All About Symbian - Symbian, Nokia and S60 unwrapped.
Every Platform and Application Will Die In The End
Published by Ewan Spence at 13:09 UTC, February 12th 2009
CellPhoneSoft have announced, in a reversal of their previous statement, that they will be ceasing to support and develop their UIQ portfolio with immediate effect. They had pledged resources through to the end of 2009, but with rising levels of piracy and a drop in income from registrations they've pulled the plug.
They won't be the first to decide to leave a platform behind, and they won't be the last. There are countless examples of platforms that lost manufacturer support and continued for a long time; there are also platforms that manufacturers held onto for far too long (PalmOS only got the official 'you're dead' memo yesterday) as well. There's no easy way to step away from a platform, because people will continue to use the product that works for them even though the technology may be older, and they need to work twice as hard to get it connected to modern computers, cellphones or services.
(At this point Steve says lots of people still use Psion PDA's, someone points out David Wood continues to use a 5mx, I bemoan the death of lifeblog and hold onto my N95 that supports it rather than move down to Nokia Photos, and Rafe just shakes his head and moves on with the times).
While times move on, the fact is that without a strong community, every platform, every application, every software company, even every language will die. By all means mourn their passing, and take note of anything that hastened their demise, but like life, we must all (eventually) move on.
And remember.
-- Ewan Spence, Feb 2009.
News Discussion
VMS, 31 years old and still going strong.
UNIX, 30 years old and still conquering the world.
BTW realise that Apple has shifted from OS-9 to Unix (OS-X, FreeBSD based).
Particular the availability of open source code for UNIX has contributed to it's longlevity. Where as VMS is being considered the most secure OS by financial companies and thus performs well in its own niche.
Compared to these Symbian is a youngling, Becoming next june 11 years old. Windows Mobile will be 6 years old then.
With Symbian going opensource its longlevity is certainly increased and will most likely will outlive WindowsMobile, a stunted copy of a stunted PC OS. However the battle between Symbian and Linux will become far more very interesting. If there is a battle, that is. With Mobiles become more and more wireless internet computers many features part of UNIX will be required to become part of Symbian and vice versa. With both being opensource, mixing them is not only smart but nearly unavoidable...
Office docs, photos and videos are pretty much taken care of.
Notes, contacts and calenders are a bit of a minefield, but at least possible with some effort.
SMS, MMS and email are usually out for large numbers of them.
Outliners and other things like lifeblog will be really tricky to preserve and transfer, I'm of the opinion that they should all have some sort of XML/HTML import/export.
I'm hoping AAS will focus a little more on the portability of data, as people migrate platforms quite frequently in the phone world - perhaps a review of portable data formats is in order?
eg. usefulness of pst files vs online PIM backup, how to save those SMS messages (people usually only want to archive messages).
And the big plus - it just integrated with Windows, which is what people use day to day.
I have had so many problems with trying to sync UIQ devices to Windows, data at best duplicated, at worst lost, frankly, I am glad it is dead, it was a mercy killing.
All devices now need to interoperate, something the EPOC Psion handhelds never did, and UIQ STILL CANNOT (accurately). Psion survived for as long as it did because Windows/MS Office was still primitive and I used my Psion as a primary device. In those days I had a secretary with a PAPER diary. No longer. The world has moved on and is more connected, UIQ had some fancy graphics (which obviously seduced many journos) but it was clumsy to use as part of an office network.
Good riddance.
I agree with "Unregistered" - time to spend more time of what works together, not what looks sexy.
the fact is with UIQ, Symbian has lost its sex appeal, we are now left with Series 60 and Nokia. In a fight against Apple/Android, it's like putting me against Mike Tyson in his prime.
Symbian RIP. And good riddance. I will never forgive you for what you did to my data.
rjstep3
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