Symbian^3

Symbian^3 Ready For Primetime

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On August 2nd, Nokia announced via their blog that work on Symbian^3 has been completed as of June 17th.  Nokia says that the next step is to begin: tweaking and testing its settings to make sure it works optimally with the hardware on the forthcoming Nokia N8 and the family of Symbian^3 devices that will … Read more

Symbian: The Next Generation

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While Symbian’s condition isn’t pretty, it’s not all doom and gloom for the world’s largest smartphone OS.  Symbian still has a lot going for it, and if Nokia can get all their ducks in a row they have the potential to make themselves a formidable rival against Android and iOS

Quality Control – The main problem with Symbian S60v5 was the overall usability and stability.  They simply didn’t do enough testing and research to figure out the best way to implement the UI.  The OS has a very thrown-together feel to it.  In addition, there were just too many bugs in initial releases.  My N97 was practically unusable until firmware version v11 and the 5530 XpressMusic had kinetic scrolling enabled only in a few areas(the main menu was not one of them) which added to confusion as to when one could use it and when one couldn’t.  Releasing phones with beta-like builds of the OS is not going to make Symbian look good in anyone’s eyes.  Not to mention that not all consumers understand how to update their phones.  They expect the out of box experience to work, as they should.

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Why Symbian Sucks and Why It Wont Stop Sucking Anytime Soon

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In light of Symbian-Guru shutting its doors, and Symbian Screenshot0003falling behind Android in market share, I thought I should add my two cents about Symbian.  I own a Nokia N97 which I got about a year ago.  My critique of Symbian will be focused primarily on my experience with the N97 since I do not own any other Symbian powered devices.  My intention is not to bash Nokia or Symbian, but rather to point out areas that need improvement.  Nokia has done many things right with the N97.  For example, the resistive screen is very responsive and the best I’ve used.  The TFT screen works great in direct sunlight and the camera records in nHD resolution for a great viewing experience on the phone.

However, the N97 has be plagued by a ridiculous amount of problems and issues from day one.  I’ve seen multiple complaints about performance and transitions.  Nokia’s ads show the device very smoothly and with very nice transition effects.  In reality the OS is anything but smooth, with noticeable lag when scrolling or launching applications; even auto screen rotation suffers from lag! The transitions amount to nothing more than the screen fading off and back on when you rotate the screen, yet somehow this pathetic excuse for a transition causes the system to run at a snail’s pace.  I should note that Nokia has fixed most of the lag with it’s firmware updates.  This is not to say that the OS is completely smooth now, but it is vastly superior to what I had to deal with in v10…

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