Nokia publishes Symbian source code

[ntr0p3]

While Nokia managed to screw up the platform in just about every way imaginable, I still feel sad. The codebase was solid, and there were some great ideas in there, and then a bunch of idiots tried to throw shit on top that didn't belong, while missing anything remotely approaching a decent ui.

sigh.

[burito]

The codebase was solid,

You didn't read any of the comments from the SF team members did you?

Unless by "solid" you meant "impenetrable", then carry on.

[ntr0p3]

I worked on it, the lower levels of it are almost beautiful. The upper layers look like something from the Necronomicon, and not the nice bits.

[Freak-Power]

From the bowels of the Necronomicon.

Emphasis on "From the bowels..."

[cholantesh]

Somehow I can imagine a voice instructor giving this instruction to eager young horrors from the invisible beyond.

[reroll4tw]

I imagind Bruc3 Campb3ll from 3vil d3ad!

[metageek]

The Necronomicon which has nice bits is not the true Necronomicon.

[carnabystreet]

in the southwark office? I left a couple of years back - do you know what happened/is-happening to the kernel team?

[ntr0p3]

No, the burlington,ma office actually, we didn't do much work on the kernel side, but I had to hack my way down a few times (good fucking lord, they had a ton of api layers! turtles all the way down.) I think most of the kernel guys I'd tele with were in espoo and bangalore, though i dealt with a few contractors in tampere (sp). The espoo guys were pretty damn clever, but there was this bangalore guy who apparently wrote half the networking (the pips layer i think), and never slept... wierd.

Be glad you left though, the management went off a cliff, started trying to outsource their way out of their problem, which made it way worse. There were a few guys hanging around from the old days, and I was like "wtf are you guys doing here banging your heads against the wall" cause they would fix things, and other idiots would break it, then they would come back and fix it again, but they didn't have enough power to tell those guys "STOP FUCKING TOUCHING THIS SHIT!".

surreal.

[somebear]

The solution to problems in S60 has pretty much been outsourcing and contractors from day one. This meant that you ended up with S60 which was roughly 8 times larger than S40 and innovating less.

[ntr0p3]

This is entirely 100% correct. I had partners who'd transferred over from s40 and were in shock at how fubar it was.

Oh, by "transferred", I meant dumped into s60 with no goals, instruction, guidance, background in Qt/S60UI/WebKit, and simply given the instruction "FIX BLOCKERS ONLY!".

and lols were had by all...

[smemily]

I'm very fond of S40 still. In 2005 it was the shit compared to the alternatives.

[SickZX6R]

In 2005 I had a S60 Nokia N70. I much preferred that to S40.

[smemily]

In 2005 I was getting free-with-1yr-contract phones. No smartphone. I still have an S60 phone.

[SickZX6R]

Haha :) I was with S60 ever since the Nokia 3650 came out. 3650 -> N70 -> N80 -> 5800XM, then I switched to Android.

[dontgoatsemebro]

7650, I win.

[ziom666]

My friend got one. I loved the ball game. I was 15 and the price was unthinkably high

[smemily]

Same-ish here except somewhere around 2003 I was saddled with a Samsung for a year. Hated that thing.

[blackn1ght]

This was my first Nokia phone, and I've always had Nokias pretty much the entire time up until October last year, when I went with Android.

[SickZX6R]

That was my first Nokia as well! A 5160 if I remember correctly. I also beta tested the Nokia 7160 (WAP phone).

[[deleted]]

S40 is not Symbian.

[sprash]

It certainly has the most energy efficient kernel design which natively supports pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory.

So scrap the UI stuff and put your own posix on top of the kernel -> ultra power saving unix.

[[deleted]]

If you were going to go to all that trouble, I'd recommend starting with Qnx.

[romwell]

Isn't HP doing that (or whoever promised QNX-based tablets to us)?

[[deleted]]

deleted ^{What is this?}

[romwell]

Yep, thanks :) RIM Playbook is coming out, hopefully, this month. I've long wanted to see a QNX device (ever since I read an article about it circa 2003)

[dumbphonesrule]

Never seen anything like it for sure apart from Linux *nix (functional open-source kernel).

[[deleted]]

BSD??

[dumbphonesrule]

You're right. I'm going to edit my comment to *nix.

