Symbian is (in)famous for its special dialect of C++. However, over the last few years a lot of effort has been made to allow developers to write standard C/C++ and POSIX compliant code for the platform. There are also several popular open source libraries available, including a Standard Template Library implementation.

Code for most of these can be found in the Generic OS Services package. The move to use Qt as the native application framework continues the trend to make Symbian an ever more open source and porting-friendly platform. The recent post from Paul Beusterien shows we’re also trying to align our tools strategy with this same philosophy.

If you want to write mobile applications without the idioms of Symbian C++, have existing software assets that you’d like to re-use on Symbian devices, or are an open source developer still waiting for an open Linux-based device to gain significant market penetration, this is the book for you!

As many of you know I'm a huge Symbian fan and tend to always go back to my Symbian based devices. However also being a developer and hearing the frustrations of the users of namely Nokia devices I tend to stray away from writing Symbian applications even though I have several great ideas ( at least I think so ).

Over the last year I have developed three Symbian applications but have yet to release a single one to the public. My main reason for doing this is because I feel the user experience is not up to par with what it should be. One example of this would be being prompted to allow connections even though they have accepted this previously. While I don't want to get into a discussion about what is good and bad about Symbian I do want to express that as a developer we want our users to have the best experience possibly and I strongly feel this is hard to do currently on the Symbian platform.

I appreciate all of the efforts being made to make developing for the Symbian platform easier and documentation more readily available however the real focus needs to be on making the user experience better so more developers want to write applications for the platform.

How do you the consumers of the devices that run Symbian (aka S60) feel about the user experience. I'm now opening the flood gates...come on in.