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Handhelds Communications Software Wireless Networking Hardware Linux

Nokia Could Make Linux Top Embedded OS 185

Posted by timothy from the sea-changes-considered-not-promised dept.
prostoalex writes "Nokia's experiment with N770 prototype device and its own Linux-based dev platform got the folks from ARCchart thinking - Is Nokia ready to jump the Symbian ship and switch to Linux? TechWeb chimes in: "Such a switch by Symbian would make Linux, in one fell swoop, the leading mobile device platform. It already is riding a wave with PalmSource's decision to port the Palm OS to Linux and a defection by Nokia would seal the deal.""
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Nokia Could Make Linux Top Embedded OS More

Nokia Could Make Linux Top Embedded OS

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  • And the top post on the linked blog? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sH4RD ( 749216 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:05AM (#13173954) Homepage
    Nokia to move off Symbian? Unlikely

    ARCchart do allow that the porting process would be possible if technically not an easy feat. This rather understates the difficulty involved. The strength of Symbian is and always has been the fact it has been designed as a mobile OS from the beginning of its life. From release 6 onwards it has been designed with mobile telephony at the heart of the OS. As a result the Symbian OS is structured is some fundamentally different ways to other OSs. Power and performance management are key considerations in design from the kernel upwards. As a result the Symbian OS is the most powerful mobile OS available. It would require fundamental changes in Linuxs core to achieve similar specifications.
    • Exactly -- there's a reason they've been using Symbian. Supposedly, it does the job it is designed to do.

      If Nokia wants to switch to something else, they'll take on some risks, but perhaps it is worth it given the $140 million they have to pay out (just next year! -- nevermind the future).

      I suspect that having used Symbian for a few years, they know what Symbian-like features they need (and which they don't) in order to port over the apps they need. That would imply "they've outgrown Symbian." Adding those
      • You can't extend a GPL'd piece of software and then release your extensions under the LGPL. Perhaps you should read the GPL.

        Unless of course you are talking about something in userspace...then that is of course possible.
        • Oh -- I figured the linux kernel was LGPL. I guess it is GPL. But I thought there were non-free components in there too, so I figured it was LGPL.
          • There aren't any non-free comments IN the kernel. There are non-free device drivers (such as Nvidia's) but they normally have free replacements, so the kernel is GPL. They also plug into the kernel as modules, but are not actually part of the kernel. Even still, they are legally questionable. Anyone sueing them would be stupid though, since they would scare away future software development on the Linux Platform. The kernel source at kernel.org, for instance, doesn't contain these modules. If you, for instan
            • Nokia can do what they like... nobody enforces it.

              Check out the broadcom kernels sometime.. they're about 20% closed source binary crap compiled into the kernel.

              Nobody cares. Really.
              • Actually, several companies have been threatened with legal action, and have folded. If you have proof that broadcom is violating the GPL, bring it to the attention of Linus and the FSF. I'm not sure exactly who Linus uses to enforce his copyrights, but so far they've been very effective. THey do, however, require people to inform them, its impossible to monitor every hardware device being sold and check for violations.
            • > Anyone sueing them would be stupid though, since they would scare away future software development on the Linux Platform.

              That's a good example of winning the battle, but losing the war.

              An OS is (next to) useless without drivers.

              --
              Which has more Faith?
              The Religion of Science, or
              the Science of Religion?

      • Re:And the top post on the linked blog? (Score:4, Informative)

        by the_womble ( 580291 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @03:33AM (#13174269) Homepage Journal
        Yes but as they own half of Symbian, half of the $140m still belongs to them. In fact Symbian is not really and independent business so much as an outsourced R & D facility for mobile phone companies - which is why Psion, the only shareholder who was interested in making money out of it, sold their stake.

      • Re:And the top post on the linked blog? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by pchan- ( 118053 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @03:49AM (#13174319) Journal
        Yes, but...

