Remember back when Nokia jumped to Windows Phone 7, abandoning all other platforms and future directions? Remember Elop’s infamous ‘burning platform‘ memo was coveniently ‘leaked’ to the web? Remember how Elop claimed Windows Phone 7 was the only way forward, since nothing else inside the company would be ready for prime time soon enough? Remember how I thought this was a very good and sane decision? Well, the first reviews of what will be the only MeeGo handset from Nokia (the N9) are in, and well… To whoever decided to go WP7 and ditch MeeGo: I don’t like you. To myself: I’m an idiot for arguing this was a good idea.
I could do a lot of talking and rehashing of other people’s reviews, but I’m just going to point you to Engadget’s review. Not only is the N9 by far the best looking phone on the market today – nothing comes even close, and yes, I’m stating that as a fact – MeeGo itself is actually incredibly interesting. It has its own unique user interface paradigm, and as far as smoothness and responsiveness go, it’s right up there with Windows Phone 7 (which I find one notch above iOS, and two notches above Android).
Just watch Engadget’s half hour video tour of the stillborn operating system. It’s magical.
I haven’t ever touched an N9 (if any of you work at Nokia, this is a massive, glowing, and shimmering hint), but from Engadget’s and others’ reviews of the N9 (which will only be available in a limited number of markets), it becomes clear that this phone is Nokia’s swan song. The last phone built and designed entirely in Keilaniemi in an end-to-end fashion, both hardware and software.
The N9 is the ultimate culmination of Nokia’s 140+ year history, starting with a pulp mill in Tampere, and ending with one of the most successful and most influential technology companies in the world. You think Android or iOS made an impact on this world? Don’t make me laugh – those guys are barely fit to bring in Nokia’s slippers in the morning. Nokia not only invented the mobile phone (together with Motorola), they pretty much invented the entire back-end which supports it to this very day. Nokia made the mobile phone available to everyone – not just rich kids in the west – and thereby changed the entire world for the better.
In the history books of the future, Android and iOS will barely be footnotes. End rant.
The N9, brought to market before Nokia’s Windows Phone 7 handsets, is proof that Elop was lying. Nokia did have more options than Windows Phone 7 and Android. Had Elop not been a Microsoft shill, and had he stated “here’s MeeGo, it’s going to be our smartphone operating system”, developers would’ve lined up to get their applications ready for it. Nokia’s massive reach would’ve ensured that.
And now, this beautiful platform is stillborn. This breaks my geek heart. Have fun being a Microsoft OEM, Nokia.
The N9 has sold very well and we are yet to see how well the market receives the wp7. Nokia still have qt and linux as strategic technologies going forward, it wont be branded Meego but who cares about that?
i have been using an n9 for about a month now and this is by far the best device on the market today.
Unless Nokia gets rid of Elop, Nokia is finished, there is an MS shill running it. Any company that has an MS shill installed as CEO/President gets destroyed and sold for parts with MS buying up the useful patents. Just look what happened to Silicon Graphics a once mighty company that is no more.
I have always bought Nokia phones – not anymore.
Businessmen don’t act like immature fanboys on the internet. Going for WP7 was probably not Elop’s idea alone.
Honestly, there are some businessmen who are very (or appear to be) immature, like Steve Ballmer
“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong”
“I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this”
They don’t?
Well, there might be something crazy to businessmen named Steve.
Edited 2011-10-23 11:17 UTC
No they don’t. They are like politicians and pork belly futures, they can be bought and sold.
Well Elop’s days at the head of Nokia are very much dependendent on Nokia’s Windows Phones sales figures. If after 6 months, they don’t catch up, he is out of job. What will happen after that is unknown (revive maemo or go android’s road…).
I am using one myself and can tell this is the best phone I’ve ever laid my hands on. I’ve used Symbian and then iPhone and then back to Symbian. The iPhone is nice but too restrictive and lacks many standard features like full BT A2DP.
I hope Nokia releases new firmware, especially those that are supposed to take advantage of the front facing camera. I am currently using it to do video Skype on my corporate laptop that has no webcam. Check out SmartCam on the Nokia store if you are interested.
iPhone has supported BT A2DP since iOS 3.0
Has everybody else been using a different Windows OS than me? I’ve used it on two different models and yes the MS apps work well but IE is slow not a great a mobile browser, most third party apps are slow when navigating (swiping left and right). Ebay app, news apps and others just lag in way I haven’t experienced on iOS or Android. The metro interface is brave and minimalist but after half an hour its limits become apparent, the design of the actual apps looks very good, real competition to iOS but the market is full of crap. The one thing WP7 is good for in my opinion is gaming with the top titles available for it and the xbox live integration. But again games cost significantly more on WP7 than iOS or Android. For example Angry Birds on Android is free, on iOS its £0.69 and on WP7 its £2.29…
I haven’t used WP7 myself, but have wondered about it. I read recently were Balmer and one of the other execs were talking about how Android was for geeks (or ‘computer scientists’) and WP7 was for ‘the rest of us’. Well, iOS already serves to be the phone for tech tards, so what exactly is WP7 supposed to be good for?
On one hand, it may be that WP7 is sort of the middle ground between Android and iOS, but while iOS has gone PC free, WP7 is still dependent on the Zune software? Haven’t we moved past needing a bloated media manager app for syncing updates and such?
how long did it take Apple to get to that point?
Windows Phone 7 Mango is looking to be a great OS… I would have gotten a windows phone but the current generation of hardware sucked (IMHO… All I wanted was an AMOLED screen rather than an LCD screen… so… I got an Android…. Perhaps I will get a winpho7 phone next time.
No doubt it looks great but its just skin deep, multitasking is a joke, the web browser is a joke and the marketplace makes the Android Market look professional. I hope it gets better as I’ve just bought a WP7 phone for my dad (iPhone was too costly and Android isn’t for the faint hearted) I just hope it gets better.
I have to agree on the WP7 IE part. It’s total crap. The most simple thing – proper support for non ASCII characters is not there.
And apparently WP7 doesn’t even support multi core processors… Which is pretty poor considering thats where Apple and highend android handsets are heading now.
I had the same reaction to Balmer’s statement, their aiming for a market that the iPhone already dominates using the same locked down model that Apple has championed for almost 5 years now.
‘Nokia made the mobile phone available to everyone – not just rich kids in the west – and thereby changed the entire world for the better.’
Now that is an achievment
The only Nokia customers I had when I was selling phones wanted Nokias because of the consistency between every model. Symbian today would be pretty familiar to anyone who used a Nokia five or even ten years ago. As cool as Meego looks, the average Nokia customer is about as tolerant of change as the average Facebook user.
and the reason the Nokia customer base was shrinking is because of Symbian’s lack of modernity.
