Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

The result of the pioneering joint Psion and Nokia smartphone effort is still out there on GitHub.

Smartphones are everywhere. They are entirely commoditized now. Most of them run Android, which uses the Linux kernel. The rest run Apple's iOS, which uses the same XNU kernel as macOS. As we've said before, they're not Unix-like, they really are Unix™.

There have been a bunch of others. BlackBerry tried hard with BB10, but even a decade ago, it was over. It was based on QNX and Qt, and both of those are doing fine. We reported last year that QNX 8 is free to use again. Palm's WebOS ended up with HP and now runs in LG smart TVs – but it's Linux underneath.

The most radical, though, was probably Symbian. The Register covered it at length back in the day, notably the epic Psion: the Last ...