[edderly]

No, the OS was a mess. The UI split was the root of the nightmare.

Nokia were "running" (perhaps should read ruining) Symbian well before they bought it. They were only one of the four or was it five co-owners, but they ran rings around the others when pressuring Symbian leadership. They were the only phone manufacturer with a dedicated product support org, and their pre-prod devices were available in core engineering teams unlike Moto et al. Nokia were the key players to create a Symbian OS core without a coherent UI (Techview lol), no TCP/IP stack, no telephony stack. They helped reduce Symbian OS to swiss cheese because they were so concerned with with recouping their investment from gen 1 SOS products and terrified their competitors at the time got a tiny leg up.

[secondcoming]

Techview was a barebones UI used by Symbian devs on the x86 emulator and ARM reference boards (TI OMAP H2 and H4). It never appeared on any phone.

[edderly]

Indeed. So imagine doing performance profiling on a 90s UI framework from Psion and then getting feedback from S60 three months later after an integration cycle that you have a core perf or latency problem.