Talk:Symbian/Archive 2

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Stichbury (talk) 16:28, 24 February 2010 (UTC) I believe it's time to start a Symbian platform page again. This page existed previously and was folded into the general Symbian OS page on the basis that they were much the same thing, and separation could be seen as a marketing ploy.

Now that Symbian is a fully open source platform it is a different entity to the previous incarnation (Symbian OS plus UI platform) and explaining that clearly on a single page is becoming more and more convoluted.

I think a new page that describes the Symbian platform in its state as an open source platform is acceptable and propose to start one by repopulating the page here. The page should be restricted to discussion of the new Symbian platform and not contain information about past releases, devices or commercial successes (built on Symbian OS, Symbian Software Ltd etc etc).

I disagree completely. The user below is also confused. Bpringlemeir (talk) 00:59, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Stichbury and disagree with Bpringlemeir. The article states "Symbian^1, as the first release, forms the basis for the platform. It incorporates Symbian OS and S60 5th Edition (which is built on Symbian OS 9.4) and thus it was not made available as open source." It incorporates but it is not Symbian OS. Also all the planned releases have nothing to do with the old Symbian OS. The page could use a bit of cleanup though. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.181.70.18 (talk) 21:52, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Can anyone find a similar situation where an OS version has been given a particular page? Ie, there is no Windows 7 or Debian Lenny pages. I guess the major problem is in the naming. This is like someone making a Linux distribution and calling it Linux 3. I get that the platform has several packages added. However, just because Microsoft bundles IE with an OS release didn't give it a new page. Also, by having separate pages some of the history is missing. History is often important to readers of an Encyclopedia. Bpringlemeir (talk) 13:31, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

I think you can compare it with Debian and Ubuntu. One is based on another and both have a wiki page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.181.70.18 (talk) 09:51, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

There certainly is a Windows 7 page, along with pages for most major releases of Windows, and for each major release of Mac OS X. --210.84.59.38 (talk) 02:25, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

screenshots?

If anyone has some screenshots of Symbian running, they could greatly add to the content of the article. SaiferPhoenix (talk) 14:07, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

the devices list only has some more recent devices

there are a bunch of other devices running Symbian that were released before those in the list. --TiagoTiago (talk) 04:26, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

oops, aparently it's no the same Symbian... --TiagoTiago (talk) 04:32, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

to prevent such misunderstanding I changed the Symbian landing page from “redirect” to “disambiguation”. I made the same mistake on first seeing the page. And I know Symbian and the history fairly well. --Krischik ^T 05:06, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

I made the same mistake too. Thanks for the disambig, but I do not think it is enough. I re-propose to merge the articles. Andries (talk) 08:43, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

UIQ

I know that UIQ is dead but still should there not be a reference to properly describe the history of Symbian? Or alternatively rephrase ”Since its creation Symbian“ to make it clear that the beginning of Symbian platform is meant (and therefore imply that Symbian OS might have had different choices if UI).

--Krischik ^T 07:19, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

touchscreens were practically nonexistent

“touchscreens were practically nonexistent” is not true either. The “nonexistent” only applies for Nokia. Other companies had touch screen phones. For example Sony Ericsson had Symbian/UIQ based touch screen phones since 2002 (Sony_Ericsson_P800). Again I think this page only exist to ”beautify” Nokia's mistakes in (A) underestimating the importance of touch screens and (B) the choice of upgrading the non-touchscreen GUI “S60” over the already touch screen GUI “UIQ” (in a case of Not Invented Here). If the vote comes up again my vote will be merge on the basis that this page is company propaganda. --Krischik ^T 05:01, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

symbian.org shutdown

Now that Symbian website will be shut down, referenced articles will need to be archived with Web Cite or Internet Archive. --Dmitry _{(talk •contibs )} 20:36, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Some will move to forum Nokia. Andries (talk) 09:16, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Off topic contents: criticisms

Most of the criticism does not address the performance of the platform/OS but the internal workings of the organization. So it belongs at either Symbian Ltd. or Symbian Foundation, but not here. Andries (talk) 19:11, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

This section needs to explain the legacy of Symbian platform which resulted in its current poor ratings, that's why it needs some historical details of bad design decisions and why did they happen; however it's focus on the events of the past is not intended. It should actually talk about current numbered releases like Symbian^1 aka S60 5th Edition, which is largely synonymous with Symbian now, its latest reincarnation Symbian^3, and its updates that should make up the cancelled Symbian^4 release. So feel free to add more information about actual shortcomings in the current numbered versions.

