Nokia's 808 PureView Officially the End of the Symbian Line 102
Snirt writes "Symbian is now officially dead, Nokia confirmed today. In the company's earnings announcement that came out a little while ago, Nokia confirmed that the 808 PureView, released last year, was the very last device that the company would make on the Symbian platform: 'During our transition to Windows Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian,' the company wrote. 'The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia.'"
That's too bad, RIP Symbian... (Score:5, Interesting)
What is worse is that it is hard to find any existing Symbian devices...
For all the drawbacks of Symbian, the combination of a camera that put to shame any other cellphones, and the built-in capabilities of the phone (e.g. a complete SIP stack, integrated with the regular phone functionality) is still unmatched. Even Nokia themselves cannot replicate the hardware capabilities of the 808 in a Windows phone, because the OS can't handle them...
Re:I didn't like it (Score:2, Interesting)
Nokia going w Android is a brilliant move. Maybe we can get back to the indestructible mobile device of yesteryear.
I was a solid and loyal Nokia fan for 10+ years until Symbian forced me to rethink.
I remember cycling to work, dropping my nokia into the street. Came apart, battery on the road. No problem worked fiine. Cracked screen or whatnot, worked fine. Those things would not die!
tl;dr Nokia phones were famous for rock solid, abuse-proof hardware. Hope they attach this to a proper OS and live again.
Re:Sorry to see Symbian go (Score:4, Interesting)
well, of symbian^4 (or 4 or wtf it was supposed to be, who the fuck knows since apparently whenever they reorganized the new guy at the top thought that instead of fixing things it was just important to rename things) you would've gotten the ui(and well, not that much else relevant for making a phone..).
it was axed though(the four), but they did do one public commit of the tree at least which included homescreen. around the axing they decided to go all qml.
so you'd get some ui pieces for a dead tree.
and earlier symbian source.. well, if you want to go insane, take a look. there's really nothing that much worthwhile saving there without properiaty phone stack to go along with it.. so you could run the whole phone on a single arm chip or execute in place from rom. symbian did some neat tricks like that, but with current chip pricing they don't matter that much.
the reason why the story isn't pretty is that always they just went adding api's instead of fixing them. as if stacking an extra api on top of a broken one would fix the broken api underneath! how the fuck that's supposed to work? I'll suddenly get videoframes from the original api underneath by adding an extra layer on top of it? it wasn't most of the time that big of a problem that the api was totally obscure to use but that it was just plain unimplemented to do half the things it should have done now that was a real problem! but due to the totally broken chain of authority nobody could be arsed to do the work to actually tell people to do the fucking fixes. this plays a major role in why the whole symbian got axed and dumped, the organization was deemed to be bloated beyond repairable, employing 10x the people needed and that just impaired the development - every reorg they did just made things worse and at the height of the organizations size they were still relying on contractors for writing critical pieces of code all the way from kernel to ui. another reason of course is that elop is one lazy fat bastard and this was a very easy way out of the mess for him - just take n9's shell, license sw from MS and call it a day - or rather call it two years of work in a day, but hey at least he didn't have to deal with aholes who had entrenched themselves as guardians of buggy code.
and they should just have gone android. or rather they should have done the open source aspect of symbian properly back in the day and should have made symbian into what became android. you don't execute a successful open source strategy by at the same time releasing source while you lock the platform from unauthorized code!
anyone doing a new phone os now from existing base is just going to go android now, jolla excluded and even them I think would have done better to go with android and extend it.. instead of what they're doing now. easy to find drivers/socs, plenty of sw.. complete open source package to roll the os with and less chance of just going clinically insane.
Re:Sorry to see Symbian go (Score:2, Interesting)
I got an N85 in 2008 (still using it) and it had tons of stuff that other phones at the time did not. A 5 MP camera, the ability to install apps from any source (including game emulators), ability to watch flash videos, FM radio (including an FM transmitter), an actual filesystem that you could access, offline turn by turn navigation, the ability to connect to an Microsoft Exchange server to name a few. I also had an N770 which had the full power of a Linux system. Meego was suppose to combine the two, but Nokia went with Microsoft killing the perfect phone.