Symbian OS

~ a brief life ~

Symbian was created in 1998 as a joint venture between Psion (whose EPOC OS was the foundation), Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola. The first Symbian phone shipped in 2000. By 2007 Symbian had over 60% of the global smartphone market, almost entirely on Nokia hardware. It was, briefly, the dominant smartphone operating system in the world.

Then the iPhone shipped in 2007. Then Android shipped in 2008. By 2011 Symbian's share had collapsed to 16%. Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop announced a partnership with Microsoft in February 2011 (the famous "burning platform" memo), effectively committing Nokia to Windows Phone. Symbian was retired from new Nokia phones in 2012. The final Symbian phone, the Nokia 808 PureView, shipped in 2013. Nokia ended Symbian support entirely on January 1, 2014.

~ vital stats ~

~ what symbian was ~

Symbian was, in technical terms, an outstanding mobile operating system for its time. It was built for low-power, resource-constrained devices. It supported real multitasking, Bluetooth, GPRS, MMS, and a decade later WiFi and HSDPA. It had a real C++ application framework and a respectable software world. The Nokia N95 (2007) was, on paper, a more capable phone than the iPhone in almost every dimension except touchscreen.

But Symbian was also, by 2007, an aging codebase. Its API was complex and idiosyncratic, though programming for Symbian required understanding "active objects," "descriptors," and "panic codes", concepts that no other major platform required. Symbian developers were a specialised and shrinking guild. The OS had been designed for mobile phones with real keyboards. It was retrofitted clumsily for touchscreens.

~ the n-series glory ~

The Nokia N-series, 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 (numeric keypad on one side, media controls on the other)
• microSD expansion
• FM radio
• 3.5mm headphone jack

The N95 cost $750 unsubsidised in 2007 and Nokia could not produce them fast enough. It was, on every dimension that mattered to a 2007 consumer, the best phone 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, because nokia's was a more capable phone. The market chose the smaller computer.

~ the burning platform memo ~

On February 11, 2011, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop circulated an internal memo describing Nokia's situation as a man on a burning platform who must choose to jump into freezing water or burn alive. The memo was leaked within hours and printed in the Wall Street Journal the same day.

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 the iPhone-Android duopoly 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 that 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, which Microsoft wrote off entirely two years later. Nokia's smartphone empire was gone within five years of the memo.

~ the meego coda ~

Nokia, before the Microsoft pivot, had been internally developing a Linux-based mobile OS called MeeGo (a merger of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin), though the first MeeGo phone, the Nokia N9, shipped in 2011. It was widely considered, at launch, the best-designed Nokia phone ever made: edge-to-edge display, single-button navigation that prefigured later phone interface conventions, beautiful industrial design.

Elop's burning-platform decision killed MeeGo. The N9 shipped to limited markets and Nokia explicitly refused to release a successor. The MeeGo team was reorganised, then made redundant. Several former MeeGo engineers founded Jolla, a small Finnish company that has continued to develop the codebase as Sailfish OS, because sailfish has a small but devoted user base. It is the last remnant of Nokia's pre-Microsoft mobile vision.

~ the void ~

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. The mobile world is poorer for not having a third major world. Competition matters.

The European mobile industry. Symbian was, more than anything, 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 a great piece of hardware, optimise 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 hardware specs do not determine winners; user experience does.

~ what people said ~

"i had a nokia n95 in 2008 and it had everything. gps, navigation, real camera, real keyboard, real internet. i thought i had won the smartphone war. when iphone friends made fun of my battery life i pitied their three apps."; b.ö. 41

"i was a symbian developer at nokia from 2005 to 2011. when the burning platform memo came out i was at my desk in espoo. i went to the parking lot and sat in my car for an hour. then i went home and applied to google.". o.k. 44

"the nokia n9 was the most beautiful phone ever made and it shipped already-cancelled. i bought one in 2011 and used it for four years past its support window because nothing else made me feel that way. it is still in a drawer.", i.t. 38