Symbian Completes Transition To Open Source 189
Grond writes "Symbian, maker of the the world's most popular mobile operating system, has completed the transition to a completely open platform months ahead of schedule. While the kernel was opened up last year, the entire platform is now open source, primarily under the Eclipse Public License. A FAQ is available with more information about the platform opening."
Adds an anonymous reader, linking to PC Magazine's story on the transition: "By putting Symbian fully in the public domain, the Symbian Foundation is pitting it against Google's Android. Symbian is well known across most of the world, but it's mostly a foreign curiosity in the US, AT&T is the only carrier that currently has a symbian phone in its lineup, the Nokia E71x."
Drivers too, please! (Score:5, Interesting)
Since Nokia is phone manufacturer itself and main supporter of Symbian, I really hope they open source their drivers for different phones too. Nokia is already moving in that direction with Qt and it doesn't impact their main business as a phone manufacturer. Only problem would be if those drivers use licensed patents from other manufacturers though.
Android being open source is practically useless because you cannot get drivers for any phone. Sure you can see the OS code and tinker around it (if you are able to get overly complex development environment set up), but you are unable to use it on your phone or do pretty much anything with it. It's only good for phone manufacturers.
If Nokia also were to release drivers for their phones, this would be huge victory against Android.
http://maemo.org/ (Score:5, Insightful)
It's even Linux. Hell, it's Debian.
http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/ [nokia.com]
Re:http://maemo.org/ (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I have just ordered a new N900 to replace my G1. The G1 is being only replaced because I dropped it a few too many times and it got flaky. I am moving from Android partly because the only way I have found to make the most of the hardware I own is to run a bunch o' hacks, I am more comfortable running a bunch o' hacks on Debian/Linux than Android, and partly because I can't find another Android phone with a flip out keyboard I like.
From what I have read, Nokia are dropping Symbian from future N series smart phones, so basically this announcement means that they are open sourcing their low end crappy OS which has pretty much failed in the smart phone space.
I vowed never to own another Symbian device when my last Nokia was retired a year ago. It is painfully limited and obscure and I don't see how opening up the source code will help when there is such a strong alternative in Maemo which already benefits from the familiarity of Linux/X/Qt. Waste of time, Nokia.
As an aside, and a bit off topic, I am interested in the AndroidExecutionEnvironment that was being developed for Ubuntu. A (hopefully) simple port to maemo would mean I could still run my favourite Android apps.
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"From what I have read, Nokia are dropping Symbian from future N series smart phones, so basically this announcement means that they are open sourcing their low end crappy OS which has pretty much failed in the smart phone space."
Symbian has been around for a decade and still controls the plurality (even majority?) of the smartphone market. I wouldn't call that a failure.
Re:http://maemo.org/ (Score:4, Insightful)
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That is as may be, but I am not in the US, never been there and don't mind if I never go.
Quite serious. The thing about Symbian is it has been succesful because Nokia has been responsible for good, reliable hardware, arguably the best, and Symbian is all they have offe
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Re:http://maemo.org/ (Score:5, Insightful)
Maemo is suffering from the US-centric view of the average IT media. It's simply the best smartphone OS... because it's not a phone OS, it's a full desktop OS with a phone-friendly UI, more or less like the iPhone. But differently from the iPhone, it's a standard Linux, it's open to all sorts of hacks, and you don't have to pay rent to develop for it (at least not yet). I have one, and it's mind-blowing. I can run anything I want without worrying about "jailbreaking" and other absurd locks. Once the price goes down a little, it will become the perfect device for, well, almost anything. (Yeah, the screen is resistive, but the quality and resolution... man, the iPhone looks very cheap in comparison).
What is holding Maemo back, at the moment is:
- the above-mentioned US-centric attitude
- fear. Many in Nokia are scared of dropping their old Symbian workhorse, which is still immensely profitable even if it managed to irritate almost every single user it ever had, and never managed to establish a decent ecosystem of third-party developers. They are afraid that Maemo (an untested platform in the wider market) might fail, so they don't allocate enough resources to it, which leads to unpolished releases, which in turn means they don't feel confident enough to push Maemo-based devices as hard as they should...
