In the Face of Android, Why Should Nokia Stick With MeeGo? 336
GMGruman writes "In September, Symbian 3 was Nokia's latest great hope for becoming relevant in the modern smartphone market. Now comes word that the Symbian Foundation is shutting down, ending the Symbian 3 and Symbian 4 efforts. Nokia is now banking on MeeGo, a collaboration with Intel whose release date — and fit to smartphones — is highly uncertain. InfoWorld's Ted Samson thinks that it's time for Nokia to swallow its pride and stop pretending it will ship MeeGo in time to matter, and instead consider adopting Android — or even Windows Phone 7, which after all might finally support copy and paste by the time Nokia decides to hitch its mobile wagon to a new horse."
maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
And Symbian Foundation is not Symbian. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems the news is just that the Foundation might not continue operating in its current legal framework (which depended on few other entities apart from Nokia, and now that they are gone...). But that doesn't lead to S^3 effort ending, as TFS claims (S^4 apparently is, somewhat - only in the sense that, instead of one big future release, its features will be pushed gradually to existing devices; a change for the better IMHO)
Symbian isn't going anywhere - it has greater share of sales than the next two players combined; when taking number 2 player out of the equation, greater share than all what's rest combined. Might very well be the first smartphone platform to break the barrier of 100 million devices shipped annually, this year.
All this ignoring the modus operandi of Nokia. Is S40 dead? (checking...) No, it's the most widespread mobile phone platform in the world. Heck, even S30 sells quite a few units. Symbian will be around for a long time, just in price segments where S40 was for large part of the last decade.
Those segments aren't going away. If anything, the market seems to be getting more diverse than the simplistic "everybody will want either 'true' (for the current definition of 'true') smartphone or something ultra low cost" - but it's probably hard for pundits in few atypical (but highly visible) markets to notice some crucial segments; most of those people have smartphones...
Smartphones which still sit at around 20% of total shipments. Have been sitting close to that for a few years. People are generally happy with slick UI, touch screen, good web browsing (heck, Chinese makers are starting to integrate even full Opera Mobile), few widgets - "smartphone" doesn't need to enter the equation, as fabulously popular "feature phone" touchscreen mobiles from Samsung and LG have shown recently (those phones from Samsung are why they might be level in marketshare with Nokia by the end of the year, not smartphones)
As for Android...heck, who knows. Though probably "MeeGo-fied/Qt-fied", to share at least their custom apps with Symbian, to have the same widget engine available (the W3C one, iirc). But they are profitable, in Q3 their revenue has risen, at #1 marketshare it doesn't make sense to willingly get relegated to the status of PC makers (vs. MS/provider of OS). Why Samsung pushes also bada OS (indeed almost a direct continuation of their wildly successful TouchWiz handsets). BTW, funny how MediaTek was apparently almost blocked for some time from participating in Android, by Qualcomm; funny times ahead, now that MT releases their solution for Android soon.
Re:And Symbian Foundation is not Symbian. (Score:5, Insightful)
Symbian isn't going anywhere - it has greater share of sales than the next two players combined; when taking number 2 player out of the equation, greater share than all what's rest combined. Might very well be the first smartphone platform to break the barrier of 100 million devices shipped annually, this year.
The thing about Symbian is it really doesn't seem to be going anywhere; in the other sense. The other smartphone OSs; Android and iOS, and even Maemo/Meego, are designed to establish platforms. New Symbian versions consistently fail to run software from old versions. Symbian phones always seem very locked in; for example it used to be difficult to just connect the phone and directly access the whole of it's file system (at best you got a few specific directories). I think that's improved now, but similar stories apply all around. etc.
What this means is, that the number of symbian devices is irrelevant. Even if Gartner's numbers [arstechnica.com] are a bit exaggerated, it's clear most of those devices are not selling software; are not being used as smart phones and just don't count. Your addressable market for smart phone applications (the main meaningful thing about a "smart phone") is not the number of phones, but the number of phones that are actually being used in a smart way. This determines the amount that other people are investing in the platform and so it's long term future value.