I can’t see their strategy paying off, short term, though. Long term, Nokia will fade into being “Just another one of those identical Windows Phone manufacturers”, short term, they’ll alienate what user base they have left, and get a few early-adopter geeks like us in exchange. It will take the general public a while to realise things at Nokia are any different to business as usual, and most people have some fairly deeply ingrained preference of manufacturer already, anyway.
Edit: They should have focused on staying unique. Furthering Meego development, probably making it look like Symbian, or be themable to look like it (actually this video makes it look kind of like Symbian anyway), while still striving to bring new features in. The watchword of anything should be configurability, expose those that think they can handle it to as much new hotness as they want, while the regular schmoes get something they’re already familiar with. They also needed more third party app developers, or a way to open up to the existing app stores of other OSs. QNX has an Android emulator, doesn’t it? Meego could probably have done that, too. Sure, native apps would look and be better, of course.
Edited 2011-10-23 05:05 UTC
(The more annoying “I told you so”)
“Nokia just lost all credibility with developers. Qt just a few weeks ago was to be the platform for all Nokia devices. Now it won’t even run on WindoesPhone7(dayum, that name creeps me out)
Qt quick is the best way to develop great apps there is PERIOD. Sure a new platform needs some polish and that takes time, but Android showed that you can arrive late and still dominate. The smartphone wars are far from over.
Nokia will gain a nearly finished platform and few known brands .. well Xbox, but mainly Office. Bing is just unkown. Do people really care for Office anymore?
Nokia will loose:
-The 6 billion they invested in maps (Navteq maps or bing maps .. people will not care. HTCs WP7 phones will have the same mapping as far as the gernal public is concerned.)
-Half a billion they invested in Qt and Meego
-A lot of faith and cred with developers. Don’t go around telling people Qt is the future and now it won’t even be supported on WP7. Because at the end of the day MS controls WP7, not Nokia. MS is the daddy, Nokia the bitch.
-They will have to compete with the likes of Samsung and equal terms, which builds RAM,SOCs and displays and they will always be cheaper and faster. Anybody who thinks Nokia will be able to build better “more differiantiated phones than HTC or Samsung is just insane. MS wants WP7 to succeed, they couldn’t care less for Nokia.
I could go on and on, but at the end of the day a great european company is doomed, maybe it already was, but now it is quite certain.”
But if an OS falls in the forest and nobody uses it, does it make a sound? it is the APPS that are driving phones today and meego was DOA when it came to apps. Even my just turned 71 year old dad is looking at an HTC Droid because “That is where all the programs are at”.
Now like it or not a percentage, higher than meego would EVER get WILL port their apps to WinPhone simply because of the relationship MSFT has with corporate America. in a way MSFT reminds me a lot of old big blue, not really going up but not going down either, and both are business heavy and consumer light.
so I’m sorry but Meego could have been the greatest thing since chili dogs and it would have went exactly nowhere. hell the only way MSFT is gonna gain any real share with apple owning the high and Google the low is to basically buy their way in like they did with Xbox and Nokia? don’t have that kind of cash.
To nie wady MeeGo sprawiły, że nie ma gier, ale świadome decyzje Nokii. Przecież od miesięcy trombiła, że to ostatni telefon z MeeGo. Więc jak chcesz mieć na niego dużo programów?
Z drógiej strony aplikacje dla MeeGo działają na najnowszych Symbianach! A te z symbianów działają na MeeGo!!!
Więc rynek jest potencjalnie ogromny. Ale po co się w to pchać jeśli Symbian umiera (powoli ale jednak), a MeeGo to chodzący trup?
A aby aplikacja Symbianowa działała na MeeGo musi być ona oparta o Qt. A skoro uczyć się czegoś nowego, to czemu nie API iOSa lub Androida? Albo choćby WinP7 skoro to z nim Nokia wiąże przyszłość?
Possibly. But then the N9 might get some additional developer support from using Qt and an open OS. There are zillions of Qt developers out there, and plenty of them will get the N9 simply because of Qt. Then they can develop for that and easily port their work to the world’s biggest mobile platform, Symbian.
Then again, apps are overrated. “There’s an app for that!” is just advertising speech for “the phone can’t do that by default”.
It wasn’t. Nokia made it.
Android did. But maybe Google was in a better position than Nokia to bull it of in the mobile phone space?
iOS did to but then it was created by Apple which put some more finish on the smartphone and made it sell to the masses.
Edited 2011-10-23 11:56 UTC
WP7 is also pretty much dead in the water when it comes to apps…
On the other hand, Meego is Linux based and thus would not be terribly hard to port the Android runtime to.. You could run Android apps unmodified, or significantly ease the burden of porting them.
Meego also used qt, and so provided a relatively easy porting route for Symbian apps
Already done.
http://www.osnews.com/story/24388/Alien_Dalvik_Brings_Android_Apps_…
Old news.
From the first moment I thought that the decision to choose WP7 was not a meditated but a premeditated one. Convenient leaks, saying that Symbian had no future, etc. It seemed as Elop was more concerned about promoting WP7 than promoting Nokia
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Tizen yet, the one great hope for Meego fans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen
Of course, it probably won’t be Nokia that comes out with the first Tizen phone. My guess is that it will be Samsung.
Tizen is just another HTML nonsense.
Well It seems Nokia will use Linux in the lower end with Meltemi.
Nemo/Mer is another option.
The real tragedy is the loss of support for the only viable true open source mobile OS.
Viable .. LOL!!
Obviously that is Tizer .. sorry Tizen …
Edited 2011-10-23 00:55 UTC
Android seems to be the *only* viable open source mobile OS.
Thom the sensationalist … Why don’t you go OTT even more .. seriously do you want column similar to SJVN @zednet? I like the page hits stuff … especially the UK Gov article recently.
Why don’t you, David and I get together in a Skype meeting so we can troll the OSNews readers better? I recently got a good 300 comments on the “Linux has only 10 decent apps article” .. I obviously have the trolling abilities needed for OSNews.
On a serious note …
I am sure it is a nice phone … but I will probably get a Win Phone just to $hill a bit harder … or due to the fact I am a .NET developer … So it will be good to have a real phone to test code on.
Or if the Win phones are cheap I get a iPhone and then buy a cheap win phone so I have 3 phones I can actually test on. Appcelerator seems to be a nice framework
Edited 2011-10-23 00:52 UTC
I am struggling to understand why you think the MeeGo UI is ‘incredibly interesting’?
