The king was on his last legs: Symbian once ruled the smartphone world, but the introduction of the iPhone followed by the arrival of Android spelled the end for the platform. However, this good night would not be good.
Symbian is the core of the operating system and several user interfaces have been built on top of it. The 60 series is perhaps the best known of these: it made its debut with the Nokia 7650, which was not only Nokia’s first camera phone, but also the first mass-marketed Symbian phone (before that there were a few niche).
Nokia 7650, the first mass-market Symbian phone
For the most part, the Series 60 ran on phones with displays between 2 and 3 inches. The user interface was built around a D-pad, used to navigate between elements on the screen, and several smart buttons, which trigger context-sensitive actions.
There was also the Series 80, used in Nokia’s QWERTY Communicator phones, but the Finns mainly used the S60. None of those Communicators had a touch display anyway.
There was also Symbian UIQ, created for PDA-style devices. We revisited that branch of Symbian in our Sony Ericsson P910 Flashback. UIQ was designed for touchscreens: resistive touchscreens intended to be used with a pointed stylus rather than a finger (a finger, especially a nail, worked most of the time, though).
Sony Ericsson P910
Fast forward to 2008 and we come to Symbian Series 60 5th Edition or as it was later called, Symbian^1. This was a Symbian UI built for touch, but instead of taking inspiration from now-dead PDAs like UIQ did, the third edition was copied from the iPhone. We’ve already discussed the reasons why it failed in our Nokia 5800 retrospective: putting touch on a D-pad-based UI simply didn’t work.
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was a big step towards touch user interface, a failed attempt
Today we want to focus on what came next, Symbian Anna, which arrived a year after the launch of Symbian^3 (Symbian^2 only launched in Japan). Anna was presented in early 2011 together with the Nokia X7 and the Nokia E6. The E6 was a bar phone with a QWERTY keypad (and 2.45″ touch display), but the X7 was all touch (4.0″ display).
Even better, owners of some older Nokias would receive Anna as an update, as was the case with the Nokia N8 and E7. The Nokia C7 and C6-01 got it too.
Nokia E6 • Nokia X7 • Nokia C7 • Nokia C6-01
We’ve updated our Nokia C7 review to cover all the new features – let’s take a look at them together. Honestly, it feels more like rediscovering the limitations of the old Symbian. Was it really that bad? Yes it was.
Perhaps the two biggest updates to Anna on ^3 were the new keyboard and the new browser. “That’s all?” you might think. Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here it is: Symbian^3’s vertical keyboard is on the left, Anna’s is on the right.
Vertical keyboard: Symbian^3 • Symbian Anna
In case it’s not yet clear, what you see on the left is not an app that shares the screen with the keyboard. No, this is the text entry interface: it covered the entire screen and showed a panel for text and the keyboard underneath. Instead, Anna’s keyboard (like any sane operating system today) simply appeared in the bottom half of the screen, obscuring part of the app but leaving the other part visible as well.
And yes, the only vertical option in ^3 was a virtual T9 keyboard. If you wanted QWERTY, you had to go to landscape mode.
Horizontal keyboard: Symbian^3 • Symbian Anna.
This is what we mean by touch features installed on a non-touch operating system. The text entry interface made sense when phones had 2.6 inch displays with 240 x 320 px resolution, it just wasn’t worth splitting such a screen between text and apps.
It was even worse than it might seem, since multi-touch wasn’t supported, meaning you couldn’t press multiple keys even on the full QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode – and if you typed with any kind of speed, you’d just do That . Multitouch was also not available in Anna.
As mentioned above, the other big update was the browser. In the early days of mobile Internet there was this thing called WAP, which was very limited. Eventually, as screens got better, CPUs got faster, RAM increased, and mobile data got faster, phones ventured into the real World Wide Web, the one PCs surfed. But this required a new generation of browsers to get the full experience.
The browser UI was redesigned to leave more of the screen to the page: the status bar/URL field was at the top, there was a back button in the bottom left corner, and a menu button at the bottom To the right. Speaking of URLs, you could type one without a stupid text entry UI covering your entire screen.
The much improved Symbian browser
Tabs were supported as were new web technologies such as HTML5. Flash wasn’t ready yet – the Symbian browser could only support Flash Lite 4. This pretty much ruled out playing Flash games and watching YouTube videos in the browser (you had to use the app).
The Symbian Anna home screen
There have been other improvements too. For example, Symbian has long supported home screen widgets, even multiple home screens. However, navigating between them wasn’t as smooth as on Android: you swiped sideways and then the scrolling animation played. With Anna (as on Android), the home screen would immediately follow your finger.
Nokia has also refined the email app, calendar app and Ovi Maps app. He also changed the icons to the still popular squirrel shape.
Things were going well – in fact, they seemed better – but Anna was still far behind Android. Former Symbian users like Sony Ericsson and Motorola had switched to Android, it was only Nokia that kept the old OS running. The Finnish giant still had other improvements in the pipeline, but even those wouldn’t be enough.
Remember Symbian Anna: is it a good or bad memory? We’ll take a more in-depth look at the Symbian Belle next week.
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