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  • Mobile Phone OS Battle: Symbian vs. Android

    Posted on March 6th, 2010 anphase 38 comments
    Google vs. Symbian

    Google vs. Symbian

    The Sym­bian OS(operating sys­tem) has been around for years with Sym­bian v9 being launched in 2005. That was around the same time that Android was acquired by Google, only to be announced some time in 2007 and released on the G1 in 2008. I’m going to cut to chase here, Android is over-hyped and that is prob­a­bly it’s great­est weakness.

    The whole idea of these mobile phone oper­at­ing sys­tems like Win­dows Mobile, Sym­bian and Android, made by soft­ware com­pa­nies, is to accel­er­ate time to mar­ket and reduce devel­op­ment costs. Sil­i­con mak­ers also tai­lor their chips for these OSs based on their capabilities/features, so it’s eas­ier for phone man­u­fac­tur­ers to develop devices with these pop­u­lar OSs.

    Now the deal with Android is that there’s a lot of hype sur­round­ing it. Hype that pro­motes lazi­ness on the part of phone mak­ers to a point where it’s okay to just slap the stock OS as it is, untouched. When look­ing at the line of Android devices, you can’t help but notice that they are extremely sim­i­lar. That’s because of this hype fac­tor; peo­ple are happy enough with a device just because it has Android because Android is ‘cool’. On the other hand, HTC does try to put a lot more effort on their Android devices with their Sense UI, but that’s only HTC. The hype-effect goes beyond just the user inter­face — hardware-wise Android devices haven’t offered any­thing new. Many peo­ple expected the Nexus One would be a rev­o­lu­tion­ary device. It has pow­er­ful hard­ware and… that’s about it.

    For Sym­bian, it’s a dif­fer­ent story. Man­u­fac­tur­ers are forced to come up with not only inno­v­a­tive soft­ware, but inno­v­a­tive hard­ware as well to com­pli­ment it. When you think about it, almost all Sym­bian devices have cus­tom inter­faces. Sam­sung has the clever Touch Wiz UI which is spread­ing to other plat­forms, the Sony Eric­s­son phones, the Satio and the Vivaz have cus­tom UIs with the Vivaz tak­ing advan­tage of the accelerom­e­ter with it’s ani­mated wall­pa­pers. Nokia also has the panel of wid­gets for its user inter­face on the n97 devices.

    When it comes to inno­v­a­tive hard­ware, the S60v3 Sam­sung i8510 was the first to mar­ket with an 8MP cam­era and the S60v5 Satio was the first with a 12MP and the s60v5 i8910 was the first touch screen phone with an AMOLED dis­play just to name a few. There are also many cus­tom appli­ca­tions that man­u­fac­tures build in to their Sym­bian devices so that they are bet­ter and dif­fer­ent. Take the Omnia HD for instance. It has a cus­tom search fea­ture, music player, com­mu­ni­ties social app, pod­cast­ing app, cus­tom hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion, cus­tom cam­era inter­face, thor­ough codec sup­port,  cus­tom media gallery, busi­ness card reader, Sam­sung LBS nav­i­ga­tion and inte­grated DSNe 2.0 tech­nol­ogy for bet­ter audio just to name a few. It’s packed right out of the box. When it comes to fea­tures, Sym­bian devices set the stan­dard; they paves the way for other plat­forms to follow.

    So, what did Android bring to the table for mobile devices? Noth­ing. It’s just another mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem but with the back­ing of one the biggest and most cre­ative com­pa­nies around, Google. This could be the rea­son why peo­ple get excited; when Google is behind some­thing, they usu­ally do it very well. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s a heavy reliance on stock Android to do every­thing, mak­ing the prod­uct mak­ers relax on cre­ativ­ity and focus on just releas­ing that ‘Android device’.

    I like to think of Sym­bian vs. Android like the image below cre­ated by @Mad_Geek. Android devices pretty much have stock Android on them whilst a whole lot is done for Sym­bian devices mak­ing them more com­plete out of the box.

    Android vs. Symbian

    Android vs. Symbian

    For this rea­son I feel Sym­bian has a more solid future.