Nokia could fix this by making sure that it delivered software updates for it's old phones and ensuring backwards application compatibility. This would mean that it would only support one software version over all it's phones and would mean that Symbian apps would become much more valuable. I'd assume, though, that there's something in Symbian or in the way Nokia uses symbian. which makes this impractical.
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
The thing about Symbian is it really doesn't seem to be going anywhere; in the other sense
You could say the same thing about Windows. Saying it still won't change the world for quite a few years, don't be fooled into thinking the entire world now wants Android phones (good though they are). Incremental updates and a vast target market will keep them relevant for a long time.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But that's again trying a bit to define what we're looking at in a way which results in a very narrow view.
How many years do we hear "symbian is dying" while it consistently ships most units and gains most sales, in number of handsets, year after year? ("percentage of growth" might be deceiving when one player is much closer to the absolute limit of "number of all mobile phones sold" than the rest) Oh, "but they aren't used how I say they should be!"? What?...
It won't matter much anyway when the smarthphone
Re:And Symbian Foundation is not Symbian. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd assume, though, that there's something in Symbian or in the way Nokia uses symbian. which makes this impractical.
Indeed there is: cell companies adopted a strategy early on of "never, never, never deliver software updates to old phones" where "old" is "already purchased." If your phone didn't have annoying bugs in it, what would encourage you to get a new one after the 18-24 month financing deal was up, and lock in a new plan?
In a sense, their "software update" plan has always been, "buy a new phone"
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Smartphone unit sales out of global mobile phone sales accounted for 10 percent in 2007, 11.4 percent in 2008, and 14.4 percent in 2009. They haven't been holding steady at 20 percent market share since 2007. That doesn't even compute with the addition of new players iPhone and Android. Do you think purchasers of those devices only cannibalized from RIM and Symbian?
Smartphones had 18 percent year over year growth in 2008 and 25 percent in 2009 compared to an overall slight decline in total mobile phone ship
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget to mention the projections from, IIRC, around 2007 telling how they were supposed to be at around 35% right about now. The growth is quite gradual, and like that for many years (might look slightly different from the perspective of few atypical markets which were previously mostly deprived of smartphones by carriers and fed with very locked down handsets)
Of course, it would help if we had any sensible definition - given how SE A200 "feature phones" have even full multitasking for several years,
Re:maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's more than that. For example, Nokia is Europe based; it has a strong respect for the privacy of it's customers through not gathering data which doesn't really fit directly into Google's way of doing things. Note; I'm not saying that Google lacks respect, just that they do it from a completely different base. They assume they own your data and then voluntarily give you back most of your privacy (compare with e.g. Facebook which just doesn't bother to give you back your privacy.. "Deal with it Bitch"). Nokia has to start from a base of asking for permission to data which they assume you own. I think that in a Google led environment would strongly disadvantage Nokia compared to other companies which would be happy to gather all their customers data and/or hand it over to Google. Adroid was never designed to work for Nokia and there are probably plenty of other things like that which just won't be a good fit.
Also, if you think that Google is a big target for Java patent attacks that's nothing to Nokia. Nokia almost certainly already has agreements in place that it would be breaking by delivering a java execution environment which isn't compliant to Oracle's spec etc. etc.
Nokia could go with Android, but only if Google agreed to give them a serious level of long term influence over the platform. That's not something I guess Google would do and it's probably not something Google should do.
Nokia needs to do something it hasn't had the guts for for years; commit to Meego; promise that Meego will be available for at least seven years, no matter what market success it has for the first couple of years; limit Symbian to the low end; be clear about where it's going; have a vision of a bigger market and see that it's mobile expertise will only be relevant if it can apply them to devices which have the same level of flexibility as a general computer. Commit to delivering low cost Meego devices soon. Make sure that Meego will be available on all pre-existing N700/N800/N900 devices so that there is a guaranteed base market from the very beginning. Even better; if possible provide a Meego upgrade for N97 and above devices. Build up a developer "eco-system" and make sure that you look after it. This will mean that people will be able to believe in the future of Meego.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:maybe (Score:5, Informative)
This is wrong. I have an N900 and it's entirely voluntary to register with MyNokia. There is even an application available for N900 to disable/block the entire MyNokia feature. I know because I have it installed :)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Did you get your N900 with PR1.2 already installed, did you install the PR1.2 update via SSU or did you install it via the firmware flasher?