        Symbian does the job that it was designed to do, and does it well. That is, it makes a good phone, with an elementry address book and simple games. This is good for a phone from 1999. The problem is that today, phones do much more and in the near future they will need to do even more so. Among these things are: bluetooth stack, audio and video playback, filesystem support (think sd cards), more advanced applications and games, virtual memory management, advanced process scheduling features, (wireless) USB stack with host/client, mass storage controller stack, input device support (who knows what kind), hotplug capability (expansion cards), tcp/ip networking (perhaps for VOIP).
        On top of these, you'll want to run advanced web browsers (how about KHTML?), mp3 players and an itunes-compatible DRM client, an address book to sync with Outlook, real games that have a better interface than the lousy phone keypad, Java/brew environment, Vonage client, net stumbler, secure credit card transaction manager, SD card file browser, ...

        Yes, some of these things are hacked into Symbian now. But think of who Symbian's biggest competitor is: Windows CE. WinCE provides all of the above. Nokia is not an operating system company, and can't afford to be. They can modify Symbian to no end, but the effort required is large. Or they can use a freely available piece of code that does it all already.

        As for NetBSD, Nokia is kind of in the anti-Microsoft camp because they fear MS marginalizing them. Like Palm, they've been fighting the invasion of WinCE, and they too realize that having an open system (to which they and their fellows in the anti-MS group) have to contribute benefits everyone.

    • Re:And the top post on the linked blog? (Score:4, Informative)

      by juhanio ( 770843 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:19AM (#13174014) Journal
      Remember to check http://www.maemo.org/ [maemo.org] it's development platform for 770.

    • Re:And the top post on the linked blog? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:20AM (#13174020) Homepage Journal
      Is Nokia likely to move off Symbian? Very unlikely from the sound of it. Then again Nokia has been interested in Linux, and given their work on, for instance, gtk-webcore [sourceforge.net] perhaps we can see why: Symbian might be great for telephony, but much of the movement with cell-phones today is toward convergence devices that feature web browsers, MP3 players, vast amounts of PDA functions, cameras, etc. For such devices the greater flexiblity and more friendly development offered Linux might be considered valuable.

      Which is to say, Symbian is probably here to stay, but Linux may become Nokias OS of choice for its more complex devices. There's plenty of room for both in what is a diverging market.

      Jedidiah.
      • Has it occurred to anyone else that this might be Nokia's attempt to pull a Ballmer-kneecap against Symbian? "Hey we're looking at Linux! Now Micros^W Symbian, what's your really-lowest offer?"

        • Has it occurred to anyone else that this might be Nokia's attempt to pull a Ballmer-kneecap against Symbian? "Hey we're looking at Linux! Now Micros^W Symbian, what's your really-lowest offer?"

          Except Nokia owns 48% of the Symbian consortium. They are the largest stakeholder in Symbian. If anything other Symbian stakeholders, like Motorola, are playing Linux games against Nokia.
    • Nokia's choosing Linux is best explained by a recent "Washington Post" article [washingtonpost.com] reporting that Motorola, the #2 cell-phone manufacturer, is making aggressive moves in the market for cell phones. The market is cutthroat, and margins are shrinking.

      Linux provides a very cost-effective (almost free) solution. The cost is born by the small army of volunteer open-source developers.

      Nokia is making the right choice and shall remain the #1 cell-phone manufacturer.

    • Today's phone have the power that my old computer used to have. Strip Linux to the bone and linux will run just fine there.

      See, the power of Linux is in providing a whole set of tools and interfaces from the network stack to the i/o system that are well tested. While work would be required, today's phones are very accommodating. In two year's time, it will make little sense to keep these niche operating systems around,except for very limited cases.
    • well, nokia did say in the latest issue of the personnel magazine ("Nokia People") that they have a linux strategy, but don't intend to dump symbian in favor of it... but i guess we'll see!
    • I've worked with symbian OS and I'm pleased with it. the main programing language used by symbian is C++ and the Maemo Platform, now only suports C (I think). this could be a great problem for current nokia developers if the switch is made.
    • Which blog would that be, good Sir? Neither the ARCchart site nor the TechWeb site so much as even contains the phrase "the porting process".
    • As a result the Symbian OS is structured is some fundamentally different ways to other OSs.

      In which ways is it different?

  • Nokia calling for Linux developers in Bangalore (Score:4, Informative)

    by Argon ( 6783 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:05AM (#13173957) Homepage
    Today's employment section in Bangalore "Times of India" calls for software developers with experience in Symbian/Series 60/Linux developers. Read what you want into this development :-).

