[harshaw]

I did Symbian programming back in the day. IIRC the Sony-Erricson P800. It was not developer friendly. The memory management model was hard to program and could crash easily. Also did some work with Nokia on the N60. I was working at Orange at that time and we had hired a contractor to integrate push to talk (because for some reasons Orange though push to talk would take off in Europe, lolol). I got a couple of free trips to Tampere to theoretically help Nokia debug this third party push to talk app. I seem to recall Nokia not being too enthused to work with some pushy American hacker who wanted to open a debugger and fix things. I remember that we had some nice reindeer dinners.

Early mobile is littered with dead operating systems. not really that surprising. PalmOS, Symbian, SaveJE, windows mobile, etc. not worth crying over.

[aapoalas]

As a Tampere native working with a lot of old Symbian folks, it's good that you remember the dinners :) Hope you liked the city in general, we certainly do!

[selfhoster11]

Palm OS is better described as "undead, and slowly reviving itself". There are ongoing efforts to port it to diverse new hardware (a couple of new-parts ARM boards, and the Nintendo DS among other targets), an alive community that preserves old software and writes brand new software, and at least one reimplementation project (Pumpkin OS).

[flowerthoughts]

Development was unfriendly because S60 supported running without virtual memory, so you had to be really careful releasing memory. I.e. it was targetting small CPUs. The wonky "cleanup" was a big part of this.