Before the iPhone, mobile device companies were held ransom by wireless carriers. Carriers dictated everything about the phones, down the Verizon demanding Bluetooth file transfer was disabled to force people to use data minutes to send pictures.

This is one of the things that I think modern techies have forgotten. No matter what you think of Apple, they were the only ones with enough market power to force carriers out of that position (Apple having been newly minted at the king of digital music) . It’s why the iPhone was exclusive to AT&T — because Verizon was the market leader and AT&T had to make the deal to get the iPhone. And Jobs wouldn’t make the deal with any carrier that insisted on adding crapware to the phone.

This was true in the US. I don’t know about Europe. But it wasn’t true anywhere else. Even in the US it was dominated by Motorola (and BB) as a result. Motorola didn’t have much success outside of Razr in the rest of the world and Nokia and Sony didn’t have much success in the US. So it was really a tale of two worlds. I really liked the Sonys and Nokias of the era.

Symbian didn’t screw up the UI and it certainly was “too open”. It was so common to have malware and viruses on nokia phones. Bluetooth was scary.

The biggest issue of all was the incompatible app ecosystem. Each phone and OS and sometimes even models were different. Some were Java, others were Symbian and then the whole world of blackberries and windows.

It was not true in Europe either. You could of course use any device, and in many countries bundling a device with a phone contract was even expressly forbidden. Carriers had no control at all.

Insert the usual disclaimer that Europe has a lot of countries with different legislation, but the carrier stranglehold was a US specific problem.

I've been working for a carrier in Italy in the first half of 2000s. We designed some phones with manufacturers but any phone could work on our network AFAIK. There was not much choice at the beginning because we only had a 3G network and there were very few 3G phones (only one at launch.)

This was very true in Japan where most of phone supported limited internet access even in 2001. Careers ordered phone manufacturer to what to develop, and most phones have zero compatibility for other career feature because every phones were locked.

> was so common to have malware and viruses on nokia phones

I never experienced that and don’t know anyone who did. Was it really a thing?

I don’t think this is true. I worked extensively in the mobile industry back in the day and all Nokia apps had more painful signing process than iOS apps have today.

No, It's true, most my fiends who used to install pirated application (.sis file) from internet got affected by these viruses and at that time most popular antivirus companies (McAfee, Kaspersky, f-secure) had Symbian versions of their antivirus programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabir_(computer_worm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commwarrior

I'm not sure what you expect here. Is it the manufacturer's fault if you sideload virus infested applications?

Note that these are not computer virii by the definition, as they cannot spread independently. User always need to download the application somewhere and install it themself. The closest analogue would be Remote Access Trojan (RAT) infected Windows PC pirated software.

It was half true in the mid 2000s in Australia. While you could put basically any device on to the network, Telstra and Optus definitely held a some sway over manufacturers.

There are different markets than US and phones aren't only sold by carriers. Even admitting what you say in US is true, it definitely was not in Europe or Asia thus I doubt any of your analysis of carriers impacting the tech.

You obviously didn't live at this age or were too young. Most people in the late 90s and the early 2000s got their phones subsidized by a carrier. There was a time when the carriers were the most important channel for selling phones and this was not only in the US.

It was a huge problem in Japan, South Korea and to lesser extent, the US. Japanese phone industry conformed to it but bled to death soon after iPhone happened.

I think as long as it was companies like nokia who liked to create smartphones that where primarily phones with texting first and computers a very distant second Symbian did not have a chance.

I know that they made stuff like the 9x00 communicators but they where never intended as mass market products.

Nokia was never able to craft a desirable product that brought applications to the mainstream user, most people who got their smartphones only used them as phones.

Third-party apps for Symbian may not have been mainstream, but third-party games definitely were. Even before that, Java ME games were popular on feature phones.

TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

Also one of several instances where the Breaking Bad writers put a lot of thought into amazing episode themes and titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)

I love your post.

NB tho, Symbian already knew (see 1998) how to make a "truly excellent mobile GUI" - sure, it was a PDA, but we were already making phone UIs with phone licensees then, and could happily have made a "well-designed high-level UI framework".

I'd've loved that "parallel universe".

Alas, the Symbian deal nixed it, and our new owners simply wanted us to make their kind of phone platforms for them: four whole new ones, in 18 months (heh right), mainly to their specs, while recruiting 100 new devs and 10 new designers.

So I feel it's a little harsh to say "the biggest failing of Symbian was to disown the UI" -- we never had the option to keep control of it. (It was a major failing of the Symbian deal itself, sure.)