  • That's what I get for RTFA (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Amazing Fish Boy ( 863897 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:08AM (#13173969) Homepage Journal
    Clicked the link. First story on their page:

    Nokia to move off Symbian? Unlikely

    Of course the article below that is the one we are looking for.

  • First Prime Factorization Post (Score:3, Funny)

    by 2*2*3*75011 ( 900132 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:08AM (#13173970)
    770 = 2*5*7*11
  • Coulda sworn I read that somewhere recently.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:17AM (#13174007)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Possibly, but I prefer the ability to create a .procphone file which will route the boss's calls to /dev/null during lunchbreaks and happy hour...

    • Perl already supported on Symbian (Score:5, Funny)

      by jdfox ( 74524 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @04:27AM (#13174408)
      the ability to PERL script my phone into calling me every 5 minutes when I'm down at the pub is going to make me look popular...

      Then get coding, because Perl [slashdot.org] and Python [theregister.co.uk] have already been supported by Nokia on Symbian for over a year. :)

      But once Nokia moves to Linux, you can look forward to being able to VNC into your home Nokia server, turn down the lights and put that can't-fail Barry White CD on, all while you're still down at the pub.

      Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Nokia phones, remotely managing your Swinging Bachelor Pad.
    • Maybe you should add some randomness, because otherwise someone might notice the excact 5 minute interval ...

  • Hold your horses (Score:5, Interesting)

    by da_matta ( 854422 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:20AM (#13174019)
    I know everybody here would love the idea of Nokia switching to linux, but let's not get carried away. What would Nokia benefit from that:

    1) Since Nokia owns 48% of it, Symbian is "as open and free as necessary" from Nokia's point of view. They get to decide how the OS evolves and get their share of the profits.

    2) Symbian is stable and has functionality made specifically for mobile phones. A new Linux platform does not offer this. There are no short terms benefits of switching.

    3) Licensing Series 60 is a business for Nokia and something they have huge investments in. They can't switch unless it doesn't affect this.

    4) The reason Symbian exists, is that Nokia doesn't wan't to spend resources to development of an OS.

    The only way I see Nokia switching would be that Symbian would do it. And why would they?

    • Re:Hold your horses (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "And why would they?"

      Because it's no longer just about phones. It's about that mobile thing people carry around being the new "desktop" and providing the desktop apps they expect. Pushing Symbian in that direction makes no sense when Linux is already there.
      • That's actually a really interesting idea for Linux to explore I think. I think Linux on the PC desktop is always going to be a "couple years away", simply because making a good desktop OS requires a lot of boring detail and busy work, and the sort of developers attracted to linux aren't usually interested in that. Especially if they're working for free. Plus there's the multiple window managers and desktop environments etc...It'll be hard for linux as a whole to keep up with big companies that can pay peop

    • Re:Hold your horses (Score:5, Funny)

      by QuickFox ( 311231 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @03:54AM (#13174336)
      I know everybody here would love the idea of Nokia switching to linux, but let's not get carried away.

      You must be new here.

      -- The price of eternal vigilance is a dollar a day and half an hour of your time.
      Carefully choose a responsible newspaper. Support it, read it, write to it. Do your part.

    • Re:Hold your horses (Score:3, Informative)

      by S3D ( 745318 )

      2) Symbian is stable and has functionality made specifically for mobile phones. A new Linux platform does not offer this. There are no short terms benefits of switching.

      While Symbian may be more stable then Windows CE it's not exactly bulletproof stable. My Nokia 6600 Symbian phone reboot himself by it's own volution about twice per month. Though I'm using a lot of third party applications, some written by me, so it's may be not entierly Symbian fault. About "functionality made specifically for mobi

      • > Though I'm using a lot of third party applications, some written by me, so it's may be not entierly Symbian fault.

        Poorly written applications should not be able to crash the system, if the kernel is solid.

  • I cannot see Nokia jumping ship to Linux as much as we all may want them to, however they do seem to be heading in a direction which suggests they may offer a Nokia friendly distro which would be semi supported. Not installed initially, but would allow individuals and businesses to download at will and get more of out the hardware.

