Nokia N70 in 2026: a developer builds a Telegram pager for it

Bringing it back took some shopping. The battery measured 0 V, so he ordered a new BL-5C. There was no charger either, and the N70 uses a thin pin connector, not Mini-USB or Micro-USB, so that had to be ordered too. The phone booted, the memory card worked, and the clock was reset. The card still held photos from his student days. He says he would have preferred a bitcoin wallet.

How do you write apps for Symbian 8.1?

The easy route is Python 2 through PyS60, an official Nokia project launched in 2005 that ported Python to the Series 60 platform. Enthusiasts wrote plenty of apps that way. He chose the harder path: native Symbian C++.

Symbian 8.1 grew out of EPOC, the system Psion built for its pocket computers, especially the Series 5. Code is C++98 with Symbian's own idioms. Instead of normal C++ exceptions it uses a mechanism called Leave, with a Cleanup Stack to free objects safely after errors. Classes are named by type (C, R, T, M). Active Objects let an app wait for a file read or a network reply without a separate thread, which saves memory on a small phone.

A classic S60 app is built from an Application, a Document, an AppUi and a View or Container. S60 uses the Avkon interface framework and UIQ has its own, so an app for one is not automatically compatible with the other.

The N70 was also an early hit. According to Wikipedia, it was the first smartphone to sell over a million units, and the model ended up in the tens of millions.