When I installed PR1.2 via SSU (how most users install updates; it's essentially a nice GUI on top of APT), after the reboot up popped a modal dialog asking me to accept the MyNokia T&Cs. The *only* way to dismiss this dialog is to accept the T&Cs, at which point it sends an SMS to Nokia. Sure, you can opt-out later, but by that point Nokia already has the data.
Re:maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Android already runs on the N900, a few rough edges, but it's almost good enough to use as a replacement OS.
If you're only looking to use basic functionality, (ignoring the stuff unsupported in Android). Meego and Maemo are both vastly superior in the functionality for expert users.
It's like comparing Windows to Linux; Windows is easier for the general populace, Linux is for those who know what they want. They're really not comparable.
I suggest the following change to the headline: "In the Face of Windows, Why Should Linus Stick With Linux?"
What the hell ever happened to choice being a good thing, anyway?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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I think it's more than that. For example, Nokia is Europe based
More than that; they're from Linus' country. Linux is like the national operating system kernel.
Re:maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
> Google can ensure products follow standards better
Pray tell me: Whose standards will those products follow once there is only one mobile OS that matters?
Re:maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Excellent point. I wish I could mod you up.
Easy! Google's of course.
Just like Microsoft gave us standard's... I can't finish the sentence.
From what I see, standards are not very high in Google's agenda. Dalvik the non-standard bastard step-child of Java, and Flash the proprietary home-run of Adobe's are what I see as talking points for Android. Not that HTML5 isn't a priority for Google.
Of course standards are what companies use until they reach a dominate position, then they become the de facto standard.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
I would imagine Nokia feels ditching their own OS would just make them hardware manufacturers, not so different from a large portion of their competition.
That's certainly possible, but this goes beyond Symbian and MeeGo. There is the whole fiasco which was Maemo.
With the N700 and N800, Nokia had the foundation for a viable, sustainable, open platform for the development of pocket computing, to which they could have added phone capability. Very little needed fixing (mainly the webcam, for which there was never any software except Nokia's own webchat, which no-one used). Instead, they failed to recognise the market, ignored the users completely, and came out with the N900, which was a phone with a hobbled PDA platform.
To be fair, Google made similar mistakes [silmaril.ie] with Android, releasing 1.* with no support for two key elements, principally Bluetooth and Wifi Proxies. But these appear to be partially fixed in 2.*, whereas the N900 was just an expensive not-very-smart-phone.
Every time the deficiencies of Nokia's vision come up, their developers (who are excellent people) come up with the same scripted blather about how important the company's marketing strategy is, and how they know best, and how the market for "tablets" is so important. Of course it is, as the iPad showed, but the N800 was there long before, and had more facilities than the iPad, and could easily have been developed into a larger, competitive device.
But Nokia is at heart still just a phone manufacturer, and they lack the vision to see where the handheld market is going, despite having it explained to them numerous times in words that even marketing 'droids can understand. The future isn't in "tablets" but in portable computing. Call them "tablets" if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy, but don't think for a moment that they are phones with a PDA bolted on. They're computers, and the way to sell them is to make sure they run stuff — simply, easily, quickly, and openly.
Re:maybe (Score:5, Informative)
I work for NOKIA and Google is our primary competitor; not Motorola, HTC, Samsung etc.
We are moving towards becoming an Internet services provider with smartphones playing an important role in this transition. MeeGo plays vital role in this strategy. Qt should allow seamless integration of applications in both Symbian and MeeGo; Symbian is still useful for middle-end devices, MeeGo aims to be the top dog. Qt should allow you to get the same UI experience on both platforms later.
At this moment we are deploying distributed architecture comparable to Google's so that we can compete in latency and scalability of all our services once the initial pains are over. MeeGo should be fully integrated with this framework.
