Nokia S60 SIP and Compatibility
Recently, there has been much confusion and speculation over the SIP stack in the latest Nokia N85 and Nokia N79 phones. The SIP stack is used for VoIP. The truth is revealed by the article on the Nokia Conversations web site. It turns out that the SIP stack is there. It’s just the Nokia VoIP client that has been removed because it was no longer compatible with the latest SIP API.
It’s this kind of thing that I was alluding to in my post on iPhone vs other mobile platforms. Maintaining compatibility across multiple versions of an OS becomes increasingly difficult with time.
The Nokia Conversations article goes on to say…
"These sorts of platform breaks can be frustrating to someone building and selling software (as in ‘Uh, it works on these three devices, but not these two, and kinda works on these five"), but also slows down the development of a wide-spread platform. And it is not just a Symbian thang. I think it is indicative of how we are in such early-stages still in mobile phone software, sort of like the early days in computers (say, the 70s)."
I agree we are in early stages in that we haven’t yet worked out ways eliminating these kinds of compatibility issues. However, I would say S60 and Symbian might be in the later stages of the OS’s development as it’s becoming harder and harder to create new versions without breaking compatibility. This is still something Apple and Android don’t have to contend with and as such they have an advantage of being young having come late to the market. Nevertheless, Apple and Android have a lot to think about in that API design decisions made now may haunt them for years to come.
I also wonder how the compatibility thing will play out when Symbian goes open source and more parties are modifying the OS.
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