- internal politics. In Nokia, Symbian is the establishment, the cash-cow, the power, the suits, the veteran developers; Maemo is the skunkwork geek project, youthful and technically light-years ahead, but bringing a revolution in how things are done, with an unclear business model... not everyone is on board yet. Sometimes the friction shows.
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While I am immensely interested in the development of Symbian(as I hate my work provided Windows "smart" phone) I am glad I am a sysamdin, not a developer. Knowing I could do wonders if I invested tons of my time seems somehow futile. I would rather ride the backs of skilled developers and provide constructive criticism (and lots of homemade beer) than do the actual work myself.
Thank you for making me appreciate my role in this process so much more.
If ever you find yourself in Fredericksburg, VA, hit me
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I agree. I could understand the US media focusing less on Symbian (though even there, that still doesn't explain the Apple and Google fascination, since Motorola are American, and they sell way more phones too). But here in the UK, the BBC are also obsessed with covering the Iphone, and to a lesser extent, Android, whilst Nokia phones rarely get a mention.
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If you don't mind, could you tell us which Maemo phone you have? I'm interested in them and short of hearing a more extensive review, I'd like to know which model you are so happy with.
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If you don't mind, could you tell us which Maemo phone you have? I'm interested in them and short of hearing a more extensive review, I'd like to know which model you are so happy with.
There's only one Maemo phone so far: the N900.
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the drivers are binary only though.
Which means when they want to sell the n901, no more new drivers for you.
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Symbian, is finding that it is loosing its once strong share in the Mobile OS Market. They are moving to an Open Source Model in an attempt to "Firefox" their OS back to a good standing.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. However trying to go against big names like Apple, Google and RIM you need to do something.
It isn't as much as Open Source for comunity sake. Just kinda a gap so new companies who are making mobile apps wont go with android all that quickly so they can keep their market share. S
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1. It is the most backwards and strange platform I have ever had the misfortune to develop for, both in regards to their development platform and OS architecture. Learning to develop for Symbian is kind of like learning to code while staring at a reflection of your monitor in a mirror.
2. 80% of the work to develop a Symbian app that could run on enough platforms for it to be marketable was all UI develo
Nokia's share is increasing, not decreasing (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure there's much evidence that Nokia are losing any ground? For last quarter of 2009, their sales were up 22%, their profits almost doubled, and their market share increased to 39%; in the "smartphone" market, their share increased from 35% to 40% [bbc.co.uk].
The "big names" you mention are still niche players in the phone market (except perhaps RIM; admittedly they should also worrying about Android, not because of Google phones directly, but because the rest of the phone manufacturers such as Motorola may switch to Android; but Apple are a non-issue here).
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The drivers for your device should be on your device when you get it. You can extract them and use them on your own custom rom if you want.
"By putting Symbian fully in the public domain" (Score:4, Insightful)
Except they didn't, in any sense of the term, put it in the public domain.
Re:"By putting Symbian fully in the public domain" (Score:4, Interesting)
People these days, with all the overloading talk of "intellectual property" don't even know what "public domain" means. I see it all too often with my friends and family. It's getting to the point that copyright is so overreaching (and has been for so long), that few people even know what it means when a work no longer is under copyright.
That said, having Symbian under an open source licence is definitely a nice thing.
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The brainwashing is complete. Long live the brainwashing.
Still need signed apps though don't I (Score:2)
If it's so freakin' open please tell me why I still need to have apps signed on my Nokia 6220 classic and will do for the foreseeable future unless I'm willing to try risky hacks.
Re:Still need signed apps though don't I (Score:5, Informative)
If it's so freakin' open please tell me why I still need to have apps signed on my Nokia 6220 classic and will do for the foreseeable future unless I'm willing to try risky hacks.
I'll raise you an anecdote. I just bought a Nokia E63, new and unlocked with a full US warranty for $189 from Newegg, and it's one of the best phones I've ever owned. You simply go to the application manager menu, and for the option that says "Install only signed apps", select "No". It's that simple. I just installed an unsigned FTP client, so now I don't even need Nokia's atrocious PC Suite for syncing.
