Nokia and Microsoft Make Smartphone Alliance 479
pbahra writes "The smart money was right. Nokia has jumped into bed with Microsoft and will produce phones running Windows Phone 7. The cynics would say that, here, we have two lumbering dinosaurs of the technology world clinging to each other hoping that the other gives them a future. Optimists would point to two companies that need each other, both bringing vital components to the alliance. The big winner is Microsoft. Windows Phone 7, while reasonably well received by commentators, has not set the world on fire. An alliance with Nokia gives it access to the world's largest phone maker and its huge mindshare — in many developing nations a mobile phone is known as a Nokia. The biggest loser is MeeGo, the ugly, unloved step-child of operating systems."
Nokia wrote to developers, "Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same."
Shocking (Score:5, Informative)
This [blogs.com] is a good read on the whole matter. Writing's a bit crude in some parts but raises some good points.
These charts also illustrate the point. Nokia is alienating both its development community and its customers. Qt is put on the sidelines. Who's going to develop for a dying platform? A lot of people I know buy Symbian because of the generally familiar UI, which is similar to the Series 40 phones. Windows Phone is radically different.
Ugh.
The Register's view on this (Score:5, Informative)
"15 years of rivalry ends with Losers Alliance" [theregister.co.uk]
Re:Rest in piece, hacker friendly mobile future (Score:5, Informative)
The Android bootloader lockdown? What? Just stop buying Motorola devices and all will be fine... you've still got HTC and Samsung building decent phones with completely open bootloaders.
Re:Rest in piece, Nokia (Score:4, Informative)
Attn Nokia: Was nice knowing you [wikipedia.org]
Re:Minimum Requirements for Windows Phone 7? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rest in piece, hacker friendly mobile future (Score:4, Informative)
According to the German Spiegel [spiegel.de], Alberto Torres [nokia.com] (responsible board member for MeeGo) just left the board. So yeah, MeeGo is basically left for dead.
Re:Rest in piece, hacker friendly mobile future (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Shocking (Score:4, Informative)
This whole thing is even more crazy if you take in account that Nokia shelled out more than $400 million for two assets (Symbian and Qt/Trolltech) which are now pushed into irrelevance. Nokia even open-sourced the entire Symbian operating system under the EPL, a huge move unlike what has been done by any company, only to dissolve the Symbian foundation after Mr. Elop joined the company.
What's more, Symbian and Windows phone are not perfect replacements. As some other posters have noted, the hardware requirements for Windows Phone are egregiously high, whilst Symbian is known to be frugal with hardware requirements because it was built from the ground-up to be an operating system for low-power devices. The user-interfaces are radically different.
The main issue with Symbian is that it was hard to develop for. This was supposed to be resolved with Qt, but now what? Nobody will develop for a platform that's going to eventually die.
Re:Sell sell sell (Score:5, Informative)
Then KDE will be screwed.
Nope [kde.org].
Re:Rest in piece, hacker friendly mobile future (Score:4, Informative)
Not even close to the same thing. At least a Nexus has a reasonable open OS that can do real multitasking.
Re:Rest in piece, hacker friendly mobile future (Score:2, Informative)