The app tray looks very much like Android. You’ve been freequently railing about the traditional icon view on both iOS and Android so this is not really interesting, right?
The notification system is virtually identical to iOS and Android. So that’s not really interesting, right?
The running app view is sort of interesting but not, you know, ‘really interesting’ because it’s just some running app images.
The settings are virtually a copy of Android.
The contacts and their associated services are nicely integrated, better then iOS or Android in some cases but not as well in others. Windows Phone 7 is certainly much more solid in this respect.
The OS apparently gets ‘bogged down’ if you leave a lot of running apps.
The browser is a bit weak as the reviewer notes.
Also the phone is, essentially, equal in performance to last years Android devices. It’s much more attractive certainly but that’s it’s most redeeming feature.
So, in general, this is, you know, a decent device. It has a few nice ideas in the OS but nothing outstanding. It may be the best device Nokia has ever built but it’s not an Android or iOS ‘killer’ or even a really solid competitor.
All that said I think that Nokia made a good call in killing their OS effort in favor of OEMing an OS though I do think locking into Window Phone was a bit dumb. If your going to OEM why not OEM Android too to get better customer reach?
Maybe they see Google as worse than Microsoft. Maybe they wanted to differentiate themselves. Who would want to be another Android OEM?
If you’re going to be relegated to the “just another oem” status… Surely it makes sense to be an OEM for a platform that is more popular, cheaper and has more apps available?
They went from a niche platform they totally controlled, to being an OEM for a niche platform controlled by someone else.
Maybe because it is a beautiful device that runs a very elegant and well thought out open operating system?
Plus:
– No bloated VM like in Windows Mobile Phone 7 Series or Android
– solid fast true multitasking, not the IOS bolted on second thought recently used apps + a little extra solution or Androids pre-4.0 weird solution
– incredible Qt framework, that does nearly everything from low level OpenGL to declarative Qt Quick
– only device that includes the most popular services like Gtalk, Skype, Mail, Picasa, Flicker, Twitter and Facebook etc out of the box
– most open development in the industry
– best contact management (I don’t agree that Windows Mobile 7 is better, because it only works with unpopular MS stuff and popular Facebook AFAIK)
Comparable to Meego is only WebOS, but that always had flimsy crappy hardware and stupid owners (of course Nokia is also not Einstein tbh)
>because it only works with unpopular MS stuff
You mean really unpopular MS stuff like Hotmail which has 100 M more active users than gmail? Or did you mean gmail itself whose contact also sync perfectly in wp7? I’m guessing that you don’t agree wp7 that contact management is great mainly because you don’t know what your talking about.
>its own unique user interface paradigm
Which is what? I think Meego looks great and is really interesting from a dev standpoint but little about the paradigm is unique. This statement makes no sense.
? WP7 apps load faster than the apps I’ve seen on the N9. So WP7 can read off of a disk, JIT, and execute faster than the N9 can read off of a disk and execute?
I don’t know, but I’m really not seeing this “bloated VM” you’re talking about. Especially when XNA games run at maximum FPS in a majority of titles I download.
What’s the upside to having an entire process taking up clock cycles when its not in the foreground? I quite like the specialized multitasking in Windows Phone and iPhone. Its a lot saner than what the other platforms offer.
Nice? Neat? Sure. Incredible? Come on. They tack so much to shoehorn C++ into a useable language, coupled with a second rate declarative markup which is controlled by, yes, Javascript.
Seriously? We’re going to go from Visual Studio to Qt Creator? Not in this lifetime.
Uh, what? Qt just recently was granted open governance status. You realized that a lot of the N9, well, almost all of it, was developed behind closed doors, right? Just because it says MeeGo, doesn’t mean it had much of anything to do with whatever leftovers the open source crowd was given.
Facebook, Windows Live (which itself aggregates like 20 social networks), Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo, ..? That’s pretty much everything..
No, they’re quite comparable. Both are complete and utter failures.
The OS is not as important as the developer ecosystem you build around it. WP7’s developer armies are absolutely massive. No other OS platform is gaining apps as fast as WP7. None.
Your comment is exactly what I come to expect from an Apple fanatic such as yourself: incapable of looking at how user interfaces behave, instead focussing just on how they look.
Which also explains why people like you think Android is an iOS ripoff, even though the two are nothing alike in behaviour.
Well, you didn’t really further explain your statement, but kristoph did enumerate a few reasons that he didn’t see much there.
So I’d actually like to know what you feel the unique user interface paradigm offered by Meego is?
Thom, why are you always so defensive? I asked some very basic questions, and instead of answering them you just fire off a personal attack.
In response to your answer, I don’t how it behaves any more than what I’ve seen in the review. If that’s what your into why not say so?
(Also, note that that I am now officially an Apple and a Microsoft ‘fanatic’. I do make software for Android as well but I do think it’s weaker then iOS WP7/Mango).
I have nothing against MeeGo. I’ve used QT for almost 10 years and I would love to do it again. I am just saying this platform is not competitive .
It looks good and all, but after watching the endgadget review, I’m glad I finally gave up on waiting for the n9 and got a galaxy s2.
Why?
For one thing I looked through the ovi store. It didn’t like that appealing. There just wasn’t a lot of stuff there. I couldn’t find things like an rdp client, or an ssh client for the n9.
Another thing is I find having widgets on the homescreen to be really useful.
I don’t personally like WP7, but it is really different. This demo looks like yet another iOS clone. It is a few years late for Wow.
Several years ago I used to like Maemo on my N800, but UI was really buggy. And the most annoying thing was that Nokia could not figure out right delays in touch-screen logic, so it was always starting something when I was trying to scroll. And see, the same thing again during the Engadget video. It never happens on iOS.
“iOS clone”. Really. Because it shows icons in a grid? Because of its excellent multitasking? Oh, wait.
The review clearly states that the multi-tasking slows down the system and you need to kill concurrent apps. So I am not sure ‘excellent multitasking’ is one of this platforms strengths.
Of course it does. There’s limited CPU time and limited RAM. If iOS had similar capabilities, it would run up against it limits even sooner, as OS X is a resource hog like no other.
The point is, that is doesn’t, because it shouldn’t. iOS does more with less. MeeGo, Android, webOS, and all the other OSes with less restrictive multitasking are CPU and battery hogs.
According to most reviews, the N9 has fairly decent battery life, as do some Android phones. In actual tests, as opposed to fanboy opinions, the Galaxy S2 has better battery life than the iPhone 4 and 4S (depending on use, of course).
Yes, which is why iOS does not make ‘true multitasking’ available to the developer. It’s certainly in the OS; it’s just Apple made the call that they wanted to give users a uniform user experience without the need to have to go and kill applications to make your device more/less sluggish.
