It wasn't so much the name as it was that you needed a special cable and a PC to install one of the dozen or so apps that existed for Symbian phones. (There were probably more, but in all honesty, none of them were worth the cost of the cable).
In fact, at the time I would argue that only perhaps 1-3% of people who owned Nokia phones even knew their phone ran Symbian. It wasn't your pocket computer back then - it was the phone that isn't tethered to the wall. People just didn't spend a lot of time obsessing over it.
I remember pointing out to someone at Nokia that perhaps the app install experience should be streamlined a bit. His response was something along the lines "well, there isn't much call for third party applications on mobile phones" and then went on to explain how it is silly to develop a more streamlined download and install experience until a clear demand for third party apps materializes.
> In fact, at the time I would argue that only perhaps 1-3% of people who owned Nokia phones even knew their phone ran Symbian.
That would be good, because the vast majority of Nokia phones ran S40 rather than Symbian-based S60.
Symbian appeared in lower-end phones only at the very end with Symbian^3. Earlier it was pretty much exclusively used in higher-end and business-oriented models.
Also, I'm pretty sure that all you needed to install either .sis packages (on S60) or .jad apps (on both S40 and S60) was the built-in browser, and it was already like that since at least Nokia 3410.
In fact, at the time I would argue that only perhaps 1-3% of people who owned Nokia phones even knew their phone ran Symbian. It wasn't your pocket computer back then - it was the phone that isn't tethered to the wall. People just didn't spend a lot of time obsessing over it.
I remember pointing out to someone at Nokia that perhaps the app install experience should be streamlined a bit. His response was something along the lines "well, there isn't much call for third party applications on mobile phones" and then went on to explain how it is silly to develop a more streamlined download and install experience until a clear demand for third party apps materializes.