Symbian Os
Symbian OsThe OperatingSystem formerly known as Epoc. See http://www.symbian.com/. North Americans like PalmOs
The market-leading HandHeld OS in Europe. Symbian OS provides a suite of productivity tools (spread-sheet, word processor etc.), sync-to-desktop and such, but also, with each new release, is integrating more and more comms protocols over more and more transport technologies (especially wireless protocols), fairly seamlessly. It's becoming a platform for communicators, rather than an OS for hand-helds. Which is a shame because IMO it's a 'great' handheld platform, much more capable than PalmOs while not requiring the hardware overhead of WinCe based WindowsMobile.
Machines that run one variety of SymbianOs or another:
News and Developments
Jul05 bad news on OS futures. See http://msmobiles.com/news.php/4070.html
Symbian is interesting in that the underlying OS is written in object-oriented C++, and the C API wraps the C++. Symbian also has its own project files, which make it slightly difficult to work with.
We liked its project files approach (simple-syntax customized makefiles) so much that we embraced-and-extended it for our in-house build system. We got brilliant results. As an example, the symbian-style project file for one project was 2k compared to 1.4meg(!) for the visual studio .dsp equivalent. The benefits of this kind of approach for multi-platform development are huge, since you DontRepeatYourself across systems, and get to work with legible project files so you don't get into CVS fights. -- AnAspirant
Good grief! The Symbian build process fills me with horror, I'd never use it if I didn't have to. I'm interested to know what sort of code volumes you're building and how they're broken up. We find that makmake generated makefiles penalize us severely with very long build times if we have many small files. It is convenient to be able to rebuild very easily for any supported platform, but we find that for much of our work, mainly porting of technologies developed for platforms other than Symbian, that setting up new .mmp, .pkg and build.inf files for code not produced within the in-bred Symbian world is a royal pain. -- KeithBraithwaite
Hundreds of files of multi-platform ported code, with a pretty standard structure unchanged by adding Symbian. Build times weren't a significant problem for us (you don't need to "make clean" often). The emulator startup time is more of a pain, but that can't be helped. The pkg and inf files only need to be created once and are pretty simple. We generated the MMP from simpler syntax.
What is its browser? These days, Opera.
does avant-go work with it? [dank spangle]
Could someone point me to the online community for SymbianOs? I work with the Nokia 9210, but I haven't found any non-Nokia sites where people gather to discuss SymbianOs
-- ShaeErisson
This is probably what your looking for, the developer newsgroups. http://www.symbian.com/developer/public/index.html
Here is a nice news and discussion site: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com or another for C++ developers: http://www.NewLC.com
Maybe not a perfect fit, but try news:comp.sys.psion.programmer which is for discussion programming the Psion machines, which these days run ER5 and/or ER6. -- MikeSmith, formerly very happy SymbianOs user (on a Psion 5mx and a DiamondMako) who has since given in to the siren song of the HandspringTreo, the latest coolest thing in the universe. ;-)
The main source of Symbian OS info is Symbian. There has historically been a lot of third-part development going on in OPL (what ER5 and previous have instead of VB), discussed on newsgroups and so on. But there isn't much public discussion of Symbian OS application development and systems programming. This is partly to do with the commercial pressures of the PDA/smartphone/communicator market, and partly to do with the way the Symbian OS community works.
These days, typically, a manufacturer who wishes to put Symbian OS onto a device, the likes of Nokia, Sony-Ericsson etc, licence whatever versions they like of the core Symbian OS technology along with various application engines, and a vanilla UI framework (there are now a range of these for Symbian OS, some bearing a striking resemblance to certain other hand-held UI frameworks - entirely coincidentally, I'm sure). Then they roll them all together and enter into a porting exercise where the OS, apps and UI are adapted and optimized for the particular device in question. So, while say Nokia and SonyEricsson? both produce SymbianOs phones, with a good deal of binary compatibility between them as far as things like comms protocols goes, the Symbian OS Word application, if it is to deployed on both, needs at least its UI ported to each one from the base UI.
It used to be that Symbian themselves would do all this for you, but nowadays they only work on the core technologies and base UIs, and manufacturers have to do the porting and tuning themselves, or farm the work out to subcontractors, like my employer: we've had variously large hands in making Java a viable proposition on a few of Symbian OS devices.
The upshot of this is that, as far as application developers are concerned, it's almost as important to know whether you're working against Nokia's Symbian OS (and which one of those), Psion's Symbian OS, Sony-Ericsson's etc. etc. as to know that you're working against Symbian Os and not WinCE.
All of which means that, if you are developing for the 9210, the only people you're going to get much value from discussing things with (if anyone else even would) are Symbian and other 9210 developers. Unfortunately, Symbian themselves aren't very communicative to the great unwashed. Is your company any one of the various kinds of Symbian partner? -- KeithBraithwaite.
I gather that the issue of compatibility between Symbian OSes with different UI's is something well known, and which is now being addressed. You can't really blame them, since this is quite a tricky problem. Hopefully this'll be addressed in v8 or v9 of the OS...
Also, the open source ports of OPL to the different Symbian UI's apparently allows one program to work pretty seamlessly on different UI's. -- csh
J2ME apps will work variously well on most recent Symbian devices, and PersonalJava on some, too. There was a huge volume of OPL written for the Psion handhelds, but there's not much being written for the phones. The question of UI interoperability is a thorny one: the incompatible phone UIs in question don't belong to Symbian (who consider that UI's aren't really their business anymore), but to Nokia (Series 60, Series 90) and to UIQ (UIQ). Series 60 and UIQ are very different beasts, although their capabilities are converging and they will soon both use Symbian OS 7 underneath, but it will be a good long time before it's trivial (or even just "not hard") to port programs between them. And now there's Series 90 to contend with, which is different again... -- KB
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