Dead Media Beat: Symbian OS, one of the most successful failures in tech history

*Sometimes I think that EVERY dead medium dies like this — for reasons that may seem easy for pundits to explain in retrospect — “the iPhone appeared” — but are, in reality, incredibly complicated, satanically detailed and paralyzingly boring to all outsiders.

The biggest smartphone operating system

“Symbian is the biggest smartphone operating system by market share, the oldest smartphone platform still in use, used by almost every major OEM at one time or another. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking Symbian is dead and buried, with news of layoffs at Nokia, management departures at the Symbian Foundation and rough reviews of the latest flagship N8 device. How does a platform powering 9 million new devices every month have almost no credibility with developers, analysts and press alike? This is the story of one of the most successful failures in tech history.

“Nokia blocked inclusion of a standard camera API in the Symbian product roadmap claiming it would be years before anyone built a cameraphone, weeks before the launch of the 7650, the first GSM cameraphone. They insisted on Symbian's adoption of Nokia controlled components, the TCP/IP networking stack, the WiFi, Location services, SIP stack for VoIP calling, and probably the worst example of this sort of tactical interference occurred with Symbian's move to support CDMA 'out of the box'.