About the project

A quiet desk at a window with a laptop, notebook and a couple of old phones, city rooftops beyond

Symbian Toys was the personal software project of Marco Bellino, a freelance consultant based in Turin, Italy, whose day-to-day work was software development and training. The about page described the site's purpose in one line: it was created as a window on the mobile world, and on Symbian in particular.

Archive notice. Symbian Toys was an independent hobbyist software project for the Symbian Series 60 platform, which Nokia discontinued in 2013. These pages preserve the project's own documentation as it was published. The software is no longer distributed here, and no support was ever offered for it. Device and platform names appear for identification only; the project was never affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any device manufacturer.

In his own description

The archived page recorded that at the time of writing he was developing a tool for the analysis and assessment of 2G and 3G networks on behalf of an international telecommunications group, in C# and ADO.NET, and that his skills ranged from assembly programming on microcontrollers to ASP.NET and C# web programming — the latter being what the site itself was built with. Nothing beyond what the archive showed is added here.

The site's front page added one further detail: he had been elected a Forum Nokia Champion in 2008 and was an Accredited Symbian Developer, both being recognitions the platform's developer programmes granted to active contributors of the era.

How the project ran

The working pattern is visible in the pages themselves. Programs were released when they were finished, with a change-log rather than an announcement; questions were answered in FAQ pages rather than individually, because the volume of email made anything else impossible; and every product page carried the same standing notice that the software came "as is", with no warranty and no technical support of any kind.

That last point was not evasion. It was the honest terms of a one-person project giving away software that manipulated firmware, kernel-shadowed memory and installation packages on hardware the author did not own and could not test exhaustively. The warnings on the NokiaCooker page — that modifying a protected partition risked an unbootable handset, and that anyone unsure should simply not do it — are the same instinct expressed as documentation.

Attribution and collaborators

Two of the programs published here were improvements on other people's work, and the site said so on the pages themselves rather than in a footnote: NAVIFIRM was originally written by EPICBIZNUS, and RomPatcher by ZoRn. The graphics across the software and the site were contributed by community artists, credited on the artwork credits page. A companion application for Guardian was written by another community member entirely.

How it ended

Nokia discontinued Symbian in 2013 and the handsets aged out of use. In September 2021 the author published the full source code of the Symbian Toys catalogue — Guardian, IconHider, FlashSMS, UnlockMe!, NokiaCooker, RomPatcher+, SISXplorer and the shared library behind them. The release archive records every version the project shipped, and the news column preserves the announcements as they were written.

This site is a preserved record of that project. It sells nothing, collects nothing and offers no support.

What has been removed from this restoration

The original pages carried the things a working site of that era carried and that a preserved record should not: an email address, a postal address in Turin, an Italian business registration number in the footer of every page, donation forms with amount selectors, tables listing the most recent contributors by nickname, and a purchase flow for the one paid program in the catalogue. All of it is gone. What remains is the documentation, the change-logs, the release record, the attributions and the news column — the parts that describe the software rather than transact with a reader.

Recognitions of the period

Both of the recognitions named on the front page belonged to developer programmes that no longer exist: Forum Nokia Champion, run by the manufacturer for contributors to its developer community, and Accredited Symbian Developer, administered through the platform's own developer programme. Both wound up along with the platform. They are recorded here because the archived front page recorded them, dated to 2008, and nothing further is claimed on their behalf.