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Surely has to be ‘The song remains the same’ (LZ fans will know the connection to ‘Swan Song’)
Or for those who have bought into this dead platform(admittedly, it is not all that bad) is
‘Won’t get fooled again’.
In some ways S Balmer is right(sounds of gritted teeth). From an operating point of views, I find Android 2.3 very frustrating and sometimes downright annoying. At the risk of getting shot down in flames, the IOS 4 device I had previously was to my mind far more logical and clean.
However from my limited experience (about an hour) of playing with an WP7 device, MS have dumbed it down even more to an extent that it goes almost too far in the wrong direction.
Well, there is still hope. Meego developers launched the Mer core project, and plan to produce free open source Nemo distribution (formerly Meego Community Edition, aka Meego CE) based on it. N9/N950 will be one of the first devices it’ll be intended for.
See:
http://merproject.org/
http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/meego-handset/2011-October/000835….
Edited 2011-10-23 07:28 UTC
I just hope that the work the alternative rom community puts into reverse engineering current top of the notch android phones will allow to put alternative linux based oses like this one on them in the future. Add alien dalvik to that and I’m finally settled.
Of of the big stumbling blocks with most mobile devices is the total lack of accelerated GPU drivers for X11 or Wayland (and Android is implicitly to be blamed for this). It starts to improve a bit with Nvidia producing hardfp X11 driver for Tegra2, but the situation is very far from perfect. Better chances probably will be with devices which already ship with such drivers. May be future Samsung Tizen devices fall in this category too.
Edited 2011-10-23 19:40 UTC
X11 is a good point towards the people, that claim Meego is much more lightweight than say Android with its bloated VM (that is JITed, and the compiled code is cached persistently).
Who wants to have a network-capable pixel-oriented Displaysystem on a mobile phone?
X11 is used until Wayland will mature enough. No one forced Android into using incompatible approach. But they did, not benefiting anyone except themselves, and giving an excuse to hardware manufactures not to produce drivers for anything except Android.
Problem is not only lightweight stack, but something that can share the effort and benefit many parties. Android doesn’t do it. If hypothetically, Android could use Wayland and pour resources into it – situation could be very different. It could be giving back to the community, and not being selfish.
Edited 2011-10-23 20:57 UTC
The problem is a lightweight stack, and during the time Android was created, Wayland didn’t even exist as a prototype or something different. Plus: What’s the difference in using X11 permanently or temporarily? Phones you buy now waste resources on this aspect, that’s the point. Buyers today do not care if phones in 3 years will draw less power. Meego won’t exist in 3 years anymore anyway…
Android is a complete Stack, that’s its purpose to be coherent and integrated, but if you wish, you can of course take the source code and extract the display subsystem 🙂
Edited 2011-10-23 21:19 UTC
Well, if you go to the beginning, design and intentions matter. Wayland was designed as X11 replacement, but as generic composting graphical stack, taking in account sharing effort of Linux drivers developers, Linux distros and etc. Android’s graphical stack was designed for Android only, without any consideration of sharing any efforts, benefiting anyone except Android and so on. And it shows. When Wayland emerged not so much later, Android could switch efforts to it, if they’d really wanted to. But, they already had their own thing, and were content with it. Android can be blamed for selfishness, not for not being too inefficient.
Edited 2011-10-23 21:26 UTC
That’s a valid point, which probably originates from its closed initial development.
But there’s another point, that is worth considering imho: Android uses Linux, but it’s not a GNU/Linux system. In fact, Android created a completely non-unixish environment on top of the Linux-Kernel (which is quite a cool fact for Linux’ versatility).
In my understanding, Android is not a Linux-System in the way we usually see Linux-Systems, but a completely independent development (they just saved the work for lowlevel stuff like multitasking, file systems, …). So you could also make these claims for other systems, that were developed completely on their own like Symbian (which has some POSIX-compatibility, so limited portability is not completely out of scope) and iOS (which also uses quite a lot of open source software).
This in case might be extended to “everyone not developing open source on a standard linux system is selfish”.
My actual point here is, that you should differentiate whether a system aims to be a classical Linux system (like Meego, in contrast to Android), then it should participate in the GNU-based ecosystem. In case nearly all of the userland is written from scratch, I don’t see a problem in designing the architecture in a different way.
Well, I’m interested in conventional Linux, but of course system can be designed in any way authors want, that’s their right. But the point is, mobile and desktop in general, have already enough competition and struggle of closed vs open, and something that benefit Linux and open source at large has an advantage. I.e. even if something could be shared to the practical point of allowing ports of open systems to those devices – it’s already good. But with Android it’s not the case. I.e. Android’s success doesn’t help porting Linux to those platforms, primarily because of the problems described above. While it really could be more helpful, considering that it draws on Linux a lot (at least on the kernel).
So far, see this:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/TEGRA2
N9 with Meego looks like a great polished device. The OS is speedy (even on yesterday’s hardware), looks great and brings a few good concepts to the table. Sure, there are some small quirks, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed in a minor update (after all, it’s the first version). On top of that, even if it’s late, Nokia got it out the door BEFORE their WP7 phones.
So where was the logic to go with WP7? There’s something fishy here … I think that through Elop, Microsoft is using Nokia to push their OS, regardless of Nokia’s interest. The other people and shareholders at Nokia are fools for not realizing this. They’ll pay with their company in a few years.
We may never know what has really happened. There are signals supporting both ways.
The unexpected awesomeness of N9 GUI layer (remember the launcher is Nokia proprietary) may as well be result of the extra effort the Finnish team have put into the device development to prove Elop wrong *after* the inglorious announcement and calling them incompetent and redundant. But that only proves Elop failed in one of the core competencies of a successfull CEO: gettin best of his employees for the benefit of the company. I doubt the same people would put as much of passion to fixing WP7 hw compatibility bugs.
Anyway, from what I heard important figures from both WP7 and Android gui teams have worked on Nokia launcher, and it shows.
Edited 2011-10-23 18:16 UTC
I watched 5 minutes of the demo and I had to stop it due to ending up annoyed/confused as all hell. God damn, I hate these newfangled UIs.
So, yes, this is one piece of beautiful hardware. That’s where Nokia has always been strong.
What Nokia failed to realize is that not only does the quality of their own Software matter, but the existence of a ecosystem around this OS. With Nokia abandoning Maemo for Meego, and now releasing Meego although it is already dead and dropped for Tizen, NO ONE will ever write apps for this piece of technology, because NO ONE wants to rewrite own apps every year or two, because some marketing bosses seem to know a better platform. Android sticks with it’s design, but it has Apps. Nobody at Nokia seems to realize, that people do not use the phone’s OS, they use Apps on this phone. No Apps, no buyer. It’s as simple as that.
