On desktop PC’s, the brand of the hardware used has become mostly irrelevant when it comes down to application compatibility - if a device runs Windows XP, it can run Windows XP software. One might also expect that this is true of mobile OS’ses - unfortunately, this is completely wrong.
So far, Palm OS developers were the only ones who had to bog themselves down with a huge load of testing hardware due to each manufacturer rolling his own API - unfortunately, this seems to be true for Symbian, too.
SymbianOne’s Richard Bloor took a bunch of S60 phones from Samsung and tortured them with a bunch of S60 apps that he likes: the resulsts are less than satisfying. While “office” applications usually worked fine (unless the developer constrained the SIS file to Nokia devices), hardware access (camera, network positioning) already turned out to be problematic.
Push finally came to shove as system applications were tortured - Nuance’s TTS application refused to run, developer tools and the Python runtime followed suit.
From my personal point of view, Nokia/Symbian must address these issues ASAP. Forcing developers to pick specific hardware for development (as some Carbide tools didn’t run on non-Nokia hardware) is a very bone-headed idea that does little excerpt drive up development costs - I would be more than happy to see this issue gone!
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