The Symbian mobile OS had its origins in Psion’s 32-bit EPOC platform; this was used and further developed in a consortium founded in 1998 called Symbian by the mobile phone companies Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Psion. Later, other companies, such as Samsung, used the operating system for their mobile phones. Ten years later, Symbian Ltd. was completely taken over by Nokia and successively transferred to a non-profit organization, the Symbian Foundation. Nokia acquired all rights in December 2008 and transferred them to the Symbian Foundation. In February 2010, Symbian declared it as an open-source solution. For almost a year, the foundation took care of the development of the operating system as well as the cooperation between open-source developers and the internal Symbian developers. On December 17, 2010, the Symbian Foundation announced that the source code of the Symbian platform would no longer be made available for free download. Since April 1, 2011, the Symbian code is available again and is under its license called Symbian License, which is largely not compatible with open source licenses. In January 2013, Nokia announced that it would no longer manufacture phones with Symbian.
In the end, Symbian was maintained by Accenture.
What Killed Symbian OS
Symbian lived a longer life because it was the only operating system for smartphones that would let us run the applications and the GSM/2G/3G protocol stack on the same processor. This resulted in low-cost mass production. When chipsets with a separate modem became cheap, Nokia had no way to run a monopoly. Symbian was popular because only Nokia used to deliver feature-rich set with virtually no competitor.
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The actual functionality of Symbian was given by the apps from a few developers, not Nokia or Symbian. Symbian out of the box shipped as a limited OS with a pathetic UI.
What were our options to play an AVI file with subtitles on Symbian? We had to install Smart Movie. The developing company Lonely Cat Game still exists, you can look at their description of Smart Movie – www.lonelycatgames.com/apps/smartmovie. Four applications from them including X-Plore, and LCG Jukebox used to make Symbian “modern”. If we compare the applications of Android and iOS, Symbian hardly could start the race.
After purchasing Nokia 6600, we could not open a PDF or play an AVI file. The set was dumb till we installed the correct applications. The Galaxy S wasn’t Samsung’s first Android phone, neither the initial Android releases were like that of today but one thing was clear – Android was more easy to use as a computing device. Out of the box, Android and iOS were what the users were wanting. The user of Symbian OS had to be an expert to use it in a modern way.
At that time of slow cellular internet connection, purchasing an application was quite a difficult task. Zillions of wap sites grew distributing the cracked applications. The application development for Symbian was interestingly weird. You had to use a modified version of C++ (that was a problem of ARM at that time). IDEs and SDKs were extremely high-priced, which was detrimental to small and independent developers.
Still, S60 V2 was popular because the users could install the cracked apps. After S60 V3 was introduced, installing cracked apps became difficult.
The user’s experience was horrible. An average user could never realise what is special in these smartphones. When Symbian and Nokia realized their problem, it was too late. The internet connection speed was horrible even on the top model sets (flagships).
What Killed Nokia
Nokia was a confused company. The initial price tag of their flagship and mid-range sets was very high. After a few months, they used to decrease the price tag. So the market of the used mobile phone was not attractive to the users.
They designed a lot of sets with hardware features for gaming, videography, and photography but essentially all were similar in function because there was a limited number of official specialed apps. The games developed for N-gage were easy to play on N73 to N91.
Both Apple and Samsung maintained a professional attitude toward device development, software update and pricing. Sets from Nokia were somewhat rugged, breaking N73 or N91 was not easy. But their thickness and design were not modern.
Conclusion
Nokia and Symbian probably never knew what they were developing. Some users used to configure them as smartphones downloading some apps, icons, themes and wallpapers. They were difficult to setup for usage as a computing device.