    Whilst there has been one ver­sion of s60v5 since Novem­ber 2008 when the Nokia 5800 was released, there have been sev­eral Android updates each with key/core fea­tures included. Unfor­tu­nately, most of these updates have not been made avail­able to all Android devices. Gen­er­ally, Android devices are not updated from one release to another, users are pretty much stuck with the ver­sion they buy their devices with. Prob­lem with this is that Android is evolv­ing very quickly. After just over a year, Android is already in ver­sion 2.1 which is miles ahead of what it was in ver­sion 1.0 on the G1. Early adopters miss out on a lot of really cool fea­tures that should have been on board in the first place. An inter­est­ing post on Engad­get enti­tled “Will Android Frag­men­ta­tion Destroy the plat­form?” high­lights these issues. Many Android devices at Mobile World Con­gress 2010 were run­ning Android 1.5 or 1.6 and there are some com­pat­i­bil­ity issues between this and the lat­est Android 2.1.

    On the other hand, most Appli­ca­tions that can run on the Nokia 5800 can eas­ily run on the i8910 or the Satio with­out a hunch because it’s the same OS, same res­o­lu­tion. All the essen­tial fea­tures were built in to Sym­bian s60v5/v3 years ago and those that were left out or didn’t exist are built on top of it, some­thing that seems dif­fi­cult to imple­ment on Android.

    Other issues with Android include: no access to mass mem­ory for appli­ca­tions, mean­ing that larger, more proper games and appli­ca­tions such as those seen and ported to Sym­bian are sim­ply not pos­si­ble on the devices(without hack­ing that is). Google has said an update will be com­ing to rec­tify this but most Android users won’t get it unless the upgrade is made avail­able for their devices, an unlikely case for most. For now users have to ‘root’/hack their phones to enable this.

    In con­clu­sion, Android is over-hyped and that cre­ates prob­lems for the peo­ple who buy in to the hype and get Android devices. It still has a long way to go and it’s future has not been clearly mapped out. It’s not as open as we would like it to be, there are lock downs on some Google ser­vices which form the core of the plat­form mak­ing the whole sit­u­a­tion a lit­tle fuzzy. It also uses cus­tom APs for app devel­op­ment which can be frus­trat­ing for devel­op­ers. Together with a few other issues, the hype is uncalled for and peo­ple need to stop going crazy just because a device has Android, it isn’t all that…yet.

    Sym­bian is a fully open and solid plat­form. It’s great­est weak­ness is the dated user inter­face which was designed a while ago. The future of Sym­bian looks bright with the inte­gra­tion of the Qt frame­work but more needs to be done to keep up with the com­pe­ti­tion. The plat­form requires more devel­op­ment time as com­pe­ti­tion to deliver some­thing inno­v­a­tive and dif­fer­ent is high. That’s a good thing for con­sumers because we get devices like the i8910, the Satio, the Vivaz and the n97 which are awe­some in their own respects and glimpses of what we will see in the future on other platforms.

    Update: Every­thing has changed

    Here is the fol­low up a year on.

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    News, Samsung i8910
    • brower

      Agree.

      I think that the future of the mobiles phone will be like the PC. The great com­pa­nies like sam­sung, nokia, motorola will only design the phone, the hard­ware, etc… then you will install an oper­at­ing sys­tem on your phone.

      Maybe not now, not next year, not in 5 years. But I think that maybe in 7 to 10 years this idea have a good chance to get started.

      When u don’t like your “smart­phone OS”, just for­mat and install another :P

      Think about it.

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    • Nathan

      @Brower:

      Could not agree more. The future of the mobile device mar­ket surely lies with the plat­form and greater flexibility.

      I think we are on the verge of an explo­sion of inno­va­tion, or over frag­men­ta­tion in the mar­ket due to new UI’s and OSes. This may lead one or more hard­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers releas­ing a device tru­ely capa­ble of hav­ing almost any OS to be installed, by the user, and sup­ported by the manufacturer.

