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. Its purpose was a window on the mobile world, and on Symbian in particular.

Project notice. Symbian Toys was an independent hobbyist software project for the Symbian Series 60 platform, which Nokia discontinued in 2013. These pages contain the project's documentation. 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

At the time, 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.

In 2008, he was 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

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 program 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 project credited the original authors directly: 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 contains the project's announcements.

The project is inactive. This site sells nothing, collects nothing and offers no support.

Project scope

The documentation includes change-logs, the release record, attributions and the news column. It provides historical information about the software rather than transactions or support.

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. Both recognitions date to 2008, and nothing further is claimed on their behalf.