  • PalmSource (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Trillan ( 597339 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:33AM (#13174067) Homepage Journal

    PalmSource can be summed up on one word: irrelevent.

    The total number of devices shipping with a "next generation" Palm OS is 0. Very shortly, PalmSource is not even going to be using Palm in their name.

    Now, if Palm (formerly PalmOne) was going Linux, this would be a big deal. But PalmSource is just building software or the sake of building software, not for the purposes of having it used by anone in the world.

  • This is the same Nokia... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by linuxhansl ( 764171 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:38AM (#13174081)
    that lobbied hard to push for unlimited software patentability in the EU!

    Personally, I do not trust them further than I can throw their cellphones.

  • Focus for speculative statements (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:45AM (#13174102) Journal
    Notice that the focus of the speculation is on LINUX, not on the embedded market. "If Nokia chose Linux..." But, why would they? Why would Symbian no longer be a good choice?

    It's like saying... "If I won the lottery, I'd be rich!". Linux is great, and I'm sure will eventually command the information/communications industries. But individual speculations like this, unfounded by even a quality rumor, are just a waste of time.

    • The answer to that is simple. Using Symbian currently costs Nokia $140,000,000 a year (or more). The fact that Nokia owns 48% of Symbian helps a little, but that's still a lot of money thrown at an operating system.

  • Top Embedded OS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slashdot.org ( 321932 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @02:47AM (#13174115) Homepage Journal
    Such a switch by Symbian would make Linux, in one fell swoop, the leading mobile device platform

    Sure, whatever, so long as you understand that Embedded OS != mobile device platform.

    Perhaps it's hard to believe, but to become the #1 embedded OS, it's going to take a little more than dominating cell-phones. Although it would be a good first step ;-)

    • Re:Top Embedded OS (Score:3, Insightful)

      by RoLi ( 141856 )
      Linux already dominates displayless embedded systems (= pretty much everything minus PDAs and cellphones), so indeed Linux would become the leading embedded OS (actually some say that it already is) - especially because PDAs are getting replaced by cellphones anyway.

  • Why only one OS? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by panurge ( 573432 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @03:14AM (#13174201)
    This may be a stupid observation, but why not keep Symbian for the phone functionality and have a second processor running Linux for the "desktop apps"? You know, the way computers work already with multiple dedicated CPUs. In which case, development should be considerably easier and cheaper. It's always easier to do a development job when the different parts of the system run on optimised architectures.
    • Twice the number of chips. Twice the expense. Twice the complication. Extra storage necessary. No advantage.

      They'd be better off either just extending Symbian or porting all their software across to Linux - development costs are one-off and up-front. Adding in another chip is a nasty workaround that costs you more on every handset sold.
    • Actually, yes, it's a rather stupid observation: the whole point of Symbian is to save power and execute applications efficiently on slower CPUs. Mobile phones are designed with an eye to evey single microampere used.
    • Nokia phones already have one processor for the cellular stack and one running symbian for the applications. Symbian doesn't do the phone stuff, unless you count the UI as phone stuff. Secondly why would they choose Linux of all things for "Desktop" apps? It can't even break significantly into the PC desktop market.
  • heres an article posted about a month ago that has more info on the 770. it looks like a really neat little thing. but i'm still not sure what the point of it is if you can just have a laptop. :\

    http://www.linuxpipeline.com/163701240;jsessionid= R2O0ULAC2ZZK2QSNDBCCKH0CJUMEKJVN [linuxpipeline.com]

  • Nokia won't dump Symbian anytime soon. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by haggar ( 72771 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @04:01AM (#13174351) Homepage Journal
    Let's just say that I have someone very close to me, that works in the Nokia business unit that makes Symbian (apps, drivers, protocol stack...).

