Old Hardware Emulating - The Continued Evolution Of Symbian

June 26, 2021

The Nokia S60 Platform Continues To Evolve

By the middle 2000's, the Symbian-powered handhelds made by Nokia dominated the marketplace once held by Palm. The PDA was evolving into the smartphone, and Nokia was in the middle of transformation. Symbian was rapidly evolving to meet the needs of these new users. The smartphone continued to get bigger screens, along with full physical keyboards. The user interface of Symbian was revamped to accommodate these changes.

However, their really isn't much to say about the base OS. The applications included were very basic and standard. The bigger-screen devices featured bigger icons, just like PalmOS. The launcher could have different themes. Their was a multimedia viewer that supported both JPG and GIF icons. Again, by 2006-2007, this was the norm.

When it came to multimedia, their were limitations within the Nokia SDK Emulator. MP3 Playback didn't work. The codec wasn't included in the device simulator for licensing reasons. As such, for music playback, MP3 files needed to be converted into the AMR audio format that is supported by the SDK.

According to the Symbian SDK in regard to supported multimedia formats, the AMR audio format is a patented audio data compression scheme optimized for speech coding. This is the audio format used for people doing voice recordings. As such, the audio quality isn't that good obviously, with a 8000 Sampling Frequency at 12.2 kbps and Mono sound. However, I don't think that this was an issue on real hardware that supported MP3 playback. One can still carry their Beatles with them on the go! However, a typical 2-3 minute song encoded in this format will typically range between 300-500KB in size, which is small enough to fit on an floppy. One can be a sucker for AM-quality audio though!

Video playback is possible on the SDK via RealPlayer Mobile. The S60 platform supported the 3GP mobile video format. This was the format used on various flip-phones of that time, like the Motorola Razr. Video encoded in this format conformed to the resolution of 176 by 144 pixels at 15 FPS. The audio source is the same as AMR (8000 sampling frequency, Mono sound at 12.2kbps Audio Bitrate). However, video playback on the SDK was relatively smooth considering the constraints.

While one could laugh at the video specifications from today's perspective. However, one has to remember that video playback on a handheld was still largely a novelty in the middle 2000's. The smartphones of the day had massive hardware constraints. One couldn't expect HD video given these constraints. The fact that video playback could even occur at all was actually something of a major feat at the time.

The SDK was installed on a VMware virtual machine running Windows XP SP3. This would have been what most Nokia developers would have used as their development environment by the mid/late 2000's. The virtual machine had a single core allocated to it along with 1GB of RAM. WinXP isn't that well optimized for multi-core processing, and thus, a single core is generally recommended for software compatibility. Also, the SDK really doesn't need massive amounts of RAM anyway, and WinXP runs well within 1GB (minus games). The host machine has 16GB's of RAM and a AMD-FX 4300 Quad-Core CPU with each core running at 3.8GHz. Again, from the SDK's perspective, their is a lot to work with.

On the whole, their wasn't much to say about the base SymbianOS. However, one could write books about the exploding software library that was starting to surpass even Palm by this point. Applications developers the world over embraced Symbian as the mobile platform of choice. The S60 SDK included the J2ME (Mobile Java) interpreter that would be used by thousands upon thousands of applications, especially games. The SDK became a very valuable tool for software developers, a role that it fulfilled very well. The 3rd party software scene will be explored in the next article. Nokia took the ball from Palm and ran wild with it!