However I don't think this part should be moved to Symbian Foundation or Symbian Ltd., since these two entities are no longer responsible for the development of the platform. Moving to Symbian Ltd. would be a pure anachronism, since they were not actually responsible for Symbian^1 release which was made through Symbian Foundation, and the Foundation is a bad choice too because it was recently reduced to a bunch of accontants performing "licensing activities" (and when it wasn't, their activity mostly consisted of making numerious design committees, while the actual code has been approved and contributed by Nokia alone due to their ultimate control of development teams for both Series 60 and Symbian OS). So this place is only logical to talk about current events. --Dmitry _{(talk •contibs )} 20:19, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

I see your point. The root cause is the very poorly organized set of articles on Symbian. The main article should be Symbian. I have only very limited time to re-organize the many symbian related articles. Andries (talk) 13:33, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

I do not agree with the amount and quality of sourcing for the internal workings of Symbian LTD and Symbian platform. Just one unconfirmed supposedly inside story is not enough. Andries (talk) 15:59, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

I also think the internal workings of the Symbian foundation and Symbian Ltd are not very relevant. Consumers look at the peformance. Andries (talk) 17:27, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Recent merge into Symbian platform

I'm the one responsible for the merging of the following pages:

Into the following pages:

I hope everything looks fine from a user and a developer perspective. I have worked with the platform myself so I restructured and did the merge based on what I understand of the Symbian OS.

Comments and everything accepted. Thank you, Tom -- Tom Jenkins ^(reply) 11:56, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm super-confused about the talk pages. Would you explain where they ended up, and why? --Pnm (talk) 06:03, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I found that User:BD2412 further moved this page:

Symbian platform

To this page:

Symbian

Tom Jenkins ^(reply) 14:41, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I requested that move. Yet, I don't understand why you keep announcing the moves here. --uKER (talk) 14:45, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I was only trying to keep things simple since there was so much confusion regarding the Symbian articles. Plus, I was the only one who took the initiative (read: bold) to merge the articles and I therefore assumed I'd get a lot of backlash from others who didn't approve. Luckily the whole process went smoothly and someone even did the last bit by renaming Symbian platform to Symbian. You see, I was confused about the articles and about the contributors that might view my actions as unnecessary or reckless or think I'm a vandal. So I decided to write up what I did and why, and state how I rewrote it to fit together and that it wasn't mindlessly done. Makes sense? I hope that ends all confusion. -- Tom Jenkins ^(reply) 19:51, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

How about the related talk page moves? Those moves confuse me, a lot. --Pnm (talk) 01:24, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Criticism in reliable sources

The recent set of edits to the Criticism section concern me for three reasons:

They removed a paragraph about declining market share. Yes, market share is covered in the previous paragraph, but with the exact opposite POV. This content should be incorporated into the Competition section.
"Old" criticism can be published in an encyclopedia. Include the date, or applicable version, if the source mentions it, and let the reader decide for her/himself.
I question using this blog post as a reliable source. Is the writer an expert who's been published in reliable publications? Is there evidence this blog is a reliable publication?

The criticism section should cover criticism published in reliable sources. I swapped in a ZDnet link for a blog post and I'm sure there's more. --Pnm (talk) 03:07, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

I think that All about Symbian is one of the best sources on Symbian, though it has clearly a pro-Symbian bias, but if even they find the web browser wanting after a thorough comparison then it can be safely stated as such. Also, there were some other website that referred to the test by All about Symbian. Andries (talk) 20:50, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Wi-Fi

Series 60 3rd edition Feature Pack 2 models DO have Wi-Fi capabilities! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.180.219.59 (talk) 02:59, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Competition and alternatives. Device manufacturers pullout sources

"In 2009-2010, Motorola, Samsung, LG, and Sony Ericsson announced their withdrawal from the platform, leaving only Nokia and several small Japanese-only vendors.[citation needed] By the end of 2010, Samsung will totally leave Symbian including the support and service and also remove all content relating to Symbian from its website, whereas Sony Ericsson will not introduce new mobile phone with Symbian.[53][unreliable source?]"