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Try ovi suite. It's a reimagining of what pc suite should do.
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Except its LOTS more crappy than pc suite. I'd consider it an alpha version. Shows some promise, but they need to finish it.
I just installed on my win 7 x64 machine at work here and I'm probably going to go back to the old pc suite.
It keeps offering ovi maps 3.0 for my phone, which is NOT compatible with it (6110 navigator). If I go to the "maps" section it says there has been an internal error, and helpfully suggests I restart ovi suite, and if that doesn't work I should try and restart my PC. WTF?.
Th
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This is par for the course with Nokia. Near as I can tell, they think that once the hardware is done, they can phone in the rest.
The result is a mapping application that adds extraneous street numbers to a street, mail clients that don't understand folders, push email that works about half the time, etc, etc. The hardware and core software is great, but the supplementary stuff is wretched. I can't believe how bad a job my E71 (ostensibly a business smartphone) does of email. There's no excuse, not since
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mail clients that don't understand folders, push email that works about half the time,
WTF? The Nokia Symbian mail client understands folders, they've supported imap for donkeys years. It just works, I use it every day. As annoying as push email & calendaring is, the MS Exchange client also just works. The street numbers in a map application come from the data provider. I get the impression you live somewhere like Podunk Idaho, do you have to stand on a hill to get a signal?
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More seriously, openness of code need not(and frequently does not) equal openness of device. Only open code and the ability to install your own binaries, built from modified code, provides that.
What you are basically asking is the equivalent of "If linux is so open, why can't I get root on any linux server?". Answer: "because the people who built and installed linux on thos
There are freebie app signers (Score:2)
You install the app signer which has a dev cert. Then you can sign and install any application you want, a bit of a pain, but no risky hacks required.
http://thesymbianblog.com/2009/07/04/how-to-sign-unsigned-files-on-a-s60-3rd5th-edition-device-itself/ [thesymbianblog.com]
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Yeah lets go get a dev cert, and a signing app just to run software. No biggy if you're a developer I guess. But an end user shouldn't need to jump through hoops.
Pet peeve: "public domain" (Score:5, Informative)
Placing code under an open-source license is not the same as putting it in the "public domain". Code under an open source license still has conditions attached to it (even if minimal ones) while code placed in the public domain has no restrictions placed on it of any sort. Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.
Re:Pet peeve: "public domain" (Score:5, Funny)
In the coming war between Open Source and Public Domain, no man will be free as in beer.
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For all of you trivia freaks, SQLite [sqlite.org] is an example of high quality source code that is widely used and is in the Public Domain.
Open source is only copyrighted to defend it. (Score:2)
Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.
Actually PD is covered by copyright law: It's free to modify it and assert a copyright on the "derived work" cwith the full set of copyright restrictions. Ditto to combine it with other works - PD or not - and copyright the collection.
What this means for
AT&T's E71x (Score:2)
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When I bought an N73 I was able to use a collection of tools to remove the simlock and flash the phone with Nokia's stock firmware. The result was massively improved performance and battery life, but I'm not sure if this is still possible.
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The FAQ warns about software patents... (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the FAQ [symbian.org] you can now get all the source and can (at least theoretically) build the OS and various applications. Groovy.
Setting aside the fact that just building all of the pieces is complicated (see the FAQ), and also setting aside the fact that many phones will refuse to run homemade, un-signed builds, you might run into issues with patents:
Having the source under an open license is just one step on the path to personal control over your phone and freedom to use, share, and modify the software running on it.
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There are no statutory damages in US patent law. I agree that software patents are pernicious, but no one is going to be sued for patent infringement over anything she does to her own phone.
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One might not be sued for patent infringement for modifying the single copy of the software on their phone, but their freedom to share the software running on it (as I mentioned above) may be enjoined by patent holders, especially if the "infringing" changes are picked up and used by large numbers of other people.
Theoretically building is the key (Score:2)
Things haven't improved over time. Their build environments and formats are still an utter disaster. Their hacks to Eclipse are half assed at best as well.
