Symbian OS Ten Years On: iPhone Opportunity?

IanFogg | June 27, 2007, 11:31 AM

Ten years ago the first device to run Symbian OS was launched, and the OS, then named EPOC32 was announced to the world. Unfortunately Symbian OS’s progress, has been as slow as the smartphones running Symbian often now feel in usage.

I was at Psion, and unlike the rather morbid piece in the Register* I remember the sense of innovation, of breaking new ground, of going way beyond any job description, and the prescient awareness inside the company about the tremendous opportunity for mobile phones to combine or link with PDA’s. Perhaps the reason my memory is so different is that I left before the period of internal struggles (1999-2001) that the article focuses upon.

But I’m tremendously frustrated by the slow progress since. Symbian OS is widely deployed in millions upon millions of smartphones. Yet the market has balkanised into different camps: Nokia’s Series 60, the UIQ flavour usually shipped in SonyEricsson and a few Motorola phones, and the cul de sac of Series 80.

When my phone broke a few weeks ago, I dusted down an Nokia N80 (Series 60) and set it up ready to use as a temporary replacement… but couldn’t bring myself to like it, or even suffer it, and opted for my old Treo 650 instead. Why?

The OS has moved from being an elegant experience, that offered both complete touch screen and keyboard control into either a keyboard-only UI (Series 60, Series 80), or an almost entirely touch interface (UIQ).

Devices that run Symbian now usually feel slow, although they run on hardware with orders of magnitude more processing power than back in 1997. Part of the design mantra for Psion handhelds was that they had to feel fast: minimum numbers of clicks, multiple ways to do anything, responsive multi-tasking, application instant launch buttons, instant on, etc. etc. My partner still uses a Psion and has politely declined any current smartphone option that I have offered.

Current Symbian smartphones, in fact virtually all smartphones, simply do not feel fast enough in use. This isn’t immediately apparent from a demo in store, or the specification sheet, it only becomes clear when carried around and relied upon. For “always with you” handhelds, even tiny little delays in responsiveness add up and become frustrating. Often these would be acceptable on a desktop computer. On a handheld they are not. On the positive side, Symbian OS devices today are reliable, stable, predictable performance – just as they always were – but also now predictably slow… unlike the stop-start experience I find using Windows Mobile (my current phone).

This lack of speed, combined with an eroding attention to UI detail in Symbian OS, leaves the way open for new entrants in the multimedia phone and smartphone markets. But, while the opportunity is there, it’s not an easy one to seize and we’ll only be able to judge success or failure after real users have lived with the new device for some months and found its real strengths and weaknesses.

* The Register has managed to record the launch date wrongly, they are out by ten days: see here for the original press release.

Rather than reading the whole Register article I recommend people dip into the parts of it that contain interviews with some of the key individuals (although mostly on the Psion hardware side):
Nick Healey – UI
Mark Gretton - hardware.
David Potter - company founder
Martin Riddiford - industrial design. There’s also a great interview with him here.
David Tupman – test engineer.