Model: Symbian: Platform / Feature pack: Nokia 3230. Nokia had been the best partner of Symbian and it had produced a large number of hones with this OS.See all Nokia phones with information about the operating system and platform with its feature packs in a summary. It originated in the early 90s and lasted for a little lesser than two decades. The Symbian OS had dominated the market for quite a significant time period with its user interface versatility and attractive features.

Unsurprisingly Nokia is keeping officially schtum this time around. Or at least its primary supporter over the years вЂ” Nokia вЂ” will cease producing any new handsets running the OSВ (or so says the FT). Symbian v9.1.This summer the veteran Symbian platform, which started life back when handhelds werenвЂ™t phones but PDAs, will quietly pass into development history.

From PDA Roots To Candybar PhonesSymbianвЂ™s origins are firmly routed in the PDA world. So what better point to take a look back at the platform that powered so many devices and dominated the mobile landscape for so long. Regardless, itвЂ™s certainly true that Symbian is the platform of a bygone 2G era, when phones were phones first and foremost, not todayвЂ™s data-gobbling pocket computers.All of which means that even if Symbian lingers a little longer вЂ” Nokia is apparently intending to sell off existing Symbian phone stock, so that may well take some time judging by how sales have dropped drastically (it now sells more Windows Phones than Symbian devices) вЂ” its end times are approaching. But SymbianвЂ™s assets have been passed over to Accenture to maintain, and itвЂ™s no longer open source, soВ its days as an active development platform are likely numbered. Symbian does still power a fair amount of phones in China, for instance. On the Chrome OS platform, including a free, unlimited, no-log browser VPN.ItвЂ™s technically possible smaller entities might look to keep the Symbian flame alive, as the former Nokians, Jolla, are attempting to do with MeeGo.

Soon a whole army of touchscreen iPhones and iClones were crowding into a mobile playground that had formerly been NokiaвЂ™s and SymbianвЂ™s to rule.Unlike Symbian, these incoming platforms were starting fresh вЂ” designed for the Internet era, not the quaint pocket PDA. The iPhoneвЂ™s arrival was of course compounded by AndroidвЂ™s debut in 2008. This was Symbian cooking on gas.The crunch time for the OS came when AppleвЂ™s iPhone arrived in 2007 to usher in the capacitive touchscreen era, putting a new more fluid touch-centric user experience at the fore and elbowing out keypads, Qwertys and fiddly menu systems that relied on wielding a stylus to navigate. HereвЂ™s FujitsuвЂ™s Symbian-based F-022 clamshell handset.SymbianвЂ™s clear run extended right through to the mid noughties, as Nokia pumped out a steady stream of candybars, flips phones and other weird/wonderful form-factors from cylinders to spherical squares, all powered by its various flavours of the OS.

Add to that,В Android was free for mobile makers to use vs SymbianвЂ™s licensing fee model. Symbian was stuck in its own folder-strewn rut, desperately needing to evolve to compete in the slick new mobile world order. And although SymbianвЂ™s PDA roots incorporated touchscreen tech this older generation of resistive screen tech вЂ” which went hand in glove with fiddly drop-down menus designed to be pecked at with a stylus вЂ” bore no relation to modern touchscreens that focused on fingers and true touch computing.All these factors gave Android and iOS a huge advantage over the decade-old Symbian platform. Of course Symbian could run apps too, but all the various flavours of the OS meant its app ecosystem was far more fragmented than its rivals. They were built with the touchscreen at their centre, and they offered a perfect platform for delivering apps. Their only heritage was connected computing.

Two more versions of the OS followed, Symbian Anna, which brought browser speed and text input improvements and ushered in a new rounded icon-based UI. But this was still playing catch up with Android and iOS.В Too little, too late remained SymbianвЂ™s problem, as its two rivals streaked ahead with their own platform evolutions and went on to sew up the smartphone market between them.In a last ditch attempt to fix Symbian fast, Nokia took development back in house. Although, at this point, development work was already pushing into 2010 meaning Symbian continued falling further behind.Symbian^3 added multiple homescreens with support for widgets, faster graphics and scrolling, pinch to zoom, visual multitasking with app previews and switching, among other new features. It wasnвЂ™t until Symbian^3 (demoed below in a Nokia promo video) that a more fully-featured touch-centric experience started to emerge. Last ditch efforts to spur Symbian onNokia, the main Symbian user ergo the company with the most to lose as the OS fell behind, made the decision to open source Symbian in 2008 to try to accelerate its evolution to compete with its younger and more agile rivals.В A rebooted version of Symbian designed for a touchscreen eraВ was to be created by merging various platform strands вЂ” including S60 and technology from UIQ and MOAP(S) вЂ” to be pooled into a new unified touch-focused platform.The first touch-enabled release of the new OS, Symbian^1 (orВ Symbian S60 v5) вЂ” is shown below running on the first device to carry it, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, released at the end of 2008.But the usability gap between Symbian^1 and its upstart rivals remained a gulf. A crushing combination for any long-in-the-tooth technology.

After all, they were the key strengths that had allowed it to travel so far and find its way on to so many devices for so many years in the first place.вЂњI remember Symbian as that upstart competitor in the GEOS/BeOS/Palm days. SymbianвЂ™s development challengesLee Williams, formerly the executive director of the Symbian Foundation вЂ” the entity created to oversee the open sourced Symbian in 2008 вЂ” takes the view that while the PDA heritage of Symbian was initially off-putting, the platformвЂ™s robust underlying architecture and flexibility gave it the ability to power through its legacy past. This summer itвЂ™s also going to stop producing even the remaining few Symbian devices in its portfolio.After some 15 years, many of them as the leader of its field, itвЂ™s the end of the line for this venerable technology stack. SymbianвЂ™s work was almost done.At the start of this year Nokia confirmedВ that the Symbian-based 808 PureView вЂ” announced in 2012 with much fanfare thanks to its 41MP camera sensor вЂ” would be the last device it makes on the Symbian platform. But it had taken far too long to level the playing field. The problem was Android already had all those things.The old folder based menu hierarchy that Symbian had carried with it from its PDA days had finally been entirely flattened.

In short, Symbian Belle was great but years too late.вЂњThough the apps started looking nice and modern , the OSВ itself (Symbian^3 andВ SymbianВ Anna) was still lookingВ dated,вЂќ says Chander. And that ultimately dragged down the more modern-looking apps now being developed for it. But what about the view from the development trenches? Roopesh Chander, a Qt developer who dabbled with writing Symbian apps after Nokia added support for the cross-platform development framework to Symbian in 2011 вЂ” having found Symbian C++ вЂњtoo arbitraryвЂќ and вЂњcomplexвЂќ вЂ” argues that in the post-iPhone years, Symbian struggled simply because it remained dated vs the competition.Even though Nokia improved the development environment for Symbian by adding support for Qt вЂ” meaning developers no longer needed to struggle with Symbian C++вЂ™s random API call names and requirements for even simple things to have low levelВ setting upВ of memory and stacks вЂ”В the platform itself continued to show its age.

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