    Symbian is not only an OS for Nokia phones. It's a whole ecosystem that Nokia develops and nourishes: 3rd party developers, service providers, operators (which often are also service providers), related non-Symbian software 1st and 3rd parties etc. etc.
    As it is now, Nokia's involvement with Symbian will only grow from here, not decline, because it aims to tap into multiple streams of revenue. If you think Nokia makes money only from mobile phones, you're a fool. And Nokia's ambitions are certainly towards further diversification. In this view, Symbian is a well-estabilished platform, and Nokia has invested billions in the abovementioned ecosystem.
    • Symbian is not only an OS for Nokia phones.
      It would make a darn fine OS for a PDA - in fact it's a descendant of the EPOC32 that ran on the Psion 5 series. Pity Psion lost interest in that market and allowed Win CE to take the game by default.
      • Well, I think the 9300 and 9500 are PDAs, even though I have never been any good at that "product placement"-thing. Not surprisingly, I don't work in marketing.

        Also, I guess the 7710 could/should be called a PDA, too. In any case, that's a damn sweet piece of kit. The first time I had it in my hands, my head almost exploded, in a positive way.
    • Let's just say that I have someone very close to me, that works in the Nokia business unit that makes Symbian (apps, drivers, protocol stack...).

      Sorry if this is offtopic, but couldn't you tell your mate that there are 9300 users out there, who would appreciate (and pay for) a halfway decent selection of games.

      Bounce is getting old and else then that (and that stoopid Golf game) there really doesn't seem to be a lot around for Series 80 phones.

      Else then that it's the best phone I ever had.

  • N770 != Phone (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GoatSucker ( 781403 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @04:02AM (#13174352)
    Sure, Nokia are using Linux in the N770, but the N770 ISNT A PHONE! It'a a portable tablet that uses surrounding networks via WiFi/Bluetooth, so doesn't need the real-time capabilties of a phone OS. Nokia is a large company that produce a LOT of different products - it's not surprising that they use different embedded OS's for different things. It's just like saying - Wow! Nokia are using Linux for their digital TV decoders, that must mean they are going to use Linux for their phones too!
  • It's not likely that Nokia will drop it's Symbian OS for a Linux version. The Symbian OS is designed for mobile terminals and specially for mobile telephnoy.

    On the other hand Linux would be an interesting choice for PDA's and other such devices. The problem is though that now, the mobile phone and the PDA's are merging together. This is where the battle stands, with the new genereation of phones with both PDA and mobile phone capabilities.

    Symbian has dominated so far.

  • I thought TRON was the top embedded OS?

  • Symbian will stay (Score:5, Informative)

    by thaig ( 415462 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @05:09AM (#13174527) Homepage
    I am responsible for some C++ components that build on Symbian, Solaris and Linux as well as some purely Symbian bits. Symbian has rich functionality in areas such as communications (obviously) and multimedia.

    There are many wonderful ideas in it, such as the way it is based on a microkernel, the asynchronous IO mechanism (Active Objects) and ECOM which is rather like COM on windows. The fact that everything is in C++ is a boon too.

    It is quite a mature system because it's simply the evolution of EPOC32 from the Psion series of PDAs. The Size and depth of the APIs is amazing.

    There are some huge problems:
    1) The base operating system is standard across phones but there are "environments" which consist of a GUI and various essential libraries (Series 60 or UIQ). The handset manufacturer has also, up till version 8, been free not to implement some of the Telephony APIs. It is hard, therefore to run exactly the same software on all phones. The situatio is probably still more standardised than Linux in that sense that it has only 2 GUIs and the multimedia stuff is completely standard.

    2) It is built with GCC 2.92 where the support for exceptions was not good. They had to implement their own exception handling and a mechanism called the CleanupStack for freeing dynamically allocated memory in the event of an exception. It is unavoidably complex to use, non portable and the biggest bane to a Symbian C++ developer's existence.

    3) The source is only open to those who pay a fortune for it and even then they get the base Symbian OS without the drivers for the phone models they use or the "Series 60" environment. This has hurt my company because we needed to understand certain aspects of the sound drivers - nobody could tell us and we couldn't look at the code ourselves because even though we have the base operating system source we haven't got the "Series 60" source.

    4) Java on the phones is so crippled (e.g. not being able to open a file) due to their security fears that it is useful only for games and trivial applications.

    Symbian 9 which is coming out with the latest N90 phone from Nokia fixes most things:
    1) They have "bitten the bullet" and broken ABI compatibility to use the standard ARM ABI so now one can compile with GCC 3.4 with all it's great improvements. It is not clear whether the infamous CleanupStack and home-made exception mechanism has gone but I am hoping so.