      Open­ing of the appli­ca­tion plat­form has been great. Open­ing the hard­ware plat­from would be even bet­ter :)

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    • ssj3gogeta

      I dont think so for exam­ple apple has a patent for almost every­thing the iphone has and the iphone is only a great soft­ware on a crappy hardware.

      btw dif­fer­ent phones have dif­fer­ent hw accord­ing to what they were made to do so the os might not run well, and theres dri­vers for dif­fer­ent hw like the cam­era and an edited inter­face because of dif­fer­ent buttons.….…

      theres more profit for the com­pany when they make the phone and the os.

      but i hope it does come true:)

      i’m think­ing of buy­ing an iphone I WANT APPS…DECENT APPS FOR MY PHONE

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    • shashankpandey1991

      gr8 job anphase…
      i was talk­ing about this only…
      m very happy now to hav a sym­bian phone…
      awsum com­par­i­sion..
      keep it up.!
      :D

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    • Jax667

      Also an inter­est­ing point is that a main dif­fer­ence between the oper­at­ing sys­tems is the con­tin­u­ous con­nec­tion to the inter­net. A fla­trate is not as cheap or even avail­able as in coun­tries like Ger­many (where I come from) or France.

      One of my favourite things on Sym­bian is that it always asks for my per­mi­tion if it wants to con­nect to the Inter­net, the trans­ferred data is min­i­mal and I can chose if I want my emails to be pushed or if wid­gets can access the inter­net always, in cer­tain time inter­vals or even never.

      There is an inter­est­ing arti­cle at Sym­bian Guru about that:
      http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2010/02/full-web-experience-no-thanks-give-me-symbian-any-day.html

      Now we´ve seen that Win­dows Mobile 7 will even require tremen­dous data trans­fers because of many func­tions like the Bada Search Engine or the con­tin­u­ous con­nec­tion to social net­works and so many more…

      Here is a video to make my point clear:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9F4QJK1wFs&feature=player_embedded

      I really hope that the new ver­sions of Sym­bian will also let you indi­vid­u­al­ize your device and let you fully con­trol the access to the inter­net so that you can decide wether or not the pro­grams are allowed trans­fer data.

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    • darknight07

      thanks for review, BUT ever since from begin­ning i can’t stop think­ing how u con­fused Android with Iphone!!!
      I mean really iPhone OS is the one that is uncus­tomised over­hyped piece of garbage! Android is the exact oppo­site man — it’s MUCH more cus­tomis­able than any other OS’s, espe­cially Sym­bian. Ex, every new HTC sense, xpe­ria x10, sam­sung beam, nexus one with 3d menu look, only the first few devices were stock to test/get the feel of its oper­at­ing sys­tem.…
      Sym­bian, on another hand lacks any sort of mobile shell, and only sam­sung, and SE cus­tomised it, but all nokia phones look very same, with sim­i­lar hard­ware specs…
      As for updates, it is what mak­ing Sym­bian behind other OS’s — not a good thing imo
      So, in another words, WHAT the HELL where u talk­ing about??
      Any­way, i was hop­ing that u will adress some of the androis short­com­ings that Sym­bian doesn’t have, like no native api sup­port, inter­nal stor­age down­load ONLY, no fm radio, etc… as listed on wiki

      Pce

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    • http://anphase.com anphase

      @darknight07 iPhone and Black­berry are on another level, the hard­ware maker also makes the soft­ware result­ing in extremely tight inte­gra­tion of hard­ware with soft­ware. That’s why my 3year old iPod Touch with a 300MHz proces­sor per­forms bet­ter than my shiny new Sam­sung i8910. We sim­ply can’t com­pare. My point on the updates is that they result in heavy frag­men­ta­tion, crit­i­cal updates are com­ing fast and they are not com­ing to older Android devices. There are so many fla­vors of Android out there now, each with vary­ing capa­bil­i­ties, func­tion­al­ity and com­pat­i­bil­ity. I did men­tion the inter­nal stor­age issue and a few oth­ers but these can and will be addressed quickly. Frag­men­ta­tion and and lim­ited cus­tomiza­tion, except for a few excep­tions, are the big­ger issues I think. It would take a lot more to address those kinds of issues.