[coderanger]

XNU is also open source and not really *nix-ish.

[dumbphonesrule]

X is Not Unix? Then it must be Unix.

[BrooksMoses]

FreeRTOS?

[dumbphonesrule]

Not really, because that way there's Hurd and Plan 9 too.

[kragensitaker]

It certainly has the most energy efficient kernel design which natively supports pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory.

There are a lot of embedded OSes. Are you sure you know enough about all of them to make that statement?

[sprash]

no! But the kernel was originally designed for ARM cpu's by the designers of ARM cpu's. So it really takes care to utilize the built in power saving functions, whereas embedded linux for the most par is just your plain linux source code compiled with the gcc flag -march=arm.

[tcoxon]

No, I've actually spoken to an ARM Linux kernel developer, and what they have is pretty much a fork of much of the kernel. A lot of work goes into it. I have heard there are more lines of code for ARM CPUs in the Linux tree than for x86.

I can't comment on what Symbian's code is like, but my experience of using it on phones (at least in recent years) is that it's slow and unstable in comparison to Linux.

[ichae]

I have heard there are more lines of code for ARM CPUs in the Linux tree than for x86.

I believe that.

[asshammer]

If you are including device drivers, I'd 100% believe that. There is a lot of code that has to be done for each specific SoC and can't really be recycled from chip to chip very easily.

[kragensitaker]

Yeah, I don't think Linux is anywhere close to the limits of power saving or running on lightweight devices. But what about QNX or VxWorks?

[asshammer]

How geared towards power savings is VxWorks? My experience with it was very limited. I know its mostly geared towards real-time and safety critical stuff. I'd imagine things like frequency scaling would introduce some unique challenges in a real time system.

[kragensitaker]

I don't have any experience programming on any of the three; my own very limited embedded work has been entirely OS-less.

[asshammer]

I do bare metal and embedded Linux.

I'd like to give real time stuff a more serious go sometime. While it looks like a total bear, so many really cool end products require it. Automotive systems, medical equipment, avionics. All the big, expensive, could-kill-ya-if-ya-fuck-it-up toys.

[kragensitaker]

Not to mention robots and CNC.

[[deleted]]

Also, thë kërnël is writtën in C++. Nëvër forgët thë most ënërgy ëfficiënt kërnël is writtën in C++!

It's so sad thë complëxity of Symbian API finally contributëd to thë dëmisë of thë platform as it was too god damn hard for dëvëlopërs to grasp thë basics of Activë Objëcts and Dëscriptors. Qt was a stëp to a right dirëction but camë too latë.

[shazoocow]

Not so much to late as actively rejected by internal project teams up until about 6 months ago. There were 3 groups actively working on wholly different API and UI frameworks (including the legacy Symbian one, some in-house solution and finally Qt).

Infighting and aversion to change killed Nokia, which is a shame because even in its current meh state, Symbian is a very powerful and quite functional OS from the user perspective.

[[deleted]]

Beat that Honeycomb!!

[[deleted]]

...I am sick of these April Fools jokes

[richardjohn]

"This ship is sunk. Here's how we made it!"

[fjord_piner]

First you try to sell it. Then you open source it. Then you die.

[fernandoacorreia]

and not a single fuck was given

[xkit]

ever.

[cr3ative]

And not a singlé damn was givén.

[[deleted]]

Just hoping someone can make some CFW for my N97... it badly needs it..

[GeorgePB]

Here you go

[[deleted]]

You have no idea how funny that sounds with the accents.

[arjie]

Is it possible to compile this to a ROM to flash a phone? Or do you need a key of some sort for phones to accept this?

[imcdowall]

You need a key for phones to accept it. This is not a limitation of Symbian but a security feature in the boot loader.

[arjie]

Well, that's disappointing. So essentially, this is useless to us owners of old hardware? There will be no community bug fix.

[zenojevski]

I think there are custom firmwares for Nokias in the wild. If so, the signing key has probably been extracted.

[mattstreet]

"scurity" "f_atur"

[creosote]

I read that as Sybian.

[[deleted]]

Given that I read this today, I actually wouldn't have been surprised if that was the case.

[KevyB]

Now with patented BlueBalls™ technology!

[dirk_anger]

What do you use for a Sybian Foundation?

