After attending the recent Symbian Foundation Developer Day in San Francisco, former VP of Palm and now Consultant Michael Mace has blogged in detail his view of what was on display. "Every time I think about Nokia and Symbian, I can't help picturing a man knee-deep in molasses, running as fast as he can. He's working up a sweat, thrashing and stumbling forward, and proudly points out that for someone knee-deep in molasses he's making really good time." You can read more on his blog.
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That's all nice and well, but will we actually see an improvement in the end product, regardless of the integration work? My suspicion is that no matter what ends up happening, Nokia will still want to sell new hardware than new software upgrades, and all the work that Symbian puts into it will be for naught.
Mr Mace is the same person who declared mobile applications dead not so long ago so while he's very eloquent and has experience coming out the wazoo he's definitely not always right.... not by a long shot.
Actually, I said native mobile apps were dying, that they were going to be replaced by web apps, and that the process would take several years. I think it's too early to judge the outcome.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong on that one, by the way. And yeah, I've been wrong about plenty of other stuff.
I recall windows 98's 'active' desktop (or was it win95 osr2?).. And how the desktop was going to blend with the web.. True, that was M$'s sales plug, but it was the first I'd heard about how web apps were going to rule the world. But here we are many years later, still running our native apps. Web apps are all good for connected offices, but the internet is still inherently unreliable, and among mobile devices even more so. I can't see that situation changing (at least, not here in Aus) for a long time..
I agree with Herr Mace about the slowly turning battleship, the 5800 and the N97 are the sign of this. They just piggy-backed a touch layer on the 7 years old S60 UI creating a mess (single click/double click, poor scrolling with scrollbar/fingers/whatever) then on the high-end model (every model will have different UI?) they throw in some messy widgets for the standby screen... They should have designed a fully touch based UI with polished, good usability. Backward compatibility is a bad excuse, the majority of the apps must be updated anyways, they don't work without D-pad. The new generation of smartphone buyers are not the S60 geeks, they want simple usability and polished base apps (browser, mail, calendar, music player) and a good 3rd party application delivery channel.
I recall windows 98's 'active' desktop (or was it win95 osr2?).. And how the desktop was going to blend with the web.. True, that was M$'s sales plug, but it was the first I'd heard about how web apps were going to rule the world. But here we are many years later, still running our native apps.
Active desktop might well have gone places had it not been crippled by it's own horridly slow implementation, Windows sidebar should have happened sooner really.
It seems to me that all handset manufacturers are nowusing the Apple iPhone as their benchmark with their so-called iPhone Killer.
In my opinion, Nokia still beat Apple in the hardware domain. But this will not stay for too long as Apple will catch up eventually.
Also Nokia needs to work very hard to ensure that Symbian will not become Nokia only OS as Android is becoming more popular with its cool factors.
" They just piggy-backed a touch layer on the 7 years old S60 "
This keeps getting said and it keeps getting answered the same way. This same software in a previous guise (EPOC on Psion) was touch from the beginning. More than 7 years ago it used a touch interface.
Having said that (again) there are still plenty of us who are completely apathetic, even turned off by touch and gimmicky prettiness in a gadget, and just want plain function. A phone is not sexy, people are sexy. A phone is a tool to do a job. That's all I want and need from a phone. Not sex. Get a life iPhone geeks.
Unregistered wrote:I agree with Herr Mace about the slowly turning battleship, the 5800 and the N97 are the sign of this. They just piggy-backed a touch layer on the 7 years old S60 UI creating a mess (single click/double click, poor scrolling with scrollbar/fingers/whatever) then on the high-end model (every model will have different UI?) they throw in some messy widgets for the standby screen... They should have designed a fully touch based UI with polished, good usability. Backward compatibility is a bad excuse, the majority of the apps must be updated anyways, they don't work without D-pad.
If Nokia is going to use a new UI and if that UI results in developers having to rewrite their apps, Nokia is dead as a smartphone contestant as far as developers are concerned. It is as simple as that.
Nokia is using their 200+ million Symbian/S60 devices as an argument to woo developers to keep developing for their platform. That 200+ million is too big anyway, because it also includes S60 1th/2nd ed and S80 (and probably even S90), and those devices are not very interesting for developers anymore. The interesting number is the number of S60 3rd ed devices out there, which is probably 100 million.
A 100 million potential customers is a lot more than the 10 million potential iPhone customers or the 1 million potential Android customers. But when Nokia starts over with a non-compatible UI, developers are facing 100 million customers for a dead platform, and zero potential customers for the new one.
Therefore, Nokia will not introduce a non-backwards compatible UI for their Touch devices.
That said, I am not happy with the way the S60 5th edition SDK has introduced touch in S60 at the API level. Stuff has been introduced in such a way that developers have to work around problems, instead of the framework taking care of things.
And still no AppStore. Even Palm now has one, and Palm has been dead for years.
The idea for the S60 UI was got from the Palm OS. But instead of touch Christian and co wanted the UI to be used with a single hand (i.e. with ITU-T keyboard). S60 is not "7 years old", it is more like 10 years old. Mango Design, who aided Nokia with design says in their site that the design was done in 1999.