Under this perspective, I still find it very reasonable to team up with MS as partner for developing the next platform, that Nokia’s phones will be running.
Oh and btw: you say Nokia will always be a name in history because they invented the phone and stuff, Android will not. Don’t you mix up things a little?
I could equally state “Google will always be remembered, Meego not”. Yes, Nokia did some bright things, but their software for the last 5 years was not part of this bright side that will be remembered.
Edited 2011-10-23 09:13 UTC
If Nokia were simply to provide Alien Dalvik, then the N9 with Meego could run all of Android’s apps pretty much natively.
http://www.osnews.com/story/24388/Alien_Dalvik_Brings_Android_Apps_…
Instant platform.
The word alien is pretty fitting here. You’re going to trade an admittingly great swiping paradigm for an inconsistent mess.
Android apps are not even that attractive to begin with, they all generally blow.
Nokia needed a bright ecosystem. iOS is the walled garden. Android is the wild west. WP7 is just right.
Nokia has real opportunity to emerge as the #1 WP7 OEM, whereas they’d be just another OEM for Android. An OS with a questionable future given the litigation.
Except, that would be selling the platform short by a country mile.
Also, providing a VM isn’t a magic sticking plaster. What would be the reason to buy an N9 over a Galaxy 2S? There’s nothing really compelling and the user interface is really something that might be recreated if it comes down to it. My N810 is now sporting a N900 style Maemo5 task display and app launcher. It’s pretty well implemented and there’s no reason that the Meego UI can’t be aped on another platform if it comes to that.
If a device such as the N9 included Alien Dalvik, then it would inherit all of the Android ecosystem AS WELL as being able to run native Meego/Qt apps. This would be a capability beyond that of any Android/iOS/WP7 device on its own.
How is that observation selling the platform short?
And where are these “Meego” apps going to spring from? Where is my incentive, as a user, to invest in a platform with a schizophrenic eco system? Why do I use Meego apps that are half baked, when I can have mature Android apps? It’s not really that hard to make a compelling argument against this. This is the ultimate question that puts many emerging platforms on a knife edge – they have to ask themselves (and their users) should we spend a lot of time building a better native platform, or is providing a set of runtimes to allow other platform exes to run going to be a better way? The former builds character, the latter is a quick fix which may ultimately backfire.
But what real benefit would it have? Why is using an Android app to bootstrap a platform a better plan, rather than developing a real native app? This is the issue Haiku and Syllable both faced. Haiku now has a port of Qt, AFAIK Syllable still sticks to the premise “native is best”. Haiku appears to be progressing faster (but then it was always a more mature platform to begin with, being that it reimplemented a stable commercially delivered OS), but where is the incentive to use the native API when I can write apps using Qt? If you don’t understand that quandary, you don’t really have anything useful to say.
Because, a platform is surely worth more than a lazy sticking plaster fix approach to getting applications? You are looking at the acquisition of apps for the platform to run with a tunnel vision, I’m telling you that without dedicated support form a multitude of developers, it will stall the Meego app eco system.
slap a dalvik vm to that and you have great os with plenty of apps already developed. For now i’m not considering buying a nokia phone in the near future. Sincerely, another customer that you lost.
1. linux (codename Meltemi) will live on in the low-end/feature phones, replacing the s40 operating system /fact/
http://bit.ly/oujz9O
2. the N9’s “MeeGo Harmattan” is Nokia’s “Maemo 6” linux os with a Meego compatibility layer /fact/
3. there’s already an 1.1 sw update comming to N9 (reliability, performance, polish and features that slipped the schedule) and 1.2 update in the making (new features) /fact/
http://bit.ly/qWUCHe (see comments)
4. the UI (and QT) from N9 will live on on linux (most probably Meltemi) for low-end/feature phones /fact/
http://bit.ly/qWUCHe (see comments)
yet another linux-based mobile platform, that’s exactly what the world has been waiting for…
seriously, why do they do this? this is added fragmentation, more headache for developers (and users), less apps, less success, and this problem is 100% homegrown and has no technological necessity at all!
I don’t think calling this just another mobile linux operating system is doing it justice.
MeeGo really does do things a lot different from other Mobile linux OS-es. The Swipe interaction is the most obvious example, but also the use of the AMOLED screen in standby, and the multitasking focus I haven’t seen in other distributions (Android/ bada/ WebOS) .
If you look at the frameworks used, it also is very different (debian based package manager, Qt UI framework, compcache etc. etc etc.).
And that is a very good thing! Nokia is experimenting and keeping an open mind, trying to re-imagine the Mobile phone, just like Apple did when it developed iPhone.
To me Maemo and MeeGo don’t feel like iOS clones, Android does to a very large extent, and Bada OS most definitely does.
I wouldn’t call it insignificant. It will be the ecosystem for the all the 99% people who can’t afford to spend $500 on a gadget. And yes, they want apps too.
One thing to note with Meltemi is the name.
Meltemi is the name of a wind ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etesian )
Harmattan is the name of a wind ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmattan )
All the maemo releases had winds as codenames ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo#Naming )
The N9 will definitely become my next phone.
But I do understand why they switched to Windows. The delays in development were just unacceptable. This Maemo 6 based MeeGo should have been released on hardware in december 2010. That is 10 months too late according to Nokias own original schedule. In Symbian Nokia had similar problems. The N8 was delayed again and again, and Symbian Anna is the OS that should have shipped on that device.
Also the developer tools for Qt are only just becoming mature. Up to June this year you could not really develop an OpenGl based game for Symbian in Qt SDK because of bugs.
It takes time for developers to get used to a new development environment, and also having to develop the tools caused extra delays in creating any real development network for Nokia.
And now in 2011 everything is moving to the cloud/webservices, iCloud, youtube, Amazon, google, spotify etc. Nokia just killed almost most of their own web services, after being extraordinarily unsuccessful.
Sticking to MeeGo/Symbian would be huge risk because of that: no third-party application ecosystem, and no lock-in web-services. By switching to Windows they get both. Can WP compete in other aspects? Don’t really know, haven’t used it. And since I don’t use Windows on Desktop I doubt I can use all features of WP, making it an less interesting alternative.
They had the N950 ready but they didn´t release it because they said that “operators complained about the keyboard.
They even made teaser advertisements:
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjY3OTIxMTY0.html
I totally lambasted the decision of Nokia hiring Elop and ditching MeeGo for WP7 when OSNews wrote an article about that, and it seems I was right all along. So there: “told you so!”
