Steve's been reviewing Mine-Fields for the Sony Ericsson P800/P900/P910 and finds a good game completely ruined by poor cooperation with the rest of the smartphone. Developers coming in from other platforms, take note.
Read on in the full article.
Game developers take note - make more effort with Symbian OS
Isn't that symptomatic of a bad OS?
Seriously, app designer should not worry about ringing tone, unless their application has something to do with the incoming call.
Multitasking is an OS task, the application should not be able to break it.
Only up to a point (we're talking UIQ 2.1 here). However good the OS, providing facilities for apps to work together and ensuring that one that crashes doesn't bring the rest down, a completely rogue app that tramples all over everything will still cause problems.
I suspect Nokia's Series 60 and 80 would handle this situation a lot better, because of the lower-level OS support for multitasking, meaning that it's quite easy to kill a rogue.
Steve Litchfield
As the review states the application itself has disabled all of the task switching keys. It's not the OS that is at fault.
There should also be no problem receiving phone calls while playing a simple game like MineSweeper. Perhaps they have written some code to disable incoming phone calls too!?
An application need to know how to suspend itself as a bare minimum.
In Symbian (as any other multitasking OS) an application needs to know what to do when it is suspended. You actually have to work quite hard to break all the normal system keys (it si possible to diabel them because in some cases you might want to). This is the equiavlent of a windows program locking out the Start Menu.
Don't worry, with SOS 9.x coming in badly written commercial apps/games will be a thing of the past.
About the frozen keys; that is not possible with a badly written app unless the coder has explicitly done this. At worst, a badly written app can reboot an S60 phone but not freeze all keys while it continues happily itself.
My 2 cents 😉
akboom wrote:Don't worry, with SOS 9.x coming in badly written commercial apps/games will be a thing of the past.About the frozen keys; that is not possible with a badly written app unless the coder has explicitly done this. At worst, a badly written app can reboot an S60 phone but not freeze all keys while it continues happily itself.
My 2 cents 😉
Remember that was on UIQ 2.1, not S60.....
As you say, S60 phones are more interruptable!
Steve
Even on old Palm OS phones, there is a concept of sublaunch, so that telephony operation would cause the current process to halt, while the telephony is handled via a sublaunched process. I can't imagine any Palm OS apps behaving in a similar manner.