It is all very easy to knock Nokia and the Symbian platform these days because it is fashionable to do so. One thing that everyone needs to remember though is that Nokia sells phone by the 100′s of millions and has continued to do so for a very long time, so let’s see what’s good and what’s bad about the Symbian platform.
Good
There’s little doubt that Symbian phones are born from the original heritage of the mobile phone and Nokia to this day continues to build in excellent battery life, great call quality and is producing the smartphones with the absolute best voice experience of any platform.
Nokia maps is an added bonus as are the standard cameras, which despite the iPhone raising the bar in the minds of many people, the high-end Nokia smart phones include cameras the rest can only dream of. If you want a camera phone there really is nowhere else to look at this time because some of the better Nokia phones easily rival compact cameras for performance.
Bad
Confusion reigns in the Symbian segment of the market these days because Nokia seems intent on releasing 250 phones a month using different variants of the Symbian platform. They seem to be releasing new software solutions all the time and at the same time removing others with little notice that people have been testing loyally, and most importantly they don’t seem to have a clear vision of where they want to go.
Nokia looks like a follower of the moment. It looks like a follower of the iPhone, it looks like a follower of Android and can’t seem to produce one smart phone that will make the world sit up and take notice. The Nokia N95 was without a doubt a high point, but since that glorious moment we have not seen anything since that comes close to what a company as large as Nokia, and a company that has such a long heritage, should be producing. Nokia has the ability to produce a smart phone that could easily compete with the rest, but on the software and hardware sides it is not quite working out. I want to see Nokia do well, I really do, but it’s been a long time now and some serious head scratching and pencil sharpening needs to be done for Nokia to truly get back in the smartphone game.
Symbian is based on Psion’s EPOC and that is why it is so efficient and solid.
Symbian identified three form factors and assumed there would be 3 different UI models, each developed by one of the lincesees and so we had a prolieration of UIs. And then when Nokia realised the benefits of a touch UI (Hildon?) they got cold feet and cancelled the project (but we see elements of this in the 7710 and Maemo devices). Nokia let itself down and Symbian.