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    • http://anphase.com anphase

      @Jax667 that’s true. I think Sym­bian has the best solu­tions for data and bat­tery opti­miza­tion as well. Win­dows 7 Phone Series looks pretty impres­sive though, very tempt­ing :-)

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    • Suo.Eno

      @anphase
      I’m no smart­phone OS expert but com­ing off as a user I com­mend how Nokia has attempted to (and still do) seed the world with Sym­bian by pro­vid­ing for price point diffs.But the prob­lem starts to affect cre­ativ­i­ties when you put cost and profit on top of the equa­tion with­out much room for maneuver.Hence why we’re see­ing “N” series phones stretches back past years with ques­tion­able CPU,RAM and gen­eral fea­ture combos.Top that off with a pretty con­fus­ing pric­ing strategy,it did good to the mar­ket share gains but more “edu­cated” Sym­bian users?

      Sorry I don’t think so and dare I say a good por­tion of the pie barely even notice that they’re using a Sym­bian smart­phone in their hands.I see S^3 and ^4 com­ing and hon­estly I’m not sure how Nokia as the hardware/device flag bearer plans to kill off legacies.I know for damn sure that peo­ple with older N phones are gonna expect some sort of an update real­is­tic or not.Why?Well good money spent are good money spent and unfor­tu­nately def­i­n­i­tions vary cat­e­gor­i­cally across the demography.

      You’ve men­tioned SE Vivaz and Satio both are well above the 5800 price point even at falling rates (for example).I’m not sure about Samsung’s future Sym­bian plans (lets us know if you know will ya?) but I take it that they’re not gonna do midrange and lower Sym phones any­time soon.

      “Our list of allies grows thin?” Lord Elrond of the elves (LOTR).Other man­u­fac­tur­ers are either silently bail­ing out or just putting their Sym plans on hold that much is obvious.

      So my issue here is about S^3’s plan of attack for the same if not bet­ter adop­tion base as current,by user expe­ri­ence phi­los­o­phy and/or phone tech progression’s balance.I still think that in bang for buck terms,Symbian beats the rest on devices no question.But if that’s about to change I’d like to remind that there’s more users out there with years of com­put­ing expe­ri­ence can tell you;we’re mov­ing into an era of 1Ghz mobile SoCs/CPUs ergo Snap­dragon or w/e,could also mean excuses to half ass an OS.The giga­hertz myth can be a dan­ger­ous if not fully understood.I still remem­ber when N1 came out Google’s Andy Rubin nearly caused a long term fit amongst Android fans when he coolly remarked about Android updates are hard­ware depen­dent “so we might see some devices NOT get­ting any”.…While of course he’s being hon­est the man­ner of that message’s deliv­ery prompted the com­mu­nity to dou­ble step their efforts and then we saw ROMs being able to run sur­pris­ingly with not much adverse neg­a­tive effects on older Android phones.But I’d credit those ded­i­cated free agents for putting the right effort in fine­tun­ing said ROMs to that point where they went back­wards to any pos­si­ble “low” spec that they can.

      I quote:-“The plat­form requires more devel­op­ment time as com­pe­ti­tion to deliver some­thing inno­v­a­tive and dif­fer­ent is high.” Well I think that’s another prob­lem right there.I think you do real­ize that some devs out there had already loudly griped that things were already at snail’s pace pre open source and how long has it been by now?As pro­gres­sion hap­pens in other OSes,how do we expect Sym­bian to be able to absorb and adapt newer changes along the way with­out detri­men­tal effects on schedules?

      Since you’re a big i8910 user,I truly hope that S^3 includes that on the list.

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    • brower

      @darknight07

      Man, I don’t under­stand about pro­gram­ming.. I’m com­pletely noob in this world… but how Androi­dOS can be more cus­tomiz­able than sym­bian if sym­bian now is Open Source like android??

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    • JJ

      http://www.intomobile.com/2010/03/10/review-thoughts-on-the-google-nexus-one-and-android-from-a-long-time-nokia-owner-and-symbian-user.html

      Review: Thoughts on the Google Nexus One, and Android, from a long time Nokia owner and Sym­bian user

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    • http://www.alcoholismtreatmentfaq.com Matthew Clark

      I am always on the look­out for new mod­els of Nokia phone and also iPhone.*,‘

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    • maria

      For future android is best or symbian?

