Put simply, Symbian has totally failed to keep up with modern trends in mobile phones. Some products are designed to be scalable, or happen to be so by a quirk of design. Symbian is neither.

It all started back in the late 1990s with various Psion devices I bought, including the Psion 3 and Psion 5. Back then Symbian - or EPOC as it was known - was reasonably useful. Having any kind of operating system on a handheld device was remarkable, and Microsoft's mobile operating system at the time - Windows CE - was dreadful.

However, a few years later Symbian made the leap to mobile phones, receiving its new name along the way. That's when it became annoying. My two main issues were that it was slow, and it was annoying to use. One of the inner circles of hell consists of people trying to find the configuration option they want on a Symbian mobile phone. However, this being hell, the phones are glued to their hands. They can't hurl the phone at a wall in frustration, as I did on more than one occasion.

My last-but-one mobile phone was a Nokia 6680. For the two years I owned it, it displayed an annoying animated screensaver that I simply could not work out how to deactivate. Please understand that I know a thing or two about technology. I'm not an 80 year-old man who squints at a mobile phone like it's just dropped out of the sky into his hands. But I quite literally spent hours trying to find this configuration option.

I knew it was there because I had found it, once, and managed to deactivate the screensaver. However, a software update had brought back the annoying animation, at which point I had both forgotten where the "off button lived, and lost the will to live.