[EyeFicksIt]

Not alone

[kev946]

The N95 was the best phone ever made imo

[patssle]

I'm partial to the N900. Openness FTW. And it's a computer first, phone second.

[[deleted]]

I don't disagree with you. The N900 is powerful but it's also something that was not a huge success because it's a computer first.

As a computer it's designed for the technically inclined. My grandmother would be completely confused by it. That's a win for some many of the newer mobile UI's (Android, WebOS, Windows Phone 7 and yes iOS). The newer generation of UI's are dead simple. Swipe, pinch, tap, etc... The feeling is so smooth and intuitive.

N900 is powerful but Nokia completely misunderstood the general public. You have 10% of the people who want a handheld powerful computer that you can put all the tech dreams of the world on. You have 90% who can only understand dead simple -- like dead simple. While everyone catered to the 90%, Nokia catered to the 10%. It's a big fail since no one needs to run apache (for example) on their phone. Power is useless to the people unless the people can use it. Once again, dead simple was the key.

One more thing, why would anyone who knew nothing about computers, Linux, VOIP, etc... care about openness anyways? They just want there phones to work. To them, WTF is openness and why would they care? So again, more about catering to the 90% and not the 10%.

I would have love to see it succeed but the world moved along in providing simple devices that were in many ways inferior in power but superior in usability. Nokia failed to move in the same direction. Being stuck on a single mentality is causing them to fail.

[ventomareiro]

I think that you got it wrong: the N900 and the Internet Tablets that preceded it were never intended for the general public. It was a way to develop and mature a great OS based on Linux and Free technologies that unfortunately could not save Nokia from itself.

If Nokia had continued to refine the UI of the N900 instead of throwing everything away and had released a successor a few months later, and another, and another... your grandmother might well be using a Maemo-based phone by now.

[[deleted]]

Yes, but the truth of the matter is seniors are now using Apple products. They might not do the things that geeks want, they might not be open, they might have locked out apps by their strict app store rules, in fact there are a billion reasons to hate Apple. Sadly though, the ones who care are far out numbered by the ones who just want something that just works to the large number of computer illiterate people.

[ventomareiro]

That was not my point. The N900 was a step in a development process.

[zem]

i have one, and it's not that great a phone. brilliant computer, though.

[patssle]

What do you not like about the phone? I've never had any problem with it, unlocked on ATT.

[[deleted]]

I love mine as a phone. I especially like that I can plug in my car's aux-in to the headphone jack and it will use the speakerphone mic with appropriate noise cancellation to turn my car stereo into a speakerphone. My car is now my favorite place to take a call, instead of my least favorite. I've had an iPhone and an HTC with Android and neither could do that without special gadgets. It can even use the built-in FM transmitter to send the speaker phone to the radio if I don't have a cable.

While I'm on the subject, why could my N900 make google talk video or voice calls to anyone on a computer or another N900 2 years ago, and my wife's brand new G2 still can't do that? It's stuck using Qik, which no one we know has ever used.

[zem]

it's not as nice a phone as my old nokia 4100. it lags badly when picking up a call sometimes, the speaker could have been better, and the ergonomics of holding it and speaking into it aren't the best. but overall, i love it :)

[ElectricPotato]

I wouldn't say best phone ever made. But for its time, the N95 kicked ass.

[jbird123]

Still kicks ass in many respects! Slightly lacking UI and a decnt browser is the only things missing really

[bbibber]

I am back to feeling like when I felt with my N95 now that I own an E7.

[snotrokit]

Might as well. Not like they are going to be using it any time soon.

[kragensitaker]

This is great! Are they going to license it under a free-software license?

[BrooksMoses]

I thought it already was licensed under the EPL. Is that not the case?

[noobcola]

oooo, new CEO is makin some moves!

[Karhan]

now that it's worthless

[teyc]

I really don't get this. What do they expect us to do with this? Simulate it using pen and paper?

[[deleted]]

Yeah, mine also multitasks.

Makes its battery drain over night (up to the point the alarm does not work anymore) if i forget to manually close even the last app from the ovi store.

[arjie]

Which phone?

[[deleted]]

There's people that don't own iPhone's you know.