I'm not sure if it counts for anything, but I visited the symbian foundation page on devices, http://www.symbian.org/devices (has been shut down now), on 6 November 2010, and if you selected year 2010 only devices from Nokia, Sharp and Fujitsu were listed. Yosh3000 (talk) 01:12, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Sony Ericsson Vivaz is from 2010. Andries (talk) 20:20, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Needs update

The article needs an update for Symbian Anna and new models, like Nokia X7. Andries (talk) 07:29, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Criticism not extensive

It seems to be accepted that the main reason for Symbian's sharp market share loss since the introduction of the iPhone and Android was the failure of the platform's OEMs and/or contributors (read: Nokia) to create a Symbian user interface as similarly optimized for touch interaction as these plaftorms, and I believe this should be added to the Criticism section; however, good, reliable sources that can verify this appear to be rare. Capdor (talk) 08:25, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, there is some truth in it, but touch for symbian preceded iPhone and Android in the form of UIQ. I dunno why UIQ failed. Andries (talk) 11:34, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Fair point, but I wasn't attempting to say that Symbian is in decline because it wasn't the first to have touch interaction. What I wanted to add to the article was that the touch interfaces that it does have (UIQ, S60 5th, S^3, etc.) couldn't (or can't) match the touchscreen UI experience on iOS and Android, which appears to be responsible for the decline of Symbian's market share. This is something always peripherally insinuated and suggested in device reviews and editorials on tech sites and in magazines, but never clearly enough to be used as sources. Capdor (talk) 09:18, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

s60 5th edition received bad reviews for its (resistive) mono-touchscreen UI (i.e. non-multitouchscreen). This can be stated with plenty of sources, I think. Andries (talk) 10:16, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Stephen Elop called Symbian/S60 crufty and slow to improve. Read the interview here http://allthingsd.com/20110601/after-a-rough-couple-of-days-nokias-stephen-elop-live-at-d9/?refcat=d9 Andries (talk) 09:34, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

Don't even get me started on Symbian. I have almost 6 years experience with Symbian app development. Touch UI support in Symbian is a joke and just a quick hack - old AVKON/EIKON slapped together with mouse event emulation, which was there for a long time (that's why you can connect mouse to Nokia N8 and use the UI with mouse cursor). The UI controls were not designed for proper touch UI and multitouch support - these are just PC-style controls which are usable with mouse, keyboard or pen. There's no system support for gestures, at all - the only thing the developers can do is to roll their own. Support for touch text input was also added as a quick hack - at first it was fullscreen, then they added proper non-fullscreen keyboard, which requires the application to know that it wants to support non-full screen keyboard ... Existing applications are not aware of multitouch. Symbian^3 is just more layers added on top of the legacy code. Debugging tools DON't exist or can be barely qualified as debugging helpers. There's no support for developers to get application stack trace - when panic occurs, you're screwed. When "debugger" is lucky enough to catch the KERN-EXEC 3 before system kills the application, I haven't seen any stack trace even one time (just some assembly code, probably in ROM). Hell, Nokia even screwed GDB in N9. The "debugger" crashes either the phone or (if you're lucky) only itself, when the application crashes, or it may happen randomly. You can barely singlestep during the "debugging" session, the "debugger" will usually skip some code, continue with "full" execution or just plainly crash. Breakpoints don't work most of the time. Capabilities are joke - they create annoying capability matching problems between DLLs, yet knowledgeable developer can crash the phone with providing incorrect arguments to system services (even by accident). Most APIs are buggy, incomplete and don't behave consistently on different phone and firmware models. It's just a tip of the iceberg. 89.67.144.21 (talk) 20:18, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