Symbian is a nice OS with outdated GUI which shoots it down; MeeGo should be our response to UI; for that we hired WebOS UI designers to help us get there.
If you ever tried N900 you can imagine what kind of phone would be the first MeeGo phone - you'd be able to run xterm, gcc or most Linux applications on your phone directly - I am not aware of any other phone on the market capable of doing this. Couple this with a capacitive touchscreen, multitouch, UI similar to WebOS yet with NOKIA style, fully offline 3D navigation, microSD, HDMI, hi-res cameras and many more - you can perhaps ditch your netbook and camera and carry only this phone.
Why not (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe they don't like Android.
That's why, in the face of Windows dominating the desktop, I installed Linux.
It's possible for people to dislike software.
I like Yellow (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm writing this on my MacBook Pro, my other work machines are Windows PC's. I administer a UNIX server at the laboratory. I do most of my work on LabView and AutoCAD. I edit my photos with Photoshop and I drive my Ford to the local supermarket at the mall and buy the biggest brand cereal. And in the evening I sooth myself with a bottle of JD.
I use stuff so I can be productive and happy. I dislike smug people who announce their dislike of stuff so they can feel superior to me. They're not. They are just
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm writing this on my Ubuntu laptop (corporate), my work systems are all Linux (Ubuntu, Mandriva) and I administer a large number of Linux systems deployed for mission-critical manufacturing test...oh my work is all on LabVIEW, besides using Linux for all "other" corporate work (I'm among the senior management at work)
I edit my pics with Shotwell and Picasa and drive the latest Honda to the local supermarket. I like to relax in the evening with some nice music and enjoy time with my family.
I use Linux to
Re: (Score:2)
I think it's a case of Symbian being their code or feeling as if they have at least contributed a lot of it.
Jobs said they considered Linux for the iPhone but ultimately didn't want to use someone else's code.
Ballmer wouldn't use anything non-Windows.
Nokia want to use their own software.
I think Nokia understand phones by now (Score:5, Insightful)
If they take up MS Windows Phone 7 that will be putting a vast amount of undeserved trust in what is really a competitor and hoping they will not get hurt. With respect to Ted Samson I think he is either not being serious and expecting to generate a spirited argument or he knows far less about what he is writing about than the youngest commenter here.
Why would anyone want Nokia to do something awful? (Score:3, Informative)
Android is all cool and stuff, it's also FLOSS and great, and whatever.
However, it has its shortcomings which make it less than a desirable phone operating system for me. First of all, MeeGo, Maemo and their cousins allow me to run any vanilla GNU/Linux GUI applications. They are most often inconvenient to use on a phone, but they are sometimes better than what's available on the platform. On Android I'm limited to apps written for Android. Thanks but no thanks.
Also, programming for Android? You need Java o
Re:Why would anyone want Nokia to do something awf (Score:4, Informative)
You might want to look into the NDK on Android. It's perfectly possible to port a runtime written in C/C++ to Android and then use that to run your python code.
yeah, right... (Score:5, Interesting)
Porting a python run time would be a pain in the butt. And even if it worked what libraries would it have?
I wrote a python script on my laptop that grabs some data off the network and displays it in a GTK window for the user. I then copied that program to my N900 and it just worked. Try that on your Droid.
Re:Why would anyone want Nokia to do something awf (Score:5, Informative)
I can get a bash shell on my nexus one, and from there its possible to install a full standard gnu userland. The only difference with meego is that the standard userland is already there, but nothing stopping you from installing what you need on android.
That said, why would you want to install ruby on a phone? I grudgingly have ruby installed on my relatively highend laptop, and it's an absolute pig, i would hate to have something so inefficient on a far less powerful device with a smaller battery.
Re: (Score:3)
You CAN GET a bash prompt on your Nexus 1. While Maemo COMES WITH a CLI out of the box.
"Rooting" the phone was as simple as enabling the extras repo and getting the gainroot application (which I believe comes from Nokia).
Then open the CLI, type sudo gainroot and watch as the prompt changes to a #.
Done. No screwing around with custom kernels, waiting for the "community" to figure it out, etc.
