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.'"
I didn't like it (Score:4, Funny)
I didn't like it when the Symbians kidnapped Patty Hearst, but their phones were OK for a while.
Re:I didn't like it (Score:5, Insightful)
Both systems are expensive, clunky, profit losing failures. I wish Nokia would go with Android. Their hardware isn't bad.
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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:I didn't like it (Score:5, Insightful)
People like you don't seem to get it. Symbian HAS failed. If it hadn't it would be here today.
That's like saying a man's heart failed - because it had a knife stabbed through it. It's dead but not by natural causes and the CEO holding the knife is Elop.
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However,
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People like you don't seem to get it. Symbian HAS failed. If it hadn't it would be here today.
That's like saying a man's heart failed - because it had a knife stabbed through it. It's dead but not by natural causes and the CEO holding the knife is Elop.
Replace "man" with "100-year-old-zombie" and you're on the right track...
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Hardly, though I like Android as my personal favourite. I keep breaking Android phones and have given up on them. The iPhone 3X was a sturdy phone (iPhone 4+ are as cruddy as any Android device IMHO, drop test my ass!) and lasted a few extra months of wear and tear but the Nokia is built the last, you could throw them at someone and kill'em they are so tough. Your "isn't that bad" should be "best damn quality hardware in the market" regardless of spec.
In any case WP8 is not clunky and it's just fine for wha
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Android loses money for everyone except Samsung. Anyway you go, Nokia was fucked.
Anyway, these threads are always funny with the clueless Symbian fanboys and the usual M$ hater-extremes circle-jerking each other.
How about Nokia stop trying to implode and build a better phone instead? Take the n900, make it thiner and lighter, with longer battery life, a faster processor, and a better screen. Upgrade the camera too but keep the nice keyboard. How about they offer that phone with a choice of Windows or Maemo?
I'd stay clear of Windows phones personally but it should be possible to build hardware that all OS's can run on, unless the terms of the MS suicide pill forbid using anything else that is.
Re:I didn't like it (Score:4, Insightful)
Take the n900, make it thiner and lighter, with longer battery life, a faster processor, and a better screen.
Gee ... is that all ... faster and better screen but also better battery life ... and the battery can't be bigger because it has to be thinner and lighter ???
Upgrade the camera too but keep the nice keyboard.
While still making it thinner and lighter?
How about they offer that phone with a choice of Windows or Maemo?
Ok now I think the whole post was just sarcasm ???
You are suggesting a struggling company piles on the R&D to get a more feature packed phone with better battery life while staying smaller and supporting 2 different operating systems ... Sounds reasonable
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He forgot to mention it should also be cheaper, maybe $50 or $100 unsubsidized.
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He forgot to mention it should also be cheaper, maybe $50 or $100 unsubsidized.
Is that sarcasm? Do you seriously believe that company that is up against it should just give up and die? Because I don't. It doesn't look good for Nokia but they are not dead yet. As unlikely as it is they could still come up with something cool that would dig them out of the hole they are in.
Apple came up with the iphone without any prior phone knowledge. Nokia has lots and could still do good things if only it started moving in the right direction.
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I'm suggesting they try to make something that people will like. The R&D budget is the last thing they should cut when they need a cool new product to sell.
If they try they may fail. If they don't try they will fail. You appear to be suggesting that they should just curl up in a corner and die quietly.
Not even remotely true (Score:2)
Android loses money for everyone except Samsung.
The Irony of your post is ignoring the fact that its not even remotely true, [Google for instance do awful well from Android.] is that Samsung make Windows Phones...you don't hear much about them, for good reason.
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[Google for instance do awful well from Android.]
Citation please.
Have you been sleeping (Score:2)
Citation please.
http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q4_google_earnings.html [google.com]
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Thanks for demonstrating my point. On your link to the results PR, Android doesn't even mention a mention, and Motorola made a loss.
Sorry fanboy. Android does not make a profit for Google.
Did you notice the line going up. (Score:3)
Android doesn't even mention a mention
Ignoring your insults...do you really not know why Google do Android. Google‘s original base intention with Android was just to make sure that Google wasn’t shut out of the mobile market. It is expected to make $4Billion from mobile advertising in the US alone this year.
Still don't believe me CEO Larry Page last conference call for *last quarter* [Now selling 1.5Billion device daily] "This time last year, I announced that our run rate from mobile advertising hit $2.5 billion . . . But now, we
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Yes, I noticed the line going up had nothing to do with Android.
"Android doesn't even [get] a mention"
Ignoring your insults...
