But when J2ME support was added, it became easy to develop apps. I used to develop J2ME apps as hobby, I made a game and took it for my first job interview. In that job I had to port a 30,000+ J2ME code app to Android in 2010. The company I worked for was even experimenting with NFC payments in Nokia Symbian phones in 2010!
> But when J2ME support was added, it became easy to develop apps.
And adding Python support for S60 (PyS60) was the best gift by Nokia for users as it brings Symbian devices to be "on-the-go handheld devs tool for developing apps without desktop PC".[0]
Has you ever know that there is fully functional Blender-like 3D mesh editor & animator app written in Python for S60 (PyS60) directly on Symbian smartphone?[1]
Oh my, this thread is bringing back sweet nostalgia!
>And adding Python support for S60 (PyS60) was best gift by Nokia
Yeah installing python interpreter in S60 on my Nokia N70 ME, motivated me to checkout Python programming book from my college library. As I was reading it in the class during break, the top-ranking girl student came across and asked me "Why Python, isn't it a dead language?"(circa 2006-2007) I assumed she must be right, I didn't write python until several years later; I bet she's using Python in her job now.
So if all these things were possible on Symbian so early what in the world happened that they lost the market race so badly. Too much engineering-driven design? Lack of a unifying Jobs-esque force at the top to make hard decisions?
• iPhone's capacitive touch screen vs Nokia's resistive touch with stylus requirement was too much of a friction (pun not intended). 1 year after iPhone's release, Nokia released 5800 marketed as iPhone killer; guess what? it had f'in stylus with resistive screen.
• Then when android happened, which was poor man's iPhone; Nokia hugged Windows Phone OS. Which never became a thing as it lacked Google apps (Google killed it, MSFT would have done the same to Google if places were interchanged). Other comments have detailed possible leadership sabotage related to the MSFT deal, which I agree with.
That's true of several mobile hardware/SW of that time, I mentioned capacitive screen to show typical consumer preference.
Btw, you can also add native 3G video calling via front camera to that list, my Nokia N70 did that years earlier in India. Not many westerners seem to know about this feature in my earlier discussions.
The market have shifted. Before iphone, everyone was trying to build the smalles phone possible. Jobs convinced the world for brick sized devices and SymbianOS lost its USP - doing a lot on small batteriess. Had there been a wearables market back then, it could have had a second lease of life.
Which is why Elop got the bonus from Nokia shareholders as per the signed contract. Finn press found out all the dirt about the contract back then, and the news are still relatively easy to track down.
There were MIDP profiles[1] as long the version matched, the apps worked fine in my experience on any device although the devices themselves varied in their key pad placements; Nokia went crazy in their phone designs[2]!
I had a 3660 (friends called it the "communications brick"). There was no wifi and I couldn't afford a data plan but I was able to have the phone dialup via Bluetooth (think "reverse tether") to my Linux desktop. I never got into J2ME: being a fledgling Linux snob in college, I went for Nokia's C++ target and got stuck in the quagmire.
But MIDP profiles were so limited that you could only build the simplest apps. To do anything complex required calling proprietary extensions, which destroyed portability.