    2) As I mentioned, support for various Telephony APIs is now a requirement on the handset manufacturer.

    3) Nokia Ported Python to Series 60 and unlike Java it's not crippled w.r.t. access to fundamental APIs.

    4) There is a new security model which controls access to sensitive APIs. To get a public key certificate which allows access to the lowest level ones requires a payment which is annoying but at least it is now possible without buying access to the source at a huge cost.

    Symbian was designed for much more constrained machines and with an inferior C++ compiler but the underlying design is very modern.

    As another poster has said, it has an "ecosystem" across several manufacturers. To compete, Linux would have to be available in a standard version across a lot of handsets too. Destroying this ecosystem would eliminate a lot of development investment by third-party software vendors so I think that Nokia would be unwise to do that overnight.

    Regards,

    Tim
    • 2) It is built with GCC 2.92 where the support for exceptions was not good. They had to implement their own exception handling and a mechanism called the CleanupStack for freeing dynamically allocated memory in the event of an exception. It is unavoidably complex to use, non portable and the biggest bane to a Symbian C++ developer's existence.

      The CleanupStack and Leave-functionality is a lot older than that. It's older than the concept of exceptions in C++ :) It's also better.

      4) Java on the phones is so cri
    • symbian 9 will include support for standard c++ exceptions, however this is for supporting port from other platforms, the CleanupStack will still be the prefered way for pure symbian apps.

  • Another ignorant rant (Score:5, Informative)

    by ArrayIndexOutOfBound ( 694797 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @05:54AM (#13174650)
    The Arc-chart article is factually wrong and assumptions made based on these 'facts' are very close to being rediculous.

    I don't really have the time to dispell all errors in the article but I must address a few.

    First, porting Series 60 user interface, and especially Nokia's base applications to linux is implausible - more likely scenario in that case is a complete rewrite due to heavy use of Symbian specific features such as comm/file/... servers, active objects, IPC and finally security.

    Java VM sold as part of Series 60 is Sun's CLDC HI ported and maintained by Symbian, not 'written by Nokia' as the article claims. In addition to core MIDP2 features, most other major features such as PIM and file access (JSR-075), multimedia, bluetooth (JSR-82), location API, access to SMS and MMS are all developed and maintained by Symbian. Nokia does have a considerable Java resource but to my knowledge most of them work on integration, future (possibly CDC) and of course Series 40 (Nokia's non-symbian OS and UI).

    Nokia has put in £50 million over it's licensing fees in 2004 to help Symbian and that was at the time of the Psion sale. The suggestion that Symbian license fees are something troubling Nokia is really really out of place because a) Nokia owns close to 50% of the company b) Nokia has ~$20 billion idle in the bank.

    Symbian phones constitute 10% of Nokia's sales - Nokia has a large set of non-symbian technologies such as Series 40 - for their mainstream phones. This explains why has Nokia licensed ActiveSync and Window Media DRM directly, rather than through Symbian - so they can actually use it in non-Symbian phones.

    Finally, using the announcement of 770 to draw conclusions about N-S relationship will not lead us very far. Following the same logic, if hotmail was using freebsd (at some point at least) would that mean that Microsoft is ditching Windows?
    • Symbian phones constitute 10% of Nokia's sales - Nokia has a large set of non-symbian technologies such as Series 40 - for their mainstream phones. This explains why has Nokia licensed ActiveSync and Window Media DRM directly, rather than through Symbian - so they can actually use it in non-Symbian phones.

      Excellent point, mod parent up!

  • ...what about text entry? One way PDA/Phones are ok, but with gadgets like these, I want to be able to enter data fairly quickly...
  • The articles make it seem that all S60 applications are Java. While many are, a growing percentage of S60 applications are written in C++. Nokia purchased and licenses pieces of freescale's (formely Motorola, formely Metrowerks) CodeWarrior for Symbian OS [nokia.com], which is the most popular C++ IDE for SymbianOS. You'll find that most games and heavy-duty S60 applications are written in C++ because, well, Java sux at ~133Mhz (where most entry level S60 devices run at).

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