As for N9: damn, it really looks slick. I like the unibody design with the curved sides, looks just great. It’s just horribly sad to see MeeGo doing great and on such an especially beautiful phone when we all know MeeGo has been dropped by Nokia. Almost makes you hate Elop, doesn’t it?
Except, Nokia don’t know how to build platforms and retain developers. I developed fot a while for Maemo and the N800. I gave up when Nokia dumped the platform (N800 and N810) and said, we all needed N900’s to develop for Maemo 5. As a hobbyist, that just wasn’t viable for me. Nokia break the ABI on every major release, constantly change the UI, pretty crappy and hard to configure toolsets (at least for Maemo – “run this script” which fails,” use these RPM’s” but, I’m using Debian and besides Maemo is Debian based?! “try these vm’s we half configured”, um… Okay, but no thanks.)
Nokia is just no longer a company I trust. Not on a hobbyist nor a commercial level. I’ve seen first hand what BS they pull commercially (RFID tracking platform, suddenly dropped like a hot potatoe after we had paid to be trained in it only a month prior, cancelling the phones we had ordered with RFID jackets, giving us 1 year “maintenance” before the platform was turned off.)
At least Elop is consistent. That might not be in the direction many hardcore Nokia fans would want, but it is true enough, given the reality of Nokia’s corporate mismanagement over the last 5 or more years.
Add this to the list (along with webOS) of brilliant mobile software that will face certain death.
I think WP7 looks good… but I’m sad to see this software, WP7 will never offer the integration that a home grown OS can offer.
And the industrial design… it’s brilliant!
…really? Maemo can integrate with my Windows 7 laptop, Windows 7 workstation, xBox 360 and Windows home media center and even better with Exchange servers at work?
Riiiiight.
I was talking about integration between hardware and software.
I think we can agree that Windows Phone 7’s integration with Microsoft stuff is one of it’s definitive strengths.
Personally I want it all (integration with hardware and other services) which is why i prefer iPhone (horrible faux-leather notes app and all).
It’s looks like an oversized iPod Nano. And it also has idiotic Apple features like non removable battery.
UI looks nice. Fonts look crisp and clear to read. Colour selection is pretty good and doesn’t have that UI lost in darkness like Android ICS.
The App selection screen looks terrible. Too roundish. Gives it a cheap look.
I hope Nokia will have something else for next week other than just a N9 with WP7.
I’m probably going to be ignored because I’m posting way down at the bottom of the article replies but the reality is that Meego is a great operating system (technologically and user interface) but it takes more than awesomeness to win the war – if superiority were the benchmark then Windows would have lost its crown many years ago. As much as people like to call Elop a ‘Microsoft shill’ the reality is that the market only has enough capacity to digest a certain number of operating systems. What makes a great phone operating system isn’t just the operating system itself or the hardware but the software ecosystem that surrounds it which is where Windows Phone has its strength.
Here are some things to consider:
1) A wonderfully rich development environment for starters which enable one to develop using tools that are standard for most developers – sorry, your dinky experience using EMACS represent but a small subsection of the larger professional developer community. Great development tools turn an otherwise pain in the ass chore into something that is enjoyable. That is of particularly high importance when it comes to seducing programmers to your platform – if you constantly erect barriers to develop for your said platform the potential developers will just say, “flag it” and stick with Android and iOS.
2) Microsoft’s linking into the enterprise will mean the ability for Nokia to go head to head with Blackberry when it comes to large scale enterprise deployments with organisations who have a library of in house built software that employees need to interact with home base – a sale representative being able to check inventory before closing a deal so that an accurate ETA can be provided to the client (as one example).
3) The relationship with Microsoft is mutual – Microsoft needs Nokia as much as Nokia needs Microsoft so anyone thinking that Nokia is being taken to the cleaners ignores the fact that without Nokia Microsoft will never the reach it requires to gain marketshare.
4) The Nokia brand is still very much a brand that is respected thus any products that do come out can be priced slightly higher even if end up being ‘just an OEM for Microsoft’ thus any margins can be maintained. The idea, therefore, that being an OEM automatically means they’ll become a low margin ‘Dell of the phone market’ simply ignores how much value there is in the Nokia brand as something that commands a higher price compared to the competition.
5) Nokia’s long term version is not just phones but tablets – the recent leak has been that Windows 9 will be the target where Windows Phone and Windows ‘traditional’ are merged into a code base so what we’re seeing is something that is long term for Nokia, something that is at least 6-10 year plan rather than a short term quarter by quarter ramming products out and hoping for the best in the mean time. Nokia needs something that spans from Windows on the laptop to the desktop then to the tablet and the phone – an ecosystem that taps into the massive developer base that exists in the Windows world.
The development environment for Meego apps would have been Qt Creator and QtQuick, not EMACS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_Creator
“Qt Creator is a cross-platform C++ integrated development environment which is part of the Qt SDK. It includes a visual debugger and an integrated GUI layout and forms designer. The editor’s features includes syntax highlighting and autocompletion, but not tabs.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_Quick
http://qt.nokia.com/qtquick/
“Qt UI creation kit lets you create rich, touch enabled UIs and apps, quickly.”
If you are going to try to make a credible point, and so avoid being ignored, then you should at least stick to the facts.
Edited 2011-10-24 02:21 UTC
Please. Qt Creator is like one rung up the ladder from EMACS.
WP7 development tools are really marvelous compared to the fucking terrible Android SDK.
WP7 have no C++ compiler, so forget it.
Edited 2011-10-24 03:07 UTC
Won’t be like that for much longer. I fully expect a C++ compiler, given the recent focus C++ got at BuildWin.
Probably next major release.
However, C# is still a great choice.
May be, so far they used the lack of NDK for political purposes, like preventing competition. They might get some sanity of course with time.
I think its more of a time restraint. Plus their native API is likely immature at this point in time.
What gives me hope is that Windows 8 rejuvinated native development with the WinRT. Hopefully some of that transfers over in the next major release, bringing with it native access.
I’m not against it if its done responsibly.
Hardly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_Creator
Qt creator includes:
– Projects
– two integrated visual editors, Qt Designer and Qt Quick Designer
– Language aware code editor
– context-sensitive help on classes, functions, and symbols
– targets, including mobile targets
– version control systems
– Qt Simulator
– integrated support for debuggers
So, eight rungs up the ladder from EMACS.
What on earth has that statement got to do with Nokia’s N9, Meego, Qt, Qt Creator or Qtquick?
I’m glad it supports the basics, I really am. I exaggerated a bit, but the point is the same. Qt Creator is no Visual Studio. Its good, but not good enough.
