symbian

Having a less painful development platform than Symbian and a better development environment than Symbian SDK/Carbide C++ combo would be a good start.

Their programmers had mostly worked on feature phones, and Symbian was made by an external company at the time.

The company executives were worried about Maemo eating into their fairly steady Symbian earnings, and so where reluctant to commit fully.

Also the famous blog post about how shitty Symbian C++ was, that only Nokia employees would be willing to use it.

If you are Nokia, will you start taking a closer look at Symbian again?

I tried developing for Symbian (S60) and WinMo, but neither was what I would call an enjoyable experience.

Anyway SQLite is heavily used in Android and well, and other mobile platforms going back to all but the early versions of Symbian even.

Yeah, for example each Symbian phone has one.

No, my Symbian Belle doesn't show any ads.

At least in the beginning, WhatsApp made a point of being available on as many different devices as possible, including low-end feature phones (java based, symbian, etc.).

> Flash existed for Symbian OS (think Nokia smartphones) way before there was iPhones, and those devices naturally had even lower hardware specs.

Qt could have been a good strategy for Nokia, it provided the most important part of their puzzle, a clear migration path for their valuable customers from Symbian to a new Qt-based platform.

That's an enormous "gift" to open source, at least by the traditional metrics of LOC and market value -- Symbian has something like 40 million lines of C++ code, and Nokia acquired it at a cost of several hundreds of millions of euros.

The flash thing that existed for symbian was not "Flash", it was "FlashLite", a very different plugin that supported exactly 0 of all the.swf files I tried to throw at it, including even super simple animations.

Between 1995 and 2007, Microsoft had a competitor in every race in mobile: - Clamshell + keyboard mobile devices à la Psion (Windows CE, "Handheld PC" [1]) - Stylus-driven PDAs à la Palm (Palm-size PC [2], Pocket PC [3]) - Stylus-driven smartphones à la Symbian (Pocket PC 2002 [4]) These products were about the success of Microsoft and its strategy, rather than building successful mobile devices that users want.

Symbian might not be the best mobile OS, but it's extremely responsive even on my mum's ancient Nokia 6600.

The best choice for such things is a chinese no-name-smartphone on Android or just an old Nokia on Symbian^3 or 9.4.

They're pushing QT as the programming framework for future versions of Symbian.