Symbian is a horrible platform to develop applications on. I developed some C++ apps maybe 5 years ago, before iPhone and Android existed. The API design just sucked, and especially the dev tools. Development was slow and painful. And everything kept changing all the time, different and incompatible for each phone model. I don't think they have learned much, considering the current Maemo/MeeGo/Qt/GTK/Whatever mess. I don't want to learn it because next year they come up with something different again.
Developing apps on Xcode and iPhone SDK is a totally different world. You have a clear MVC model, including even the nice graphical SQLite / Core Data designer stuff, and the APIs are quite logical and simple to understand. (Well actually, Core Data is the fugliest API, but I can live with it.) Apple has really concentrated on making app development easy and enjoyable. The licensing/approval bs is uncool of course.
Developing apps on Xcode and iPhone SDK is a totally different world. You have a clear MVC model, including even the nice graphical SQLite / Core Data designer stuff, and the APIs are quite logical and simple to understand. (Well actually, Core Data is the fugliest API, but I can live with it.) Apple has really concentrated on making app development easy and enjoyable. The licensing/approval bs is uncool of course.