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    • http://www.dheasupplement.org William Roberts

      Nokia always makes the coolest mobile phone.:**

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    • Fred

      LOL,

      That must be some good stuff you are smokin.

      Of course you com­pletely miss the point. 3rd party apps, no licens­ing fees etc. etc.

      Sym­bian has been around for may years and in only 2 Android has com­pletely blown them away. How exactly does that con­si­tute Sym­bian hav­ing a brigher future???

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    • http://anphase.com anphase

      @Fred I wrote the arti­cle before Android 2.2 (Froyo) was announced and before the N8 with Symbian^3 announced. I have to agree that Android has evolved in leaps and bounds in such a short period of time. Sym­bian has been around for long — it’s hang­ing on to older tech and that’s what’s hold­ing it back. Nokia is also start­ing to focus on MeeGo for smart­phones so Sym­bian will never be bet­ter than Android. That said, you never know. Thanks for the feed­back :-)

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    • http://www.digiknowzone.blogspot.com digi­knowz one

      I agree to the other’s com­ments that the future of smart phones will be that like of PCs. They’ll be more flex­i­ble and you can change OSs. Smart­phone man­u­fac­tur­ers real­ize this but are still bound by their ‘loyal’ con­sumers who would boy­cott them if they become ‘open­minded’ with regard to their phones’ OS. But I see this as an inevitability.

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    • Tamil

      i agree lot of fea­tures like usb teth­er­ing which is now being included in android update is been there for a while in sym­bian i even remem­ber using my age old 3220 to use it as a modem and connnect to inter­net before 5 years, but now the android is cre­at­ing much hype about it

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    • Nomad

      Sym­bian is dead. Let’s face it, the oper­at­ing sys­tem is a total fail­ure, and hasn’t been picked up by anyone.

      On the con­trary how­ever, Android con­tin­ues to grow at an expo­nen­tial rate, and its suc­cess is in part due to its large sup­ply of apps and its con­stantly improv­ing OS. Sure, older phones will be left in the dust, but I have 2.2 on one of my phones now and it’s out­stand­ing– I’d take it over an iPhone any day. And def­i­nitely over Symbian.

      The prob­lem with Sym­bian has always been its copi­ous amounts of bugs and glitches. Peo­ple need to be able to have an oper­at­ing sys­tem that works, instead of one that “will work in the future”. Nokia needs to step it up or join with Android before they’re left in the dust.

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    • cam­mie

      Sym­bian dead, not yet. But but it is pretty darn close to dead. Nokia’s last chance at a smart phone IMO is the N8. From the spec sheet it seems they may have some­thing to go up against the iPhone and Android OS. Unless they are able to hit a home run, they will just flop out.

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    • Andre

      It looks like the lat­est iter­a­tion of Sym­bian has some impres­sive capa­bil­i­ties, and should be eas­ier to develop appli­ca­tions for than pre­vi­ous ver­sions. How­ever, the momen­tum is cur­rently behind Android and for more rea­sons than just because it’s “cool”.

      You see it as an advan­tage that “Man­u­fac­tur­ers are forced to come up with not only inno­v­a­tive soft­ware, but inno­v­a­tive hard­ware as well. When you think about it, almost all Sym­bian devices have cus­tom inter­faces.” Frankly I don’t see that as an advan­tage. Bring­ing together a com­pelling hard­ware plat­form is dif­fi­cult enough. Design­ing a user inter­face for it too? It just increases the cost and com­plex­ity of a hand­set project. Even before smart­phones, most man­u­fac­tur­ers used a com­mon UI across their prod­uct lines as much as pos­si­ble. With Android, man­u­fac­tur­ers are free to focus on their core com­pe­tency, and still have the abil­ity to replace ele­ments if they really feel the need to dif­fer­en­ti­ate. Per­son­ally, I pre­fer stock Android’s sim­ple, func­tional inter­face and the abil­ity to install my own cus­tomiza­tions as I see fit.

