Run Symbian on Maemo devices?
 

Why nokia don't port Symbian and Ngage (is Ngage an os?) on the tablets?
It could open the Ovi doors to tablet users or use the tablet like a great development platform

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

About Symbian, why would they when there is no consumer products shipping that OS on such hardware?

N-Gage is an API in its own, running on top of Symbian. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Gage_...hnical_details

I wonder how many tablet users would replace Maemo by Symbian in order to get Ovi services. The natural way to bring Ovi support to the tablets is to bring Ovi support to Maemo.

How great is a hardware development platform that has no equivalent in consumers hands. And why for a Symbian/S60 developer a tablet would be a better hardware to use than the current S60 top sellers.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Nokia is not porting symbian to tablets, because Maemo is way better os.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Im my mind Nokia have endless possibility and endless resource and I have no idea how many man-hours would necessary for a port (I suppose beside the arm processor a tablet is a completely different beast, I was probably confused by the N97 and all the voices like a possible Maemo device).
ok, so having symbian is automagically having, hardware limitation apart, NGage . Get it :)
I probably tend to consider a good 80% of user tablet an advanced user (probably Im spoiled having spent time on ITT but I bet the percentage of people downloading the flasher is higher than other Nokia products...) and the re-flashing procedure is great (I suppose Nokia experience in the field is gigantic).
From the user point of view (MY point of view obviously) would be just another option that allow access the Ovi services, music shop and Ngage (at least the old) library. And I just imagine how well could look the Symbian logo on the tablet box...

Again my rantles came from my experience: I have no budget for any S60 (just for playing at the 'little developer game') and a sort of SDK running on Nokia controlled hardware is sure appealing for a cheap developer wannabe (like me or indian or chinese, I have no idea how much Nokia ask for their phones there) and since Im mainly a graphic person just having a touch screen with comparable screen dimension seem a way better intermediary 'step' than a normal pc-based sdk (and easier to install and with a fixed speed parameters) and would give a definitive 'personality' to the tablet. I lurked the S60 comunity a bit and I deeply envy the HUGE user base compared to the tablet (I suppose is matter of order of magnitude :) ).
+ even like a plain consumer device a Symbian OS could still appeal me but yes last barcelona's phones really overlap all the actual tablets killer features (gps, radio, keyboard, processing power, memory, wifi, audio quality). The screen and the speakers are probably still better than any phone around and is just impossible beat the flexibility.
So I can't see any reason why Nokia should not spend a couple of milions of euro to make his user happy.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

To move to Symbian would be a terrible step backwards in my opinion. I jumped on the NIT bandwagon _because_ it runs Linux. I've had enough of closed system software on my devices, including portable ones.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Well, Symbian became opensource, but still, IMHO its days are counted.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

symbiam became opensource? I remeber there were talking about that last year when Nokia aquired it for something like half billion dollars but I didnt know it was already opensource.

Anyway @TA-t3: I didn't mean to replace maemo: just and alternative OS.
And I dont really belive Nokia would really port symbian on the tablet (Im sure someone in Tampere already bring up the idea) I am just curios to analyze advantage or disadvantages and qgil gave me some good tips :)

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

As far as i know it will become open source like 2012... ;)

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Just when will Maemo be on the same level of usage than the symbian devices? I did use tablets for about two years and I did get very frustrated about tablets and switch back totally to S60 which I have been using since the 7610 model. Smaller screen, no touchscreen (N96) but very functioning applications. Music, gps, maps, email, all work well comparing to tablets!

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

For you, for me the experience is the contrary. Slow music player (10 minutes to add a song to the library), slow gallery (30 seconds to open it everytime), stutter recording video, the gps take 10 minutes to get a fix, and so on. Really I am not happy with my Symbian/S60 expensive phone.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Each product has their own positive and negative aspects. These are also personal, and everyone uses the device different. There are many things I like about my S60 phone, and there will be many things I like about RX-51 and Maemo 5.0. But for example, my Nokia phone with S60 does have a functioning internal GPS in contrast to Nokia N810. Certainly not 10 minutes to get a fix! I would have tossed it then lol :D. I also have choice between a lot of navigation software. On the other hand, the screen is rather small for navigation, and it is not touchscreen either.

