> With its mature and well-debugged phone stacks, it is better for phone calls than any other smartphone: it drops fewer calls, the calls sound better, and it uses the antenna better.
I've heard this "fact" presented many times, but is there actually any meat to it? It seems to me there must be many mature and well-debugged phone stacks out there.
IIRC, the phone stack live completely outside of Symbian itself (I'm not sure how this looks in something like Android). So each vendor attempting to deploy a phone would have to provide their own telephony stack... I worked on at least two memorable projects where they just couldn't make that work.
Now Nokia has put out hundreds of models of S60 phones, each largely sharing components. I would imagine that their telephony layer was rock solid. I have no idea if the assertion in the article is true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. Nokia has always "gotten" the phone side... it's the UX side of a smartphone that has always vexed them.
True, but my current phone N900 is weaker in terms of a phone. It is a hacker's delight with a real terminal, apt-get etc but the phone experience I never really enjoyed much. My earlier phone N95 was better than this.
3G phones are complicated beasts. It takes years for an implementation to mature -- and the standardization bodies continue evolving the standards and adding complexity.
In the past, Nokia was one of the first to have a prototype implementation -- hence, more time for testing and improving it.
I would say this is no longer the case today -- but it's still probably one of the more mature implementations around.
I've heard this "fact" presented many times, but is there actually any meat to it? It seems to me there must be many mature and well-debugged phone stacks out there.