      Then there’s the bar­rier to app devel­op­ers. First there’s the actual SDK and run­time. It looks like the lat­est ver­sion of Sym­bian has made some strides with Qt and stan­dard C++. It prob­a­bly puts it ahead of the iPhone in ease of devel­op­ment. But the truth is that even with these new options, it won’t be nearly as easy as Java for Android (Yes, Sym­bian also sup­ports add-on run­times like Java, but it’s more over­head to install/maintain).

      The sec­ond part is about appli­ca­tion reach and porta­bil­ity. If each phone has a host of UI and other cus­tomiza­tions, it increases the chances that an app won’t work or won’t fit into the look and feel on a par­tic­u­lar phone. The truth is that deliv­er­ing a high-quality appli­ca­tion on any plat­form requires test­ing on as many hand­sets as pos­si­ble, but Android’s stan­dard­iza­tion and uni­form evo­lu­tion do make it eas­ier, which means there will be more apps built for it. And let’s face it, smart­phones are all about apps. The days of choos­ing a hand­set based on what soft­ware the man­u­fac­turer decided to bun­dle in are over.

      Sym­bian and Android might be like OS/2 com­pared to Win­dows. Sym­bian might be tech­ni­cally supe­rior, but it

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    • OSRider

      Agree… when users switch phones for the lat­est and great­est *fea­tures* they don’t want to learn a whole new UI.

      The *promise* of Android is power, expand­abil­ity and famil­iar­ity com­bined. What is said above to be an advan­tage of Sym­bian (its cus­tom UI-hardware capa­bil­ity) is actu­ally its Achilles heal.

      Android is using the very same busi­ness model against iOS that Win­dows used so suc­cess­fully against MacOS. Offer a sim­i­lar friendly GUI but *unlock the hard­ware* so peo­ple can cre­ate their own hard­ware com­bi­na­tions while main­tain­ing a famil­iar UI. In that anal­ogy, Sym­bian is more like Linux vs Win­dows. One is a kernal-based OS with the pos­si­bil­ity of dif­fer­ent UIs, the other a *user expe­ri­ence* based OS with pro­pri­etary kernel.

      Sym­bian will soon be dead because peo­ple are about famil­iar­ity and user expe­ri­ence… and on its face, Sym­bian fails both tests.

      Win­dows Mobile has a decent shot at regain­ing a place at the table because they get this too.

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    • Stallion_ts

      Sym­bian is for the 3rd world, it spe­cial­izes in restrict­ing its users to a blocky inter­face with lame appli­ca­tions when they should be able to do a lot more eg com­pare the home screen con­cept on sym­bian with other plat­forms. As a nokia user for the last 10 years, I am finally fed up of com­pro­mis­ing on inter­face inno­va­tion and usabil­ity, first the iphone and now Android. thumbs down for symbian..!

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    • Joe

      Almost all android devices have dif­fer­ent UIs… touch­wiz is on sam­sung, senseUI on htc, motorola uses moto­blur. With­out ‘hack­ing’ you can cus­tomize your home/UI to a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent styles.

      Im not cer­tain what android devices you have used.. With some down­load­able mods you can basi­cally cus­tomize the ui to what­ever you want. I have had 2 sym­bian based phones, both were great — in their day. How­ever, the UI has fallen behind, and most of the hard­ware just isnt com­fort­able in the hand. It doesnt mat­ter if you have a 12 megapixel cam­era with HD record­ing if the phone is a brick and would cost 700 dol­lars to pur­chase in the states.

      There are tons of ‘real games’ for android, and a ton of cool fea­tures and apps. Google voice with voice to text voice­mail, media play­ers with a load of codecs, image edi­tors, sound edi­tors, calendar/contacts sync­ing etc — and can be had for a cou­ple hun­dred bucks.

      Google/Android has got­ten pop­u­lar for a rea­son, and its more than just hype. sorry. I agree that they are mov­ing for­ward and light­ning pace — but is that really a bad thing? Almost all the high-end android phones are run­ning 2.1 with avail­able upgrade to 2.2.. and they are cheap in the states, when com­par­ing to any sym­bian phones.

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    • GUEST

      The nokia n8 might as well just be a cam­era with phone capabilities..