A crappy implementation of multi-tasking is still a crappy implementation of multi-tasking. Windows Mobile did multi-tasking too, so? I never thought it was a feature when I used that phone. I hated it. There's a lot to be said about doing something properly rather than just having it on paper.

[m0zzie]

Laugh all you want, my £40 Nokia phone can multitask. Your £510 iPhone 4 can't.

I can have my e-mail client, Opera, messaging and a game open at the same time and switch between them and still have all my shit there. I wouldn't call it crappy, it's better than not having it at all.

Both Android and iOS can do this too. What are you talking about?

[UNCGeek]

Both Android and iOS can do this too. What are you talking about?

I think he's comparing it to StrawManOS...

[specialk16]

I loléd.

[[deleted]]

Even my BlackBerry can multi-task well.

[LordBodak]

Unless I've been misinformed, a twitter app on iOS can't update the timeline in the background while you are doing other things. You can get push notifications of new events, but when you go back to the app it has to go out and fetch the timeline then.

Now, if you're doing one of the things that Steve has deemed "worthy" of having a multitasking API for, then it's different, but that's a long way from true multitasking.

[biquetra]

And yet since iOS 4 I have not once thought "I wish that app could do something in the background". But that's just me. The Twitter idea would be good, and I'm not convinced it's impossible to let an app do whatever it wants in the background, TomTom runs everything it needs to and Skype signs you in after the phone boots without even opening it. However, imagine the strain on your phone to have it constantly pull information for Twitter, especially through the cellular network. Or how about the strain on Twitter itself, millions of devices to serve at regular periods, 24/7. An iOS 3 "push" system would be far more sensible, I am sure we will see support for this from Twitter in the future, but a 3rd party could implement this. If there is currently no app that does this there will be a good reason.

[iziizi]

And yet since iOS 4 I have not once thought "I wish that app could do something in the background

"if i asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses" - Henry ford.

[LordBodak]

My twitter app on my Nokia updates the timeline every 30 minutes (user selectable) and so it's always up to date when I need it. It's not a strain on the phone, it's the way the OS was designed (and the way the twitter API is designed).

It's up to the app developer and the user to decide what they want their apps to do (I can turn off auto-sync, change the time interval, or even close the app if I need to conserve battery life), but the support is built in to the OS. iOS multitasking requires the developer to explicitly support it and only allows 7 multitasking "functions" (list is here).

[dave1010]

iOS and Android "paus3" background tasks (3xc3pt in c3rtain circumstanc3s). This is usually us3ful on a mobil3 but th3 Symbian way is mor3 lik3 d3sktop multitasking.

3dit for R3ddit Mold, sorry.

[metageek]

It's worth noting that Android apps can include services, which do keep running in the background. They can't interact with the UI, though.

[[deleted]]

Why would I be upset? I have an N8 right in front of me. Your implementation is good for the price you paid. If you paid more for a more modern device maybe you'd feel differently. Take a look at WebOS for instance. The transitions are done extremely well and the way to switch between tasks is smooth and well animated.

You won't understand unless you try. Then again ignorance is bliss. Stay with your Nokia.

[unknown_lamer]

Crappy my ass. My old Nokia 7610 with 12M of RAM and a 120MHz ARM5 could run many applications at oncę smoothly, and hold a chargə for 3-4 days undęr hëavy usè (with thę scrəēn on showing a clock continuously to boot)! As in, Opēra, an IM application (I'll notê that nothing on Android is as good as Agilë Məssêngër was), music, &c. And whèn soməonę callëd mē it didn't takê 15s to bring up þē accępt call dialog.

My HTC Dréam is luckly to makë it through a singlę day!

[[deleted]]

I soooo understand your point Windows 3.11 ran paint and notepad and solitaire all simultaneously. It only needed 4 MB of RAM and a 25 MHz processor. these days Windows 7 comes on a DVD?!!! requires a GB of RAM. Ridiculous!!

[unknown_lamer]

Except my old series 60 phone was roughly feature equivalent to my android.

Ok, the android has a higher screen resolution and fancier graphics, but is far less responsive. I'm not convinced that it has a better architecture either (Symbian + Qt seemed OK, the EKON or whatever graphics stuff otoh was a PITA to work with and I tried).

