The Independent Kixmiller Pigeon MrkII

Games would quickly dominate the Symbian platform. It only made sense as the Nokia handhelds found their way into the hands on millions around the globe. Combined this with the universal nature of the J2ME runtime and the thousands upon thousands of developers who were already familiar with the Java programming language, it would only be a short time before games would dominate the platform. I was able to get a taste of these games as most of them have been archived on well...Archive.org. Most of these games were loaded onto the SDK which supported the J2ME environment. However, compatibility greatly differed as many of these games usually conformed to different screen sizes, depending on the phone. Not all Symbian phones were created equal.  Many of the games expected a very small screen size, and thus, didn't scale well to the screen resolution of the device that I was using (240 by 320 pixel resolution). Despite that though, they were many games that did scale to the correct res...

Their was no shortage of applications for the Symbian platform. The Symbian library became the largest of them all at a time when Palm was rapidly declining. Their were hundreds of programs available for such devices.  On one hand, one would be given a false impression as like in the case with WinCE, the vast majority of the software archive sites have shut down. However, many of these programs have been archived elsewhere, like Archive.org. Also, some of those mobile archive sites are still operating. This is where most of these programs came from.  Their were various programs that one could populate their Nokia device with. Their are various appointment keepers, calculators, media players, dictionaries. If one wanted to manage their finances and track their stock values, then there was an application for that. If one wanted to look up and element on the periodic table, then that could be done as well. Their was no shortage of web-browsers either.  If one needed directio...

  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 incl...

  The Nokia S60 Software Platform With J2ME The early 2000's was a very different time than what we're a accustomed to now. Technology that we take for granted was either non-existent or in a very different state than what we're use to now. The smartphone that is ubiquitous today was nothing short of science fiction in the early 2000's. While smartphones did exist, they were in a very different form factor than the devices of today. Also, they were very expensive, along with their service and data plans. The common phones of the day were of the small flip phone variation that we're very basic. Even then, their proliferation wasn't as widespread depending on where you lived. South Texas does not follow national trends. It usually takes 1-2 years longer for tech trends to filter down here. When I was a high-school senior in late 2003/early 2004, cellphones were not everywhere like they are today. I would occasionally run across the...

  The SDK, Revo, and the Web At $599 (4MB) and $699 (8MB) model, the Series 5 didn't come cheap. It was hard to ask users for that much money when a Palm Pilot was considerably cheaper. As such, Psion released the Revo for the lower-end of the market. The device had a smaller screen, smaller size, and lacked a backlite and Compact-Flash card slot. It was compatible with the Series 5 as both devices used the same processor. The Revo was supported under the EPOC Symbian SDK if the Revo support files were supplied. Most of the default applications on the Series 5 carried over to the Revo configuration. As such, the word-processor and other productivity applications scaled well on the smaller screen. However (on the SDK anyway), the Revo didn't have support for a web-browser. Also, I did encounter compatibility issues with applications that specifically conformed to the Series 5 640 by 240 screen resolution. Those applications did n...

  New Products From Psion And The Rise of SymbianOS Psion never could get that lucky break. On one hand, they were one of the most prominent handheld computer companies in the early and middle 90's. However, the portable computer market was small during those times, and Psion quickly got left behind when Palm Computing exploded in size. Despite Psion being around for a significantly longer time compared to Palm Computing, they got eclipsed by them in no time. Despite this, Psion kept soldiering on. Since they have been at the game longer than Palm, they still had a tricks up there sleeve. Some of the Psion devices have already been covered in previous articles, like the Psion 3 series of devices. These handhelds incorporated the 16-bit NEC V20 processor and ran the SIBO Operating System. By the late 90's, ARM was all the rage. These 32-bit processors allowed for high-performance computing while being much more energy efficient compared to desktop process...