Symbian Foundation Sites To Close 78
Following news earlier this month that Nokia is taking back control of Symbian platform development, the Symbian Foundation has now announced that its websites will shut down on December 17th. Source repositories will no longer be hosted online, and user-submitted content databases may be available later upon request.
"We are working hard to make sure that most of the content accessible through web services (such as the source code, kits, wiki, bug database, reference documentation & Symbian Ideas) is available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation. Preparing this content will take some time, hence it will not be distributable before 31st January 2011. A charge may be levied for media and shipping.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Where can I try N900? (Score:3, Informative)
For an idea of it works try the N8, the interfaces are very similar however the N900 is quicker and the interface is better (think the best parts of Andriod added in). I had a quick look online and the video found here [nokia.co.uk] gives a pretty good impression of how it works.
The only downside is it is a heavy phone. For comparison I have a Nokia 5800 the N900 is slightly larger and noticeably heavier.
It's going to MeeGo (Score:4, Informative)
One has to wonder if Nokia really knows where it's going.
It's going to MeeGo. As I understand it, Symbian is just the legacy system that Nokia uses on "feature phones" until MeeGo matures.
Re:Where can I try N900? (Score:3, Informative)
Kernel drivers are free -- not all are present in vanilla kernels, but the patches are available. The non-free stuff that is important includes hardware acceleration for the display (not strictly vital) and a tiny little detail that is battery charging -- both live in the userspace.
Other non-free bits on N900 are parts of Maemo which is on the way out -- you don't need them if you want a replacement. Any new systems would be most likely based on Meego (like the current Debian project is).
Re:It's going to MeeGo (Score:3, Informative)
Where would you get that idea? Even +3 informative?
Symbian is not going anywhere. Feature phones run S40. MeeGo is high-end and beautiful and wonderful, but it will not run on the same class of hardware. The large part of Nokia's market is still going to be Symbian.
However, you shouldn't confuse Symbian with its S60 UI. Now it goes back in-house where they can start to kick around the needed changes to make it a proper Qt platform without the bureaucracy of a committee.
Nokia's smartphone platform is Qt, and you won't care if it runs Symbian underneath or MeeGo
Sad, but we could see it coming (Score:5, Informative)
I was one of a series strategic consultants hired when Symbian was considering conversion to an Open Source project. Unfortunately, what I told them was not what they wanted to hear. One element I pushed was that nobody was going to be interested in their kernel, regardless of what they did, and that conversion to Linux would eventually be necessary if they were not to continue to expend millions on re-inventing the wheel. Another element was licensing and strategy so that the project would continue to make money, which, amazingly, was rejected as Symbian's customers were also its owners and didn't care for it to continue as a for-profit project. Rather than the direction they took, I would have preferred to see them continue to operate as a profitable proprietary software company, because they very obviously weren't going to make it in Open Source.
But in truth, this project started too late to have much hope.