Sony Ericsson Abandons Symbian
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 24th Sep 2010 23:20 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless Well, this certainly isn't particularly surprising. The rising popularity of Android leaves more victims in its wake than just Windows Mobile. Sony Ericsson, one of the major manufacturers of Symbian phones (other than Nokia) has just announced it will pretty much abandon the platform to focus entirely on Android - leaving Nokia as the sole person cheering for team Symbian.
E-mail Print r 1   · Read More · 58 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/ie4
Thread beginning with comment 442712
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
werterr
Member since:
2006-10-03

I hardly think Maemo was a failure. Technology wise it was actually pretty darn good.

Compared to Android phones it wins hands down. (I have no experience with iPhones but from what I see and hear I'm not impressed)

Mind-share wise yeah, Nokia and thus Maemo has lost there. But technology wise Maemo is not bad and the N900 as a phone proofs that.

After being forced to spend two weeks on a Android (Cupcake) phone it was clear that this platform is technically inferior to the N900 on many levels. (As well as not being very user friendly IMHO)

Now you can argue that cupcake is old, but then again the phone is locked to this version and there is no means to upgrade without voiding all warranty. Also several of the major bugs I found there still open on 2.x so no gain there.

Sure I've got my share of gripes with Nokia; about Maemo's stale userland, slow development of Maemo, more or less letting it bleed to die, the idiotic reasonings of Maemo community about security (they do not want to implement shadow file and strong crypto on passwords because the a phone device is inheritly insecure ? sorry but that's just stupid), and how things went with the hole Meego move.

But Maemo as an OS and Phone is hardly a failure.

Considering the small amount of N900 phones that where made in the beginning and it being targeted to developers/geeks it could actually be called a success.

Reply Parent Score: 5

OSGuy Member since:
2006-01-01

I hardly think Maemo was a failure. Technology wise it was actually pretty darn good.


It is not? Why don't I see it as widespread as iOS and the droid? To me that indicates a failure. Sure the technology might be good but that doesn't necessarily indicate success.

Edited 2010-09-25 22:04 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2

aliquis Member since:
2005-07-23

Because Nokia dropped it for developing MeeGo with Intel and they haven't released any such phones yet so the N900 is the only Maemo-phone around. Wait until MeeGo is out ..

Reply Parent Score: 3

Read more of this thread... >
Fettarme H-Milch Member since:
2010-02-16

Why don't I see it as widespread as iOS and the droid?

Because Maemo 1-5 were never meant to be used widespread. Two or so years ago a Nokia manager said in an interview or a presentation or so that Maemo is a years long path and that it'll take until Maemo 6 (now called MeeGo) to finish that path and all devices released before that would be marketed towards enthusiasts and not the mainstream.

To me that indicates a failure.

No, it just proves that you have no clue.
The N900 was more successful than Nokia expected. Nokia meant to sell it only in very small quantities -- the scope was basically to be a developer-only device to allow them to test Qt applications on a real handset device in preparation for Maemo 6 / MeeGo.
The N900 isn't even marketed as a phone. It's a "mobile computer" according the the official description but that "mobile computer" turned out to be a quite good phone with -- at time of release -- the best mobile Skype client.

Reply Parent Score: 5

jabbotts Member since:
2007-09-06

I'm still a little up in the air over the Meego merger though. I have a lot of .deb that have been carried across two previous devices which may get cut off unless Meego manages to support deb and rpm (I hear it'll at least be rpm with apt-get/aptitude managers).

After playing with two Iphones in the house and looking seriously at three Android devices (to the point of looking up howto for planned uses), N900 hardware is fantastic and Maemo on it blows the other's away for my needs. I really hope they don't stuff the Maemo community any more than they already have.

(Why they agreed to have Meego based on Moblin's RPM rather than a direct fork of Debian; I'll never figure out.)

Reply Parent Score: 2

spiderman Member since:
2008-10-23

I have a lot of .deb that have been carried across two previous devices which may get cut off unless Meego manages to support deb and rpm (I hear it'll at least be rpm with apt-get/aptitude managers).

alien converts deb to rpm and vise-versa anyway.

Reply Parent Score: 3

Radio Member since:
2009-06-20

(Why they agreed to have Meego based on Moblin's RPM rather than a direct fork of Debian; I'll never figure out.)

They went for the LSB. Also:
-they use tools primarily developped for RPM distributions, such as OBS (OpenSUSE Build System -compatible with .deb, but developped for SUSE);
-they may have been convinced by delta-RPMs (sure you can download updates via wifi, but Nokia's always though of the whole world, not only the US, so they may already think about minimizing bandwidth usage in countries where 3G will always be more available than wifi - many African courntries, for example, have never got widespead landlines (because of the fragility and theft of copper wires) so they jumped straight to cellular for all their communication needs);
-they also went for zypper, the fast, light on RAM, and intelligent (more than others) package manager;
-and openSUSE's one-click installs.

Source: dev lists and my own dot-connecting.
You're right to feel offensed, though, as they didn't explained themselves properly.

Reply Parent Score: 2