The only way Symbian will ever compete
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Unfortunately, the Symbian Foundation doesn't own any patents, so can't give them away to everyone. Certain patents are owned by SF member companies.
Membership of the Symbian Foundation costs a flat $1500 USD (+ VAT) [symbian.org] per year, which grants your company access to the patents contributed by other members. The Eclipse Public License grants patent rights to software and software combinations only; the member patent policy additionally grants patent rights for software-hardware combinations. It's a drop-in-the
I always want to read that as "Sybian" (Score:5, Funny)
I personally blame the Internet and rule 34.
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A smart phone with a vibrate mode as good as a sybian would destroy the iphone's marketshare over night.
Well, speaking of... (Score:2)
URL says it all:
http://www.slutload.com/watch/qgREWYjJQW/Sexy-girl-stuffs-cell-phone-up-her-pussy-WOW.html [slutload.com]
Rule 34 indeed...
(obviously NSFW)
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I will never un-see that.
Nokia moving to Open Source? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Maybe it's because the really tasty part of any modern mobile software is UI, and Nokia probably has more patents on that than everyone else in the market combined (as they tend to do with anything that's mobile phone related)?
And yet... (Score:2)
Mozilla has no plans to ever bring Firefox Mobile to it. :/
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Not unknown - its time came and went. (Score:2)
Symbian is well known across most of the world, but it's mostly a foreign curiosity in the US. AT&T is the only carrier that currently has a symbian phone in its lineup, the Nokia E71x.
There've been Symbian phones in the US for at least 7 years now - I had a Nokia 3650 back in the early days. And back then, compared to what else was out there, it was pretty cool. Compared to what's out there now? Not so much.
Symbian is a dead end. (Score:2)
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Both Maemo and Symbian will rely on Qt for their UI and main API in next major versions, they will be quite close probably; with Maemo reserved for top of the line devices and Symbian pushed more and more into mainstream.
Too late (Score:2)
That's what I wished for in 2001. If it happened then, the world of mobile OS would be different. I think it is too late to save Symbian now.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13186&cid=92580 [slashdot.org]
Re:Seems like overkill (Score:5, Funny)
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Alternately, they should open source the sex toy also. You should be able to program the bucking of the saddle and the strength of the vibrator. It would certainly help OSS nerds get dates.
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My friend, that’s only your own nasty mind.
I did not even know that a saddle/vibrator with that name existed, before I read your post.
And so do, I guess, 99.999% of the population. ^^
It's all about branding... (Score:2)
I did not even know that a saddle/vibrator with that name existed, before I read your post.
Just think how much easier it would be if the company had called themselves "Saddle plus Vibrator", "Saddle-ator", or "Vibraddle". Heck, I think we'd still get the picture if they were "Unicorn (Uniporn?) Saddles, Unlimited".
And so do, I guess, 99.999% of the population. ^^
So sad... maybe people would be happier if they knew about it.
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Seriously, that company needs to change its name. I can't read that name without thinking of that weird saddle/vibrator thing.
Their new product name: "Nervous Unicorn with Parkinson's".
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Neither can she: http://www.slutload.com/watch/qgREWYjJQW/Sexy-girl-stuffs-cell-phone-up-her-pussy-WOW.html [slutload.com] (NSFW)
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A entire OS and IDE for a glorified vibrator seems like overkill if you ask me.
Not if you really think about it.
If we all worked together to develop, test and maintain the best possible vibrator in the world, imagine how many girls we would get. If anything, this is what FOSS community should pick up and work on. Girls would be breaking in from doors and windows just to test our thing, and would be so pleased with the experience they would be coming back all the time.
What we need is WiFi, 3G (for doing it on-the-road), some app that gathers statistics and log data for optimization dev
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...and lastly, test subjects.
And there's the problem right there.
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Not if you keep it to yourself, and only accept pleasuring women with it yourself.
Re:Too little, too late (Score:5, Informative)
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The massive series of apps and developer support that's growing around Android will probably push Maemo out of the market.
Yes. Because there are no apps for Debian.
