Why did Symbian lose out to bigger, slower, less-efficient OSes?

Symbian was OK. EPOC, its progenitor, was in some ways better. (I write as a Psion owner, user and -- TBH -- fan.)

AIUI, and I do not have good solid references on this, EPOC was a very early adopter of C++ as opposed to plain old C, and as a result, it did many things in extremely nonstandard ways compared to later C++ practice. Its string handling, error handling and all sorts of things was very weird and proprietary compared to the way that the greater C++ community ended up doing.

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