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    • Delly

      help i’m con­sid­er­ing get­ting my phone changed.. N8 over Xpe­ria 10????

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • Godly George

      How­ever, you havent tack­led one of the major points of android over symbian-APPS!!.…this is just one of the main points why the android has all the hype around it.…The ios too allows flex­i­bilty to expand into a form of mobile os to the likes of which have never been seen before!

      Sym­bian had its time & more­over the needs to adapt to the likes of the iOS or android in that sense,outline the fact of how aged the sym­bian os has become!

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • http://twitter.com/Nadfaraz007 Nadeem Bee­bee­jaun

      Com­par­i­son sym­bian v/s android

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • Beautynbeast6969

      stalion_ts …u r an asshole!!!

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • Its­bruno

      This is so biased. Android is a fan­tas­tic OS on it’s own, and doesn’t really need “cus­tomiza­tion.” HTC’s extra skins don’t really make Android bet­ter. I much pre­fer stock Android.

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • http://anphase.com Anphase

      I wrote this a while back and the points were valid then. I’ve since writ­ten another post of the sit­u­a­tion now and you’re right, stock Android is pre­ferred now over man­u­fac­turer skins.

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • http://anphase.com Anphase

      It depends really. The N8 is a hard­ware king and the Xpe­ria has Android (2.1 mind you) and Timescape UI. I’d wait for the new Sony Eric­s­son phones or the Sym­bian over­haul to see if it’s worth it.

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • Ann

      which one do you think is bet­ter??? N97mini or x10mini pro? thanks

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • Jon­nala­gad­daraghu­nath

      Thank you for giv­ing this valu­able information

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • Reny

      @ the author of the sym­bian vs Android :

      dude I’ve been using a sym­bian since S60 the first sym­bian smart phone OS. Since that i’ve been using sym­bi­nas s60 v2, s60v3, s60v5. and im sad to say that i’ve been wait­ing for a bet­ter sym­bian. but with each upgrade to the sym­bian os it keeps on get­tin crazy friend­li­ness dis­apered. The end user being the king no longer applied to the new os. ANDROID on the other hand pro­vided me with all i could ever ask for from a smart phone. now im get­ting the feel­ing that Sym­bian will soon be dead and ANDROID would take over. besides that Nokia is tying up with microsoft to pro­duce mobiles pow­ered with “microsoft win­dows phone 7″ and after that the days of the sym­bian could be numbered…

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 1 Thumb down 0

    • Drew

      One of the main appeals of android is if I switch phones, I get the sim­mi­lar look and feel of android. Also, as a devel­oper, I get scared when peo­ple cre­ate cus­tom inter­faces and stuff them­selves, like HTC does with thier sense. Hard­ware com­pa­nies shouldn’t be mak­ing soft­ware, they never seem to do it cor­rectly. When devel­op­ing apps for android, i have had noth­ing but trou­bles with HTC phones, because they hijack the hard­ware. Hard­ware man­u­fac­tures fre­quently have trou­ble pro­gram­ming reli­able dri­vers for their hard­ware, and they fre­quently drop sup­port long before the hard­ware has stopped being used. Why the heck would i want them to develop my OS?

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • Mack­ysaguin­hon

      im a nokia user eversince 3310 startd. Nw wth my n8, so far, no prob­lem about it.. I agree, peo­ple get crazy when they have android devices its because their in. With­out real­iz­ing that its like they’re wear­ing the same shirt with same design but dif­fer­ent in color. Lol.. Love my n8 frm s’3 upgraded to sym­bian anna. Bet­ter inter­net con­nec­tion, bet­ter performance,good quality.better than my friend’s android device.

      Like or Dis­like: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

    • Sushant

      Guys don’t think sym­bian is deadsym­bian is all time favourite..when it comes to user friendly den sysm­bian is way way ahead of android…android has many problems…in near future hw android cam will be dead also soon…u all will see that…in todays world every phone com­pany is mov­ing towards android..but nokia is doing a smart thing to be different…nokia jst launched a new os that is sym­bian anna it is much more bet­ter den older symbian…so u’ll see that android will not last long even though today there is much hype of it

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