This is all specialized, inside knowledge but if you have some reputable sources for it then at least some of it can be added. From an outsider perspective relating to what you wrote, it is clear that Symbian OS development went slow when compared to e.g. Android or iOS. And also that growth of the number of applications was slow. Andries (talk) 20:25, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

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Marketing name...I nearly fell of my chair

Classic Nokia...sounds almost like sybian! Who thought up that name as it sounds like a sex toy that has been around since the 1980s. I wonder how many people are going to feel comfortable with a sy(m)bian (sic)? In English pronunciation there is little difference between the two due to the soft em sound. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.156.27.217 (talk) 17:39, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved -- JHunterJ (talk) 12:04, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Symbian → Nokia OS – Nokia already change the name of Symbian to Nokia OS(e.g. Nokia Belle Asiaworldcity (talk) 18:22, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.

Oppose, Split the open source Symbian should stay here, the new closed source Symbian became Nokia OS, so Symbian still exists, as an open source system. 70.24.248.211 (talk) 06:34, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Any additional comments:

There is already an article called Nokia OS. What should be done with that content?--174.93.169.157 (talk) 20:22, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

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Request to SPLIT this article.

I came here to fin some basic facts on Symbian, specifically the history of 2007-08 and ... I was sure that they were "here" last time I looked, but now there seems to be at least this one gaping hole: the dates in the Symbian version history are incomplete, with the most crucial one,. the release of ^3 missing..

Yes it's good to try and get alignment of titles and content but the most important thing is to arrange the available data so that it is easy to search and that means going from the general to the specific smoothly. It really is irrelevant if there are many articles, the key is their relationship with one another and that the degree of granularity remains consistent within each.

It helps nobody to have an article which attempts to cover intricate and arcane detail at the same time as giving the broad overview. Sadly this article seems to do just that, missing critical dates off the timeline while giving a mass of impenetrable technical detail all wrapped up in a vast, rambling and barely coherent article.

Sorry, I know everyone's been working hard on it, but this article needs splitting not more mergeing and that's just the way it is. If we go on like this we'll end up with one mountain of an article simple headed Mobile Technology!! Merges SEEM like a logical thing but this article demonstrates that it often isn't as simple as that. LookingGlass (talk) 20:30, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

The article history of Symbian exists. I have to agree that these articles are not very coherent and the history of symbian article was originally not even a history article. Andries (talk) 16:59, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Huh?

"The current form of Symbian is an open-source platform developed by Symbian Foundation in 2009, as the successor of the original Symbian OS."

Someone update this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.202.34.103 (talk) 21:27, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

P990i - exception Symbian based phone ahead of its time

Sony Ericson developed the P800, P910 and then the P990i. All were Symbian based. The phones were ahead of their times. They ran Symbian and the clever thing was that they were touchscreen (operated by a stylus), with both a numeric keypad and a full QWERTY keyboard.

It is without doubt the best phone I have ever used!!

It is a shame, that this phone was beaten firstly by Apple and then Android phones. If SonyEricson, had continued development of the P990i, there may well have been a challenger to the iPhone and Android. The P990i, did not have a centralised App marketplace (which was a strength of Apple iPhone and then later Android phones). Also, if they changed the screen from a stylus operated to finger touchscreen it would have been a step forward (although it was possible to use your finger, it was nevertheless delicate screen).

When I say the phone was ahead of its 'time' - let me explain - it was a time when people carried iPods (for music) and classic phones (for phone calls). The P800 (and later series) was everything in one.

When Steve Jobs, bragged about the iPhone having 'facetime' this was non-sense. The SonyEricson P990i had a front facing camera and I had been using 3G video-dialing well ahead. Even with the iPhone, you could n't use the network, you had to be on Wireless to use video calling. (this feature may be available on older P800 or P910... I can't remember, but the P990i was 3G).

I must admit, I still miss the P990i. It is a fantastic phone (both in physical design, clever flip out keypads) and clever in using the phone.

This is a failure on Sony, not to develop this phone further and match it when the Apple iPhone came out. Sony was wowed by the iPhone user interface, they forget they had stopped development on the P990i.

I preferred the P990 ahead of the Nokia range of Symbian based smartphones.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.25.19.47 (talk) 11:03, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

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