I've compared my 3 gadgets lately, mostly hardware wise:

If you take all this into account and think about RX-51 and Maemo 5.0 then I'd say it certainly will have a competitive feature set. My problem lies rather with the inconsistencies and reliability in the software. Unfixed bugs, and inefficient behaviour. I hope these will be resolved, but they won't be resolved if the platform is not commercially viable. And in order to fix that a wider community, with also less technically-inclined people, is necessary.

BTW, what you (ciroip) propose is commercially just not viable...

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Of recent i have noticed a great decrease in the fix time of the internal n810 gps. I can get a lock in under 2 minutes. I have noticed this after the last update to the agps app about a month ago.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

I can see ONE good reason to have Symbian, at least for some time, on the tablet :
Nokias S60 ser.3 provides a relly good PIM app. together with a search pgm. (Nokias "Search") that can find any text in the PIM database, e-mails and messages plus any file name in the file system.

( By the way, if you have a Symbian device, get the program "X-plore" from www.lonelycatgames.com, a good file manager + text editor, even on the small screen of the Nokia 5500. )

There is of course Garnet-Palm, but not quite the real thing with the N810 keyboard as the Palm screen works better in portrait mode.

Except for this, I quite agree that Symbians time is really over.
I read somewhere that Symbian is a nuisance to program in, as many of its structures come from the time when memory was scarce and every saved byte of space was essential.

So, unless porting Symbian to the tablet is really simple, programming efforts are probably better invested in bettering PIMs for Mer (or Freemantle, if you consider the next? Nokia).

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Well, we've got the search program.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Thanks for the INFO, new to me.

But the PIM, the PIM ? !

As when Alice (in Wonderland) meets to the Cheshire cat again :

'All right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly,
beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which
remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice; 'but a grin
without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Maemo 5.0 gets icalendar support. So that opens the door to an application using that library (official Nokia application or not) and together with SyncML you get something decent already. There are tons of PIM applications for Maemo btw (a list is compiled on the wiki feel free to improve), but none of them is 'good enough' so to say.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

I checked icalendar on Wikipedia, and that certainly could be a good thing.
Personally, I want something in my pocket, independant of i-net connection.

I have looked around a bit on the PIMs mentioned in the Wiki, and e.g. gpe calendar seems to be going in the right direction.
As to "not good enough", as (un-) far as I have looked, I agree with you.

To me, the advantage of Nokias Symbian PIM (that I use) and Palm (as far as I can see) is the INTEGRATION of the different apps.

Of course, as Linux ( Nokia, Mer, Openmoko, etc.) probably overtakes other systems, good PIMs will be developed.

And Symbian will, of course, not end with a bang but with a wimper, or possibly vanish quite slowly and end with a grin like the Cheshire cat.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

There will be a calendar in Fremantle :)
I think it wont use icalendar (at least as its main backend) because the new calendar API is really complete, with options for everything.

The S60 calendar has an important bug for me: if I delete a weekly meeting for just one day (and let the others untouched), from a random date every entry I had added is moved one hour early and it doesnt let me changed that. I had to buy Handy Calendar to use a calendar in the phone.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

:( ported on intel instead
http://blog.symbian.org/2009/04/16/s...n-intels-atom/

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Here we have a next PhoneOS for netbook manufacturers..

(really, android for netbooks.. how about symbian? please, it's not april 1st anymore..)

