It is based on the Eclipse IDE platform enhanced with extra plug-ins to support Symbian OS development.

Both the ADT and PDT are basic installers that include Carbide.c++, several Eclipse-based plug-ins and several stand-alone tools.

The few branches mostly relate to the different semantics of the CodeWarrior debugger engine, compared to GDB which is what Eclipse previously supported.

Developers are generally not fond of moving to new tools and early versions of Carbide had problems.

There were several frequently cited complaints – for example, lack of Symbian-OS-style code indenting, lack of an easy "find in files" facility, speed of import of Symbian OS build files (MMPs), and difficulties using on-device debugging.

Otherwise the reception was warm - the development environment is preferred to CodeWarrior, the IDE is based on Java so there are some speed and memory concerns, the IDE is often slow and has a pretty big memory foot print, all trademarks of the Java environment.