Symbian OS

» see symbian.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

symbian started in 1998 as a joint venture between psion (whose EPOC OS was the technical foundation), nokia, ericsson, and motorola. the goal was to build a shared smartphone operating system that european handset makers could all ship on their devices. the first symbian phone shipped in 2000. by 2007 symbian had over 62 percent of the global smartphone market, almost entirely on nokia hardware.

then the iphone shipped in june 2007. then android arrived in october 2008. by 2010 symbian's market share had collapsed to under 30 percent. on 11 february 2011, nokia CEO stephen elop circulated an internal memo describing nokia's situation as "a man on a burning platform" who must jump or burn. three days later nokia announced a partnership with microsoft and that windows phone would be the new platform. symbian was effectively dead from that moment.

nokia kept shipping symbian phones for two more years (the anna and belle updates of 2011, the nokia 808 PureView in 2013) but each release felt smaller and more reluctant. on 1 january 2014 nokia officially ended symbian support. about three months later microsoft completed its acquisition of nokia's phone division. the symbian era was over.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what symbian was ~

symbian was, in technical terms, an excellent mobile operating system for its era. it was built for low-power, resource-constrained devices. it supported real multitasking, bluetooth, GPRS, MMS, and later wifi and HSDPA. it had a real C++ application framework. it supported third-party apps through a curated app store called nokia ovi store.

the API was complex and idiosyncratic. symbian programming required understanding "active objects", "descriptors", and "panic codes". concepts that no other major mobile platform required. the result was that symbian developers were a specialized profession, and that profession was shrinking by 2008 as android and ios drew talent away.

the OS was designed for phones with physical keyboards and small non-touch screens. it was retrofitted clumsily for touchscreens. by 2009 the symbian touch experience felt awkward compared to ios. nokia kept iterating but the underlying design constraints were hard to work around without rewriting from scratch.

~ the n-series glory ~

the nokia n-series, especially the n95 (2007) and n900 (2009), were the high-water mark of pre-iphone smartphones. the n95 had:

• 5MP camera with carl zeiss optics
• GPS with turn-by-turn navigation
• front-facing camera for video calls (in 2007)
• wifi and 3G
• two-way slider design
• microsd expansion
• FM radio
• 3.5mm headphone jack

the n95 cost about 750 dollars unsubsidized in 2007. nokia could not produce them fast enough. on every dimension that mattered to a 2007 consumer, the n95 was the most capable smartphone available. the iphone in 2007 had no GPS, a 2MP camera, no 3G, no MMS, no copy-paste, no third-party apps, no expandable storage. apple's phone was a smaller computer. nokia's was a more capable phone. the market chose the smaller computer.

~ the burning platform memo ~

on 11 february 2011, nokia CEO stephen elop circulated an internal memo describing nokia's situation as a man on a burning oil platform who must choose between jumping into freezing water or burning alive. the memo was leaked to the wall street journal within hours.

three days later nokia announced a partnership with microsoft to ship windows phone as nokia's primary smartphone OS. symbian and meego (nokia's other mobile OS in development) were ended. the decision committed nokia to a third-place world at a moment when ios and android had become structurally entrenched.

the burning platform decision is one of the most-debated CEO calls in mobile history. defenders argue symbian was unfixable on the timescale required. critics argue committing to windows phone, a platform with even worse market traction, was strategic suicide. the outcome supports the critics. by 2014 nokia had sold its phone business to microsoft for 7.2 billion dollars, which microsoft wrote off entirely two years later. nokia's smartphone empire was gone within five years of the memo.

~ the anna and belle disasters ~

between the burning platform memo and the actual end of symbian, nokia shipped two final OS updates called symbian anna (mid 2011) and symbian belle (late 2011). they were supposed to keep symbian users patient until windows phone was ready. instead they made things worse.

the updates targeted symbian^3 phones like the N8, E7, and C7. people who installed them sometimes ended up with bricked devices. the N8 had specific update failure problems. anybody who lost their phone in this period has the same memory: you tried to update because nokia kept telling you to, the update went bad, you ended up with an expensive paperweight. nokia's response was uneven. some people got replacements. some did not.

this is the part of the symbian story that does not get written about much, because by 2011 the tech press had already moved on to the iphone vs android argument. but for the actual symbian users who lived through it, anna and belle were a worse betrayal than the burning platform memo. the memo said "we are leaving you for windows phone." anna and belle were the door slamming on the way out.

~ then microsoft swallowed the rest ~

in april 2014 microsoft completed its acquisition of nokia's phone division for 7.2 billion dollars. symbian was already dead by then but the nokia phone brand still had value, and microsoft wanted it for windows phone.

microsoft made lumia phones for a few more years. steve ballmer was famous for his "developers, developers, developers" rant from years earlier, and windows phone was supposed to be the platform that proved he was right. the developers never showed up. nobody bought the phones. in july 2015 microsoft wrote off 7.6 billion dollars on the nokia acquisition, more than they paid for it because of integration costs. the microsoft mobile division was wound down by 2017.

so if you want to count the deaths in order: symbian was killed by elop's decision in 2011. the nokia phone brand was bought and killed by microsoft over 2014 to 2016. windows phone itself was killed by microsoft in 2017. three phone platforms gone in six years, all out of the same building in espoo. by 2018 there was no european smartphone industry left.

~ what we lost ~

the third platform. ios and android became a duopoly partly because symbian, windows phone, blackberry OS, and webOS all collapsed within a few years of each other. competition matters. the mobile world is poorer for not having a third major option.

the european mobile industry. symbian was a european mobile project: finnish (nokia), swedish (ericsson), british (psion). its death coincided with the end of european leadership in consumer mobile hardware. twenty years on, the major mobile companies are american (apple, google) and east asian (samsung, xiaomi, huawei). europe has no equivalent.

the hardware-first phone. nokia's product philosophy was: build great hardware, optimize software for that hardware, ship a tightly integrated experience. apple eventually adopted this philosophy and won. nokia had it first. nokia lost because the hardware they built was not the hardware the market wanted (touchscreens, big displays, app stores). the lesson is that hardware specs do not determine winners. user experience does.

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