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

c'mon all Symbian fanatics.
Symbian is ok for a phone but even on my E51 I get frustrated with it's connectivity abilities. All applications asking for selecting way to connect even if there is connection alive.
S60 was ok on my n3650 and it filled it's capabilities but with more advanced device - equipped in many connectivity interfaces it FAILS imho.
I don't like it's way of setting up connections and all other stuff.
Maemo - once you know how it's done on PC - you know what you should do. On symbian it's the different story.
I'm impressed why nokia pushes this OS for new phones. They should forget it and modify their Maemo a bit - it would be much better.
Make it look like an s60 at it will easily replace.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

lol, could care less about manufacters and sure I m not thinking about functionality... probably is something more about a technological version of 'alpha male wannabe' need, proof of concept, unexplorated fields of possibilities.
When I have a completely different opinion about something it usually mean there is at least 1 completely different point of view I can't see :)

@XTCwell, I don't even own a Nokia cellphone and I know nearly nothing about symbian. I just barely touched it when I had to configure and install a Kurzweil's text-to-speech synthesis for a blind friend and I loved the idea to have a 'device' (family/philosophy/os) so 'open' and flexible to be able to be adapted for such a peculiar and particular niche (and this was some years ago).
By my side is just all about knowdledge and having the opportunities to touch by hand, developing, hack another toy (and reading around how much Nokia payed for symbian, an expansive toy :) ) just fit my needs.
I guess is the same for Android, watching how a company like Google build from scratch and entire os and understand better why some choices and why not other have, I repeat to me, great appeal.
My initial tought was that porting symbian on the tablets would be pretty easy and cheap for Nokia and seemd fit with the edgy personality of the series.
I think the sentence:
from the that same Symbian explain a bit more my point of view.

Peace and love, peace and love

Could Symbian be used on Maemo hardware, and vice versa?
 

The Symbian OS is going open source under EPL with the first full open release in mid-2010, and the first community-supervised (i.e. maemo-esque) open source release by the end of 2010, with all versions after that being overseen entirely by the Symbian Foundation.

(Click here for more details on the upcoming new releases from the Symbian Foundation.)

As it's going to be freely available, does anyone have any idea if this upcoming versions of Symbian could be installed to run on Maemo devices? Obviously we will probably have brand new hardware by then, but we already know a bit about it so perhaps some intelligent guesswork can be made?

There's no requirement for it to be a phone-only OS, the foundation is actively reaching out to non-phone devices too and have demonstrated Symbian running on an Intel Atom setup to prove the point.

Re: Could Symbian be used on Maemo hardware, and vice versa?
 

There's been discussion on this topic previously, the "Symbiam S60" thread being one example. In another thread, igor suggested the possibility is not far fetched, though I've been scolded previously for bringing that post up, as it was in a Windows Mobile thread.

EDIT: "Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets" is another previous thread.

Re: Could Symbian be used on Maemo hardware, and vice versa?
 

It WAS far fetched, but the recent changes to Symbian's structure (i.e. closed source to open source, commercial company to foundation) could make it a lot easier to install on unusual hardware.

Re: Could Symbian be used on Maemo hardware, and vice versa?
 

It could be used, but like S60v5, there would need to be considerable work done with the UI and many applications in order to maintain compatibility.

S60v5 would be the best canidate for MID-like use, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was already done internally by Nokia.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

Symbian if its open sourced in a timely manner, will probably be the most advanced open OS for mobile devices available. It has developer documentation and support as well as a framework for EVERYTHING, voip, calendar, multitasking, gps, HD video, most forms of cellular data, advanced gaming, WM Playsforsure (I dunno if that will be included in the spec due to licensing etc) and most importantly a strong regular phone and dialling component.

It will be mighty tempting for manufacturers who want to put out a do everything multimedia device who right now only really have the Android OS available.
See Sony Idou

As far as a port to the tablet hardware I highly doubt Nokia is going to do that for many different business decisions.

Re: Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets
 

We should probably be careful not to confuse Symbian with S60.

Re: Run Symbian on Maemo devices?
 

The following threads have been merged to form this thread:

• "Symbian and N-Gage on Tablets" with twenty-four posts
• "Could Symbian be used on Maemo hardware, and vice versa?" with four posts