it took many years to get operating system releases to market. Because first Symbian had to release a new version, which would only happen every few years or so and featured a lot of design by committee style decision making. And then it's users/owners would design products around that, which also took years.

It did not help that Nokia was a hardware company ran by electrical engineers that did not realize it was being bottle-necked on software. So, you would get new S60 products featuring bugs that had been fixed in other S60 products because they literally forked the same code base those were based on but before the bug had been patched. It was beyond stupid. And S60 was indeed a dumpster fire. One of the (many) issues with it was that it did not actually have any touch screen capability because Nokia killed that off around the time the rumors about the iphone started swirling. They then rushed out a version of S60 (v5.0) to "compete" with the iphone that re-created some of that. But then they also still had lots of v3.0 S60 products in the market for several years. Which did not help the messaging.

5.0 was a rush job and the initial products tanked hard. First there was the tube and then the N97. Both were products with lots of software issues. And subsequent efforts to fix it did not improve things. Most of the fixes amounted to too little too late.

Nokia did their best to kneecap other vendors using Symbian by fragmenting the base OS, which was a terrible strategy in retrospect.

But somehow they also managed to do it internally. The Series 90 Symbian UI could have been a real contender. This is a touchscreen smartphone from 2004:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710

But Nokia canned this advanced Symbian UI as soon as it shipped, and instead they started bolting features onto the already terrible keypad-driven S60 UI. Oh, and they also spun up a Linux touchscreen effort seemingly to ensure a total lack of focus and clarity about Nokia’s software strategy.

Karma.

I was so disppointed (as a customer) at the trajectory at the time. It could have been so much more and I was willing it on.

No, the OS was a mess. The UI split was the root of the nightmare.

Nokia were "running" (perhaps should read ruining) Symbian well before they bought it. They were only one of the four or was it five co-owners, but they ran rings around the others when pressuring Symbian leadership. They were the only phone manufacturer with a dedicated product support org, and their pre-prod devices were available in core engineering teams unlike Moto et al. Nokia were the key players to create a Symbian OS core without a coherent UI (Techview lol), no TCP/IP stack, no telephony stack. They helped reduce Symbian OS to swiss cheese because they were so concerned with with recouping their investment from gen 1 SOS products and terrified their competitors at the time got a tiny leg up.

Techview was a barebones UI used by Symbian devs on the x86 emulator and ARM reference boards (TI OMAP H2 and H4). It never appeared on any phone.

Indeed. So imagine doing performance profiling on a 90s UI framework from Psion and then getting feedback from S60 three months later after an integration cycle that you have a core perf or latency problem.

I was on the Networks business unit during those days, and even today, trying to use Android NDK still makes me miss Symbian C++ despite its warts, it is incredible how Android team has managed to make a mess out of it.

Symbian was not in a dictating position as Google or Apple are. Symbian was a complex company structure with major handset manufacturers having their separate agendas. People at Symbian had to walk a very tight rope catering to the demands of everyone. Not an easy task.

I had Nokia E71 (?) with Symbian, worst phone I had, I replaced that with Palm 650 (not sure I got model numbers right).

The Symbian UI was extremely clunky. I am not sure it even had touch screen. They had whole keyboard, but you had to navigate menus with arrow keys. Why not give user the full power of the keyboard, like Emacs or Vim? Why can't I have menu options on hotkeys?

I think people forgot about how bad phone UIs were before Steve Jobs' heavy focus on UI. And I am no fan of touch-based controls, still want a proper keyboard.

Symbian never had a UI. Phone manufacturers were expected to build their own. There were several; Nokia’s Series 60 would be the one most are familiar with. That sucked a lot. Nokia were terrible at software.

There’s probably a business lesson in there somewhere about how your biggest customer can become synonymous with your actual product, and you get ruined by association.

In some way they did. UIQ was a subsidary owned by Symbian that made the UI stack for Sony Ericssons P800, P900 and a few Motorola devices.

Nokia actually bought Qt to help them make a modern GUI, and had Qt/QML ported to Symbian S60. I was fortunate enough to develop a few apps on it back in the day and surprisingly - it didn't suck.

QML remains to this day superior framework to native Android UI development. Only Jetpack Compose, and SwiftUI on iOS, are starting to come on par with what Nokia had with Qt/QML over a decade ago.

Nokia actually had all the right pieces (Qt, Maemo/MeeGo, Symbian for feature phones, unparalleled engineering and manufacturing talent) for continuing their world domination, but their management was just laughably bad. It was all lost to in-fighting between teams and an inefficient middle manager heavy corporate culture it seems.

> I think people forgot about how bad phone UIs were before Steve Jobs' heavy focus on UI.

And years later they are still terrible. At least Android looks like an interface designed by people who have never seen GUIs before: GUI elements (warning) obscuring other GUI elements with no possibility to move them.

You think Android is bad... try Phosh

"Hey let's take GTK3 with all it's problems and love for empty space and put that on a phone..."

well considering that phosh has 0.000000000000000001% of the people working on it that android has…

What?? The E71 was the best phone i ever had!! I loved that thing until it was "stolen" at dehli airport...

Agree, blew me away as a step up from e61 - I did so much in both phones, loved 'SportsTracker' on them, and using proper turn by turn GPS satnav.

I missed that phone when it died, but Android on the Dell Streak was great step onwards for me.

Hard disagree. I really loved candybar phones. I just wished that Nokia/Microsoft had picked up android for their feature phones. IMO, the best OS is the one that has access to banking applications and lots of vendor support.

There’s no license though, right?