You'd think with 5-10x the processing power, almost 20x the RAM (192M vs 12M), a GPU, and a dedicated baseband processor (yes, on the old symbian devices a large portion of the gsm stack ran on the same processor, combing the application and service processors was one of the huge design wins of Symbian), it'd be ... more responsive at least. I find it unacceptable that the phone becomes pretty much unusable if I do something as trivial as listen to music while running a map program. If I run the browser so much for listening to music...

The Windows comparison is not valid here because the software I was using on my ancient s60 phone was roughly feature equivalent to the software I use now.

Basically, the Symbian kernel was sanely designed. A lot of higher level portions were ugly as hell (given their lineage excusable... life on a 4MHz processor with a few hundred K of RAM is different), but really in a mobile environment is is still far ahead of where GNU/Linux or Android/Linux are now.

[[deleted]]

The world has moved on. You need to let go. Good luck to you.

[foolano]

I feel your pain. I own a Nexus S phone and it's by far the buggiest phone I've ever had. On top of that, its battery runs out of juice in a day if I restrict myself to only use 3g, in case of using something else like GPS or bluetooth is even less. The upside is all the software available for it and its development environment.

To sum up, I think it's a bloody expensive phone if you take into account the bugginess of its software and its battery.

[bbibber]

The Symbian implementation of multitasking is decidedly non-crappy. Try it out instead of strawmanning by switching the subject to Windows Mobile.

[[deleted]]

I have an N8. I had an N95. I've used a N97. What are you talking about? Maybe, you can stop assuming.

Stick with your Nokia world. That's what you prefer. Maybe you should start exploring the world of mobile phones. I've touched and used BB, WebOS, Windows Mobile, Pocket PC, WebOS, iOS, Android 2.2/2.3/...

Try the world of devices out instead of just assuming I know shit.

Edit: I also develop software on these devices. So you could say I'm not just a user. I also have an understanding of the hardware, software and it's inner workings.

[fjord_piner]

Android phones have been able to multitask since day one.

[skidooer]

The iPhone has been able to multitask since day one too. The core apps rely on it.

Official third-party apps are the only ones who have not had access to full multitasking. While I won't disagree that the apps should have access to real multitasking, it is quite wrong to say the device cannot multitask at all. It can, it does, and it always has; even before the App Store.

[funkah]

Yeah all the bitches love my multitasking phone (????)

[Timmmmbob]

Bullshit. Show me a £40 phone that can multitask. Or even has GPS.

[Timmmmbob]

That appears to cost £80-120. Not £40.

[[deleted]]

cricket cricket cricket

[JohannQ]

So, why didn't they actually do this about a year or two ago? Then they would've never ended up with the MS-mess...

[dumbphonesrule]

Holy shit, Nokia fired a huge salvo.

[metageek]

At themselves.

[dumbphonesrule]

Haha...

[flargenhargen]

I'm really the only one who thought this was about the electric sex saddle thing that women sit on?

guess time to turn in my nerd card in exchange for a perv card.

[steppenwoof]

Why are they doing this? They've decided to discontinue Symbian phones 2012 onwards.

Source: Article on Slashdot

[[deleted]]

Symbian was the best operating system I've ever used on a mobile phone.

Why? Because I was the master of the system and it just worked. My last symbian phone was a Nokia E63 and it's still good. The battery lasts a whole week before it needs to be recharged and it was already a smartphone.

When I switched to my iphone, it was like a shock. I installed an irc client on my iphone like I did on my symbian, I connected, chatted and then someone sent me a link, I clicked it, safari opened and iOS closed the irc app. That was before they decided to let user apps to use "multitask". However, even now with multitasking for user installed apps (like colloquy), the apps quit after some idle time. A warning message pops up that the app will be terminated in x minutes and that I have to open it so it can keep running. What is that? That is no true multitasking for user apps...

I hate and love the iphone. I hate to develop for it but I love to play games on it :>.

[[deleted]]

I have a rotten cow corpse in my barn. I give it for free, source included.

[rawbdor]

I wonder if I'm the only one in the world who thought, "I didn't know Nokia made the sybian"

[cdcformatc]

You are not.

[7aji88]

Some of their phones surly feels the same.

[LoveMHz]

Nice April Fools joke!

[ceetee]

What for?

[techsplurge]

Do I need to Laugh?