Should I learn how to develop on Symbian OS? [closed]

Answer 1

I guess I could answer some of the subjective sides of the question as someone who has worked on Symbian OS for quite a few years ;) However I won't, I'll try to stick to what I see as some facts and useful information.

The phone in question runs the Nokia Series 60 UI (these days called s60). Symbian phones have traditionally been split into the OS bit (Symbian OS v9.1, 9.2 etc) and the phone vendor buys or develops their own UI. A particular version of s60 will run on a specific version of Symbian OS.

So a good place to start for development on your phone is Forum Nokia: http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/symbian/documentation/getting_started.html

This will cover the UI bits and pieces. I should add that UI vendors do perform a lot of OS customisation themselves (with varying degrees of self-control/quality) so differences in API's especially involving hardware can become esoteric.

Symbian itself does provide a decent level of quality of documentation, not up there with Microsoft but better than a lot of open source offerring. A good reference is the Symbian Developer Network:

http://developer.symbian.org

Regarding tools. The standard development environment these days is Nokia's Carbide platform which is based on Eclipse, I think it is fair to say that if you can put up with Eclipse you'll be fine, if you can't... well... command line time for you.

Carbide has on-device debugging and includes the compilers for PC and ARM (GCC-E) targets.

Most app development is done using the Symbian Emulator which will be part of the SDK for your phone from Nokia.

When you are ready to put the app on the phone, you need to look at Symbian Signed: http://www.newlc.com/new-symbian-signed-processes-are-now-available A lot of people have had reasonable complaints that it can be a bit confusing, but as a non-commercial developer I believe "Open Signed" is supposed to be the easiest.

Answer 2

I recommend Python for S60 as good way to explorer the capabilities of the Nokia S60/Symbian platform. It's easy to use and comes with a powerful setup of APIs. There is also a book that covers a lot of fun examples. One nice thing about the Python SDK is that you can run code on the phone interactively via a console on your PC.

Answer 3

Qt for S60 is coming out pretty soon, there's already an unsupported pre-release available. You might wish to invest your time there, since it's likely going to be the favoured UI for Nokia in the future.

Answer 4

We've done a reasonable amount of S60 programming in our organisation, plus a lot of BREW, and bits of just about everything else.

• The S60 tools are pretty good compared to a lot of platforms I've used. For example,
• BREW's tools are a disgrace.
• The S60 platform is pretty powerful. You can do just about anything (though you may be restricted by signing requirements). Java isn't even worth making the comparison, you are so sandboxed you can't do anything...
• S60 Signing is ok, though we have been mucked about a bit occasionally (who hasn't...)
• The learning curve is very steep. Fundamentally, it's different. If there are two ways to do something, one of them standard, then Symbian will have picked the other one.
• The documentation, particularly in FP2, is not that bad
• The build system is as bad as everyone says it is

Answer 5

I'd recommend trying Superwaba, it's a cross-platform development platform for PDAs using a Java-like language, so it's quite easy to get things started.

Answer 6

Today Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 is released. However, I doubt the future of nokia, who is due to face the already challenging mobile market with its N8 which has been outpaced by iphone 4 even before getting on the market. Even itself is along the lines of confessing this.