The Linux development stack is woefully immature for any kind of serious development.
WP7 is the alternative to MeeGo (and by extension Qt Creator, and Qt Quick) and Android is the other option Nokia could have chosen.
I don’t really understand this animosity towards Microsoft and Windows Phone. I mean, sure, some dissapointment that Nokia gave up on its OS that was way, way off of schedule and not showing much for it, and it just happened to be Linux. I get it, its upsetting, but damn. Its been nearly a year already, get over it.
Pfft. LOL.
http://www.linuxnewshere.com/index.php/linux-top-500-super-computer…
The people who run the world’s fastest, most expensive machines aren’t serious?
http://www.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/09/large-hadron-collider–…
The people who run the LHC aren’t serious?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform
Google services, including Google search and YouTube, running on over a million Linux servers, aren’t serious?
https://launchpad.net/
Launchpad, hosting 25050 development projects, isn’t serious?
What planet do you live on?
From a user’s point of view WP7 has a worse ecosystem than even Meego/Qt, in that it is a walled garden, with barely any apps available for it.
From a user’s point of view if the N9 could run both Meego/Qt apps (such as Calligra Active) AND all Android apps, then the platform beats all comers.
It easily beats all comers in terms of openness and in terms of readily available apps, off the shelf right now, today.
Yet Elop dropped it, and its own Symbia OS, in favour of WP7 which has less than 1% market share.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201110-201110-bar
WP7 doesn’t even register.
In any sane assessment, this amounts to Elop deliberately sabotaging Nokia. It is just a shame that Microsoft probably won’t go down with them.
Edited 2011-10-24 08:11 UTC
The one where it is acknowledged that it is a sad state of affairs over there in penguin world.
They mananage to get shit done using inferior tooling, and that’s great. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
Developers shouldn’t have to put up with the absolutely spartan tooling, I mean, seriously, this is an ongoing trend. Its always somebody elses fault, or you all always try to deflect away from the issues at hand by pointing to something, anything, to make it sound better.
Same thing happened with OpenOffice, erm sorry, LibreOffice. Same thing with GIMP. No, it can’t possibly be our own inability to deliver quality products, its most definitely everyone else.
Come on, the lack of pragmatism on the Linux scene has hindered its success. Sure, maybe some huge enterprises are stupid enough to hire a shitload of C++ programmers to ducttape together a soluton for them. Great.
The fact still remains, you’ve lost, big, huge potential developers by not having a coherent development platform. I’m not talking about a collection of command line tools that you can hobble together to resemble something easy to use. Or mazes of buildscripts and black magic debuggers.
I’m talking about how easy it is for a small business or startup to get a solution done using the Linux Stack? Not very.
The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging you have one. Believe me, you have a big problem.
Qt and Qt Creator is a step in the right direction. Mono and MonoDevelop is a step in the right direction.
They’re great starting points but need work. Hell, Qt tries so very hard to hide C++’s fail with the moc, and Mono does a great job at giving you all a good framework despite the flames, but more is needed.
People want ease of use, and I think this arrogance is symptomatic of the problem you all have. Quit thinking about yourselves, your own needs, start catering to developers. It’ll help.
App numbers are just a tick in a box. Momentum is key. The Windows Phone marketplace is outpacing Android, and going on-par and sometimes faster than iPhone. Also developers enjoy more paying customers on the WP7 marketplace vs Android, and generate more ad impressions (which are growing at an astonishing rate M/M).
He made a long term decision based on long term projections. Its illogical to look at how things are today and use it to make a decision for something with a multiyear span. Think.
MeeGo was going nowhere, very slowly. Microsoft needs Nokia, Nokia needs Microsoft. Its mutual, and I believe that by this time next year, they will have made significant inroads into the market.
Remember, Android had a slow start as well. The G1 was absolute shit.
Heh, I’m going to be amused when this is regarded by history as a monumental comeback.
A collection of command line tools that I combine together is easy to use, as opposed to the integrated candy land that is visual studio. VS is a good editor and a decent debugger, but everything else is crap (and did I mention it’s SLOW?)
And so speaks Lemur2 – has no one learnt anything all these years? When Lemur2 speaks, the earth shudders and all those who dare contradict turn to stone and burn in hell.
Serious reply: You do not seem to know what you are talking about. Better to stay quiet rather than make a fool of yourself.
All lovely links. Now realise, install gcc and GNU and most of what you mention here can be done on BSD. However, this has zero to do with what the OP was talking about.
Um… but how would that have differentiated them from every other Android partner? Really? I expect they got a dood deal from Microsoft, but who really knows? What they did inherit from Microsoft was an absolutely ROCK SOLID developer platform and literally hundreds of people that can and will develop apps.
Hmmm… how many apps does Meego actually have? I mean, actual apps for Meego, not ported apps?
In your mind. But that is your opinion, not necessarily reality, right? I realise you like to be right all the time and can’t bare to be proven wrong, but on this one (Android on Meego) you are wrong. I’m not going to repeat what I said in another thread, but here we stand, someone that has developed using Nokia technologies and has had commercial dealings with Nokia and, er, you.
..in terms of product confusion and app eco system dilation. It will make zero money for Nokia (and I assume OVI was meant to make money at some point) and also, let’s not forget that it would seem unlikely that the Meego phone would have Marketplace access, so what really does that leave? I guess if they are lucky, Amazon Android app store (or whatever they call that these days) or one of the other cruddy app stores.
At the moment. You aren’t going to like the next 18 months, because 1% will be a distant memory as soon as there are actually Windows 7 phones from brands such as Nokia. Why? Because they will be pushed like mad.
And where is Meego?
Steady on, let’s not get carried away with ourselves here… “In [your] opinion” maybe, but calling anything you say “sane” when most of it is wildly ranting and quite often obsessive, well.. no.
Why? Let’s just see how it plays out before we make wild sweeping statements.
Mark of delusioned MS/C#/VS fanboy. Products that use the “Linux development stack” generate _billions_ each month.
Just because there aren’t that many bright people on this planet and enterprises need fill their ranks with stupid C# devs that don’t really understand anything and need VS handholding all the way does not mean that it is any good.
The world is build on C and C++, deal with it.
Anyways, I have used VS and QtCreator and sure VS is more versatile, but for C++ development QtCreator compares quite well and for Qt development it is unmatched. It is also faster, cross platform and develops at a much faster rate.
Edited 2011-10-24 08:07 UTC
That’s unfortunate. You enjoy being a masochist. Spending more time worrying about, and fighting with the language instead of being productive.
