S60

» see s60.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

For most of a decade in Turkey the smartphone question was not which platform. It was which Nokia. The phones came through the same shops as everything else and the software on them was the same software everywhere, so nobody had a reason to learn the name of the layer they were touching every day. That layer was called S60, and it was not the operating system.

Symbian OS shipped without a user interface. It was an operating system in the strict sense, a kernel and a set of services with nothing on top, and every manufacturer that licensed it had to bring its own front end. Nokia's was S60, built out of a Symbian design called Pearl. Sony Ericsson went with UIQ, the Japanese carriers with MOAP. The same OS underneath, incompatible worlds on the screen. A developer who wanted to reach all of them had to build the app more than once.

S60 was introduced at COMDEX in november 2001 and reached the public the following year on the Nokia 7650, a slide phone with a camera that nobody had asked for yet. The thing it did that mattered was let you install software onto hardware you had already paid for. On a phone in 2002 that was close to unheard of.

Nokia licensed it out too. Samsung and Panasonic shipped S60 phones. Siemens built the SX1 around it and Vertu put it inside metal that cost more than the phone had any business costing. None of them sold anything near what Nokia sold, which is why the platform is remembered as a Nokia thing even though it was never only that.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The 2nd Edition arrived in 2002 on the Nokia 6600 and fixed the shape people still picture: a grid of icons behind a dedicated menu button, two soft keys underneath whose labels changed depending on what you were doing. By the 3rd Edition in 2005 you could write for it in native C++ or in Python, and Nokia was running a developer program with a logo you were allowed to print on your box.

The N95 in 2007 was the high point. It had GPS and a five megapixel camera in the same year the first iPhone shipped with neither, and Symbian was past sixty percent of the smartphone market worldwide. On paper Nokia had already won.

~ the slide ~

The 3rd Edition also brought mandatory code signing. Symbian OS 9.1 hardened the platform so that an application had to carry a certificate from a registered developer before the phone would install it, and anything written for the earlier editions stopped being binary compatible overnight. The security argument was real. The practical result was that a working ecosystem of small free software got cut off at the knees, and a cottage industry appeared around firmware hacks that turned the check back off.

Then Nokia bought Symbian Ltd. in june 2008 and set up the Symbian Foundation to open source the stack and unify the interfaces. Unifying them meant picking one, and the one they picked was S60. That should have been a win. What actually happened is that the touchscreen release which shipped on the 5800 XpressMusic in october 2008 was called S60 5th Edition and Symbian^1 at the same time, and from that point the platform was being run by a committee while Apple and Google shipped.

~ what replaced it ~

Symbian^3 was announced alongside the Nokia N8 on 27 april 2010 and the S60 name went with it. In november of that year the Symbian Foundation was wound down. In february 2011 Stephen Elop turned Nokia over to Windows Phone, and by april the company had handed Symbian development and three thousand employees to Accenture. The last device that ran a descendant of S60 was the Nokia 808 PureView in 2012, a phone with a forty one megapixel sensor and an operating system nobody was writing for.

What S60 left behind is the shape of a phone menu. A grid of icons you reach with one button, and an app you install yourself onto hardware you already own. Both of those survived into the phone in your pocket, and neither is credited to a user interface layer out of Espoo that most of the people using it could not have named.

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