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You are vastly underestimating Nokia and Maemo. As another poster has already mentioned, once Nokia moves past their current Symbian (cash cow) vs. Maemo (new kid) stage and puts their full weight behind Maemo, Maemo will become a dominant player in the smartphone market. I have no doubt of this.
Believing that Nokia will not succeed is a very limited US-centric view. True, they are just not as strong a player in the US as in the rest of the world. But, remember that Nokia still has the most market share wor
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Except for the fact that the n900 uses a resistive screen, as where the Droid uses a capacitave screen.
Which basically means that N900 screen is more precise, and can be operated with gloves on, or with a stylus (think handwriting input), while Droid cannot.
Oh, but Droid can do multitouch! Except... no stock applications support it, anyway.
D'oh.
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Except for the fact that the n900 uses a resistive screen, as where the Droid uses a capacitave screen.
Which basically means that N900 screen is more precise, and can be operated with gloves on, or with a stylus (think handwriting input), while Droid cannot.
Oh, but Droid can do multitouch! Except... no stock applications support it, anyway.
D'oh.
It actually comes with a stylus, which is very useful for high precision stuff (e.g. clicking on links in the browser if you can't be bothered zooming in). It also has the advantage of not leaving your screen covered in fingerprints. It's also ideal for handwriting recognition, although the N900 doesn't have that (yet).
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Nokia will be forced to adopt Android shortly I think (year or two). There's only room for one other player I think, but I'm pretty sure it's Windows Mobile (though force of will) or PalmOS
On my Nokia E71 I have Nokia Maps and Google Maps, I have Gizmo SIP VoIP and Skype, I have virtual assistant call manager software, I have ssh and irc clients, I have msn/icq client, and I can turn it into a wifi hotspot. I can run any application anybody has written for the device. If the choice becomes Android, Windows,
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There's still a marketplace for phones that aren't 1GHz, yet do more than talk and text. I don't know how many millions of phones out there run S60...
Oh - they'll never adopt android, they have the superior Maemo for phones/tablets with some actual horsepower.
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I don't know how many millions of phones out there run S60...
About 330 Million worldwide, according to Symbian - out of those, at least 100M were sold in the last 18 months so are likely to still be in use.
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Nokia make specific hardware with a very modern phoneOS. My 5800 does things the Iphone can't do, and at a fraction of the price - hell, even my old Motorola V980 could! And it's easy to use. Maybe there are some things an Apple phone does that no Nokia phone does, but the reverse is also true.
If you reply, let's have evidence and specific examples of how the Iphone is better than all other phones; not simply assertions that the Iphone is the Best Ever.
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And the 6350 (S40) and the 6650 (S60, same as the e71x.)
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And another data point: T-Mobile has the 5130, another S40 phone. So even the "only AT&T has any Symbian phones" part is wrong.
Re:AT&T's other phones (Score:4, Informative)
S40 is not based on Symbian.
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The S40 UI was updated to look like S60 a couple of years ago
I'd say the more adequate description would be that both S40 and S60 (up to v3) have been on the market for quite a while, targetting similar form-factors. So, considering they are from the same manufacturer, of course they will end up similar (never mind that it works both ways probably - Nokia tried to make S60 similar to S40, to ease transition for customers)
S40 has a webkit browser but can only be programmed by 3rd parties with Java, and can o
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If you're going to support the Web, you need Unix.
Uh, what?
The software community already gave Nokia free Unix, they should be building on top of that.
They are. It's called Maemo, and it's on the N900. Unfortunately, not all parts of it are Free and Open.
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The iPhone form factor is clearly where all phones are going because the screen supports the Web.
Really ? When was the last time you saw a web page designed for 480 x 320 ? And I'm not talking about "mobile" versions, I mean *real* webpages.
Compare this to N900, which has 800 x 480, meaning in a lot of cases you can see the whole width of the page without any scrolling whatsoever.
iTroll fail, better luck next time.
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Any page that doesn't have complete idiots implementing it works quite well at 480x320. Sadly, most major companies hire nothing but complete idiots.