That's no insult. You claimed Google does very well out of Android. I asked for a citation, and you posted a link to a page that doesn't even mention Android.
Still don't believe me CEO Larry Page last conference call for *last quarter* [Now selling 1.5Billion device daily] "This time last year, I announced that our run rate from mobile advertising hit $2.5 billion . . . But now, weâ(TM)ve built up additional mobile revenue from users paying for content and apps in Google Play . . . I can announce our new run rate for mobile is now over $8 billion. Thatâ(TM)s quite a business."
Note that "run rate" is another way of saying revenue, not profit. Notice also the lack of the word "Android" in there. Most of it is advertising from mobile platforms other than Android. Notably iOS.
Google wasted $billions buying Android, further developing Android, and then buying Motoro
Your not serious (Score:2)
Its a shame you are not serious. Eric Schmidt announced Android covered its costs with android revenue in Newsweek October 2010, when it only activated 200,000 Android devices. It now activates 1.5Million users daily and has a revenue of Over $8Billion a year with a growth 320% year on year.
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I've already pointed out that $8 billion is their declared MOBILE ad revenue, not Android. Again, most of that is iOS ads, because that's where most mobile web-browsing is done. And revenue ain't profit.
Furthermore, they'd still have that ad revenue had they not wasted that money on Android.
And 2010 was before Google had to purchase Motorola to get some mobile patents. They spend $15 billion on that. The opportunity cost on $15 billion is pretty big.
I'm just as serious as all the people that have crunched t
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Android loses money for everyone except Samsung.
[citation needed]
While there _are_ vendors who have failed on their Android offerings, many others are making decent profits from it.
While many of those second tier brands aren't well known to the West, they are being widely used in many third world countries in Africa, South America, as well as Asia.
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[citation needed]
Lots of people have pointed that out. For example:
http://www.unwiredview.com/2012/10/09/why-is-samsung-the-only-android-success-story/ [unwiredview.com]
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wow, I never would have guessed something that big was a phone, every video I have ever seen that featured them showed some woman straddling it and enjoying its strong vibrate function.... not sure how you talk on it though, must be a bluetooth headset.
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Possibly the best news about the end of Symbian, is the end of people thinking they've just thought up that joke.
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I didn't like it when the Symbians kidnapped Patty Hearst, but their phones were OK for a while.
Maybe the Symbionese Liberation Army will reform at this news and go on a round of kidnapping Nokia execs.
Sorry to see Symbian go (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm wondering since Symbian is open source now if someone else will make any Symbian phones.
Re:Sorry to see Symbian go (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm betting you'd only get the core OS, but most of the stuff related to actual telephony would be patented/proprietary.
I'd be surprised if you could fully operate your phone with the open source bits -- but admittedly, that's mostly just a guess.
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.
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Symbian weren't allowed break APIs. With C++ it's actually quite easy to do, so newer APIs were added. series60, which has nothing to do with SymbianOS, may be another matter. Phone manufacturers were also free to choose which functionality they supported.
look, nobody should give a fuck about symbian circa 2002 which is what you're talking about. when s60 skyrocketed nokia took over symbian, they held all the cards and called all the shots and seperate symbianos releases straight from symbian ltd like crystal were dead right there and then. they kept up a facade for purpose of licensing it to 3rd parties but were never into it with whole heart, sony excluded but their uiq phones were very marginal on the market and held very little power at symbian as conseq
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symbian open source was always back-and-forth lipservice and confusion. they never did it properly and always restarted and backpedaled, reorganized and reshuffled, put repos up and down...
the state was such that there's this legend that you could get it to boot on a beagle.
frankly if someone would pick it up and try to turn it into a working product from that they would be in a legal minefield AND IN AN INSANE ASYLUM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!fewr junk fewe
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"Symbian phones were very feature complete (much more so than Android and iOS, my E72 has functionality that even now isn't standard on those) and I don't like to see it go."
So what are the others missing? Please tell us so we can still get a decent Symbian phone before they are gone.
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Well, I only used a more or less stock Android till 1.6. Cyanogen after that but:
"sending files over Bluetooth n(of infrared for the models that had that)"
used this once to send something to a stock Milestone years ago. It worked (OBEX). Wasn't available in 1.x.
"out of the box functionality to choose which phone calls can be directly diverted to /dev/null or voicemail."
sending to voicemail is standard since 2.x. Ignore with an free app.
"It uses a decent profile system so when I'm at work I can set it to vib
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https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.navfree.android.OSM.ALL&hl=en [google.com]
OSM based, IIRC.