Enterprises see the value in rapid application development, and I didn’t think it needed mentioning that managed languages present some of the soundest development principals for maintainable, scalable, reusable code.
But this isn’t even about managed vs unmanaged. Even your C++ tools are lacking. Please don’t get me started with the absolute bullshit that GDB is.
Don’t be so fast at dismissing C++ on the basis of “tools are lacking”. The long history of C++ as a strong industrial language created one of the most vast development ecosystem that a programmer can dream of.
Hardly you can beat the richness of libraries that C++ can offer to you. And good C++ code can be reusable, maintainable and scalable.
The sole problem (if it is a problem) is that C++ makes easier for inexperienced programmers to shoot itself in the foot.
But kragil is also right: the over reliance that some C#/Java developers has of their IDEs is a very bad habit. Indeed, it is a anti-pattern. The perceived “lack of tools” that some users of managed languages see in C++ is thanks to the coding style that C++ programmers like, who emphasis the knowledge of the language itself, not only the tools that you use to edit it.
It can be, but its a lot harder and a hell of a lot less common. I think my point is that as a whole, managed programmers for example spend a lot less time fighting with the language, and a lot more time tackling truely high level concepts.
I think it absolutely is a problem. If parts of the language are terrible, or it lends itself to bad practices, jetisson them from the language. Make a new flavor of C++, hell, call it something else. Just clean the language up, its very unweildly.
I don’t think its so much as an overreliance as it s a willingness to use a convenience. I could just as easy manually run my unit tests from the command line, but it’s much better to have continous testing done for me by an extension. I can probably debug myself from the command line, or I can use an IDE to help me view locals, parallel thread stacks, do edit and continue, etc.
It’s a tool, its useful. I don’t think its bad that programmers expect more nowadays from their toolset. Its less about editing the language (though ReSharper certainly helps in avoiding code smell), its more about augmenting the development cycle.
I don’t think C++ is the problem more than tooling is. Given a competent toolchain, something that users can grasp easily, the Linux stack could become a lot nicer to work with.
Instead its an afterthought, and anyone who dares question why is shot down.
Perhaps for you this is all true but I doubt it’s the majority. Lots of hack ‘programmers’ couldn’t use a command line tool if they tried, and to be sure they love VS. Automating what you know how to do is never a problem.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTk2NA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_%28programming_language%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28framework%29#Bindings
http://www.dsource.org/projects/qtd
Enjoy.
I really like D. I think its a breath of fresh air, and I think Linux would do really well for itself to heavily invest in D. Either have the GCC guys back them, or put more manpower behind the LLVM backend.
Write some competent tooling behind it, and I think you’ll be on to something. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed D everytime I’ve toyed with it.
On the other side of the spectrum, the Vala language for our more Gnomish friends is very great.
D had its chance but never really got off the ground.
My bets for system programming are C++011 (but I hope there will be a “Good parts”-Book that everybody adhears too) or Go, because Go makes dealing with multiple cores way easier than C++. That is maybe _the_ most important aspect of a language going forward.
For managed code I like scala, but it is maybe too complex and foreign for your average hack.
Maybe Dart might get traction, because it is familiar and JS is just so bad.
Who forces you to use GDB? Take Sun(Oracle)Studio or Totalview debugger if you need to.
Edited 2011-10-24 13:53 UTC
I’m not sure about others, but my animosity about MS and WP7 boils down to this:
-Patents and the MS attitude toward them; no more needs to be said.
-The fact that no matter how creative and and interesting WP7 is, MS deserves to be in the position it is due the massive missteps (in the past) it has made regarding mobile.
Nobody else would never have had the opportunities to fail and (eventually) produce something like WP7. Sure you can fail and learn from mistakes but there should be a limit really.
-Also I massively dislike the fact that MS tends to completely screw over its partners (on the hardware side), through malice or callousness.
Edited 2011-10-24 12:18 UTC
Then thats a fundamental disagreement. I believe they’re an equal player in all of this. They are licensees just as much as they are the licensor. I think a lot of what they, and others, patent are valid and patentable.
Products should be protected from blatant copying of an idea.
I disagree, I dont count it against them that they have sufficient alternative income to hedge their bets. They have done some pretty good things in markets they’re eventually pushed themselves into, look at the 360 with Kinect.
This I agree with, though lately it seems to have been the other way around for Windows Phone OEMs. This half-hearted commitment by them I think precipitated the Nokia deal a great amount.
Not sure what’s bad with Emacs, or what it has to do with the Qt Creator. Did you even use it?
Sure, it’s a great OS, but it lacks a decent text editor.
Edited 2011-10-27 02:15 UTC
I think I read that Nokia first started working on a Linux OS in 2003. At some point they had Maemo and it was shipping on 3 small handheld wireless tablets. Then they had it shipping on a high end phone – 800 x 480 resolution and full sliding keyboard.
But then they had two roadblocks. Unfortunately, Maemo had been designed for GTK. But I imagine QT was viewed as a better GUI and class library for running apps on both Symbian and Maemo. So Nokia purchased QT and began to make development on both of their OSes use QT. This held up Maemo. Then Intel came into their picture and Nokia had to further spin their wheels integrating a mobile Linux OS, and one that was based on a different distribution (one was Debian and the other Fedora).
Had they just been able to continue forward with the GTK Maemo, there probably would have been enough phones going by the time they hired the Microsoft guy that a decision to use Microsoft’s OS wouldn’t have flown. Or better yet, they wouldn’t have felt the need to hire the Microsoft guy.
Very very sad the way it worked out.
And the real problem in the US market was that for some reason Nokia lost all their deals with the Wireless companies. And if your phone isn’t offered by the carriers at a discount in the US, you are not gonna sell many units. A Nokia employee that I talked to claimed that Nokia did not want to make slight changes to their phones as desired by US carriers which is why they were not being subsidized. If true, that was as big a problem as any – not doing what the carriers wanted.
Unfortunately the initial choice of GTK was the primary sin of the platform. They didn’t treat it seriously at the beginning and ultimately it hit them.
Nokia are apparently claiming that in Harmattan Office the N9 has “the best mobile office document viewer available anywhere, outperforming all comparable proprietary applications on smartphone platforms”.
http://www.calligra-suite.org/news/calligra-provides-the-engine-for…
“Harmattan Office is a document viewer based on the Calligra Office Engine which is part of the open-source Calligra Suite. This application provides an advanced viewer for documents in the OpenDocument Format, binary Microsoft Office documents, and Microsoft OOXML documents, as well as PDF.”
Calligra Office itself is aming for final release in novemeber.
http://www.calligra-suite.org/news/announcements/calligra-2-4-beta-…