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What ? The VGA monitors of 1987 could already display 640 x 480 ... I suppose that means every web designer since 1987 has been on completely the wrong track then ?
Kind of ironic seeing as this site alone has a logo that is about 390 pixels wide and then a search bar + button of about 280 pixels.
I suppose it's okay with you that those elements are wrapped over 2 or possibly 3 vertical lines ... anything rather than admit your mobile device sucks eh ?
iTroll still failing.
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*My* mobile device is a Nexus One with an 800x480 screen. Like *all* such devices, however, the physical dimensions preclude readability of websites designed by idiots.
Websites not designed by idiots can be reflowed appropriately by the device to look good on any screen, and images can, if necessary, be re-scaled as well.
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Absolute positioning and sizing. No, I'm not kidding. All it takes for the vast majority of site designs is to get rid of the absolute/pixel-based nonsense, and they'll work just fine on almost all displays.
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Absolute positioning is sometimes a necessity, especially when it comes to forms.
You want a text box that should hold 40 characters to display 40 characters, not be smeared all over the screen because you specified a 100% width attribute.
Likewise a table of data looks better at a fixed size so that the contents will fit nicely on one line ... so that people with 2048px wide displays don't have huge boxes with a little bit of data centered in it and a ton of whitespace, and likewise people with 640px wide di
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By the way, it also works fine as a smartphone OS, judging by Nokia's many, many smartphones. And for those who it is insufficient for, Nokia also offers Maemo, which many consider to be the best smartphone operating system available.
Hyperbole Fanboys (Score:2, Informative)
So much blah (Score:5, Informative)
I am biased as I work "with it" every day.
It's written in C++ and the syscalls are asynchronous by default (very very nice when you're doing lots of comms). It has a microkernel and an extremely comprehensive api. It's even written in C++. The kernel is actually quite nice.
So *actually* Linux is a dinosaur by comparison if you consider modern-ness to be of any importance.
I don't but and I like linux a lot but Symbian is an operating system that deserves respect and it's dumb to believe that everything has to be done "one true way". The user-level programming experience is not nice due to the great efforts made to fit it onto early phone hardware (since it has been out there long before 600Mhz ARM chips arrived that could shift the weight of Linux or OSX).
But all of that's changing and as a result of pretty gargantuan efforts that few pundits have any appreciation of that this rough diamond is being cut and will dazzle.
Apple is a hardware (consumer electronics) company (Score:2)
Apple is a software company.
Really?
See http://images.betanews.com/media/3620.png [betanews.com] or some article at http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q3-2009-by-the-numbers/1248218543 [betanews.com] (which got data from Apple's SEC filings).
From 2009, software was ~500 megabucks, iPods ~1500, iPhones ~1700, music ~1000. Also Desktops ~1130 and Portables (Laptopts?) ~2200.
Apple sells computers and consumer electronics (~tied first place). Then music. Then software at a quite distant third.
If you measure by sales, Apple is not a software company.
Then
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Feature phones will be gone by the time anyone does anything with this.
I'm not sure how you mean - there is no strict line between "feature" and "smart" phone, instead the terms are just used to distinguished between low and high end phones. Are you seriously suggesting that low end phones are going to disappear? I don't think so.
The iPhone form factor is clearly where all phones are going
I'm not sure what you mean by "iPhone form factor". If you mean the candy-bar form with a full size touchscreen, then i
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Are you seriously linking to RoughlyDrafted, a site that makes Mossberg look tame as an Apple fanboy?
The 1st epoc devices were 16bit and had 256kb (Score:3, Insightful)
My current N97 has 128Mb of RAM and 30+Gb of storage on board.
It browses web pages fine, plays music, videos, sends video emails and calls, has gps and maps and it lasts up to 3 days on a battery charge.
The maemo N900 has 256Mb of RAM, 600MHz CPU. As fast and powerful and as handy with Linux on board as it is, do you think the battery life is going to last 3 days?
If you want an embedded platform where the costs and specific performance criteria are important, e.g. making profit selling hardware, the OS req
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I did. I clearly spend too much time torrenting porn and not enough time torrenting Linux distros.