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Never tried this one, I use Navigator (beta) with OSM:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapfactor.navigator [google.com]
Works well for me.
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I set persistant marketers ringtone to silent (using out of the box functionality in Android), which is effectively the same as ignore.
I think
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My old Nokia Symbian had DLNA/UPnP and VoIP/SIP support out of the box.
My brand-new Samsung Android has neither, but requires me to download 3rd party apps for this.
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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, b
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It's sad, but my retired Symbian E70 remains to this day a better phone than any modern smart phone. It is smaller, faster to make a phone call, the battery lasted a week, the loud speaker was louder, the microphone is it was so good we ended using in preference to dedicated devices for recording messages, the native SIP stack in it (and we are talking 5 years go now) was better and more reliable than in Android 4.2.1 today, it could be doing several things and still play music and podcasts without a singl
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I see your E72 as a primary phone, and raise you my E71. Getting a bit long in the tooth at this point, though...
To me, hardware keyboard, world class reception, and a battery that lasts a week is more important than most other stuff.
I've been considering getting an android for random computing on, though. (But I'd keep the nokia for calls and text).
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...
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What about the many SIP-clients available on the AppStore?
I use XS4ALL SIP-client every day, and it reroutes my VOIP too!
The world is bigger without Nokia!
What about them? They require a separate app, Symbian had it built in, and the "Internet calling" capability was integrated directly with the contacts, you could choose to call using cell phone or SIP from the same dialer (including using 3G data, not only WiFi). It is just one example of things that have been standard on Symbian years before other platforms had them. Another example, the panorama picture feature on iPhone 5 - that was available years earlier on Symbian. As I said, it is not one single thi
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The n900 running maemo has SIP built in, no extra client needed. Skype too. You can pick a phone number and be given a choice of using the mobile network, skype out, or SIP.
Plus skype video calls work without any extra software.
I have never got SIP to work over 3G data though. I assumed the phone networks blocked this to protect their profits.
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Which doesn't cost nearly as much as sending an SMS because IM is blocked.
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Except that Android has an integrated SIP stack.
oh no!!! (Score:4, Funny)
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Get your gruesome details here: (Score:5, Informative)
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Detailed analysis of the "analysis". [wordpress.com]
Symbian++ (Score:1)
I personally love Symbian phones. I love the well designed user interface and the general reliability. I recently looked at Android, iPhones, and decided to get the Nokia 701 Symbian smart phone. To me, a phone is a means to an end, not the end itself. Which is probably why I didn't get an iPhone. The 701 is a thing of beauty, really well designed and loaded with great features. It's like an iPhone but designed in Symbian, and doesn't have that many apps. Still, it's pretty slick.
I'm not quite ready to say
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Replacement Needed (Score:1)
None of the current smartphone operating systems seem to fill the feature phone nitch. Apps for Android generally expect a strong processor, accelerometer, gps, and camera. While these features are useful, not everyone needs them, while things like email are necessary.
What is needed is an operating system that will receive updates for feature phones. A lot of Android devices are left with Android 2.1-3 because they cannot support the new features of modern versions. There needs to be a mobile OS that will r
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What would a feature phone need updates for? It's not like they'd run any sort of arbitrary code, so security updates would be relatively unnecessary. And in case of a real update-emergency, you can always just flash the firmware via cable.
Bullshit (Score:2)
Who says the hardware won't ever be used in another device?
Two words (Score:2)
Good riddance!
Goodbye Nokia (Score:2)
I hope people will switch to 4G as soon as possible, so that 3G will be freed up for me, so I can enjoy my E7-00 untill it dies.
If Nokia doesn't have the best HTMLv5 experience and Whatsapp (or whatever will be required by then), awesome battery life, offline maps, full qwerty keyboard, kickass camera and all the other superb features of my current phone (that excludes the camera), I will not buy a Nokia device, ever again, unless Nokia ships a full featured Linux phone.
I hope the Nokia board realizes that
In other news... (Score:2)
When you sleep with Ballmer, don't be astonished to wake up with crabs...
That's it, then... (Score:1)
The last vestiges of Psion's flagship OS have now died. It's a real pity that they let their slimline, yet feature-complete EPOC 5 be taken over in effect by Nokia. Nokia inherited an OS with cut-n-paste, OLE-style object embedding, fully-draggable windows long before those things appeared elsewhere - and it could do all that (and surf the Web too) on a 36MHz ARM processor. They proceeded to gut the OS over the course of a decade and then ham-fistedly shovel layer upon layer of bloat onto it, effectively el