But the reality is that mobile phones aren't built for people who care about such things. If Nokia survives the handse
never say never (Score:3, Interesting)
Android is all cool and stuff, it's also FLOSS and great, and whatever.
However, it has its shortcomings which make it less than a desirable phone operating system for me. First of all, MeeGo, Maemo and their cousins allow me to run any vanilla GNU/Linux GUI applications. They are most often inconvenient to use on a phone, but they are sometimes better than what's available on the platform. On Android I'm limited to apps written for Android. Thanks but no thanks.
Also, programming for Android? You need Java or another language that compiles for JVM.
Just a small (but very important) correction It's not the JVM, but the Dalvik VM. Bytecode is different, architecture is different, and Dalvik by design will not run J2ME things that can run on a JVM.
Want to program in Python? Good luck. You can't, and you'll never can, because Jython isn't portable to Android.
Considering that Google App's engine primary language (for a while) was Python, I doubt that Python (or a subset of it) will never be supported on Android. To run Python on a VM, you. do. not. necessarily. need. Jython. You simply need (a yet to be developed) Jython-like equivalent for the Dalvik.
Obviously
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Dalvik on the other hand started (and has remained so) with support to a subset of Java. Why? Because it caters to the masses of J2ME developers already in existence; another strategic move, and a better response to iPhone's reliance on Objective-C.
This confuses me, see if they wanted a strategic language for Android that gained a absolute heap of developers, J2ME wasn't it. It was C/C++ as used by Symbian. Add some symbian->Android conversion tools, libraries or frameworks and you'd have had a massive a
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http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-android-scripting.html [blogspot.com]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
SL4A for Android [google.com] from Google gives you Python and Ruby right on your Android phone. Also Perl, Lua, JavaScript, Tcl and shell. In other words, you're about as wrong as it's possible to be.
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MeeGo is the merger of Maemo and Moblin, so there's lots of man hours already been put into the platform. Personally I don't like the tab based approach to the UI. The icons are unclear and the tab selectors are small, not much use for people with fat fingers who are running it on a smartphone.
The problem is current Nokia handsets with Symbian are probably just stop-gap until this project gets somewhere. I wouldn't want to put my money into buying an applications from the Ovi store if I knew that the phone'
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And also, MeeGo is not meant for the phone market, only Android is. MeeGo is meant for the mobile/wifi netbook/tablet market. In that sense, MeeGo is competing with ChromeOS, Windows 7, and Linux, and it will do very well in that regards with Intel backing it, Intel already dominates the Netbook market (just not on the OS side yet).
Re:I think Nokia understand phones by now (Score:5, Funny)
I bought an iPhone: brilliant engineering, highly intuitive.
You mean like brilliantly putting the antenna on the outside of the phone so you could intuitively kill your signal by touching the phone?
Re:I think Nokia understand phones by now (Score:4, Informative)
Yes all phones lose signal strength when you cover the antenna, not all phones allow the antenna to be bridged with another antenna rendering it into a pretty crappy antenna.
That's what the whole iphone antenna issue was about. Not signal attenuation do through holding it.
About bloody time! (Score:2)
Ouch. I didn't think Nokia would ever muster the balls to kill off Symbian (which was clearly the only logical move after the iPhone ate its lunch, even more so after Android started making inroads). I guess the majority of those 1800 redundancies will be Symbian geeks, to be replaced by Linux ninjas working on MeeGo (here's hope).
It's a shame it took so long for them to understand. They should have ditched Symbian right after the N97 disaster, pushing hard on shipping great Maemo products. Instead, Maemo w
Reality check people (Score:2)
Re:Reality check people (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah but their margins are thin and getting thinner by the day. They currently rely on third-world consumers not being able to afford Android or Apple phones, but cheap 'droids are less than a year away...
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Nokia made a decent profit again the last fiscal quarter after a short dip in the red, with their average phone being more expensive than before. And if the rumours about Gingerbread's system requirements are true (which is highly unlikely, but feature creep won't make it any lighter), the last cheap Android phones will be running 2.2.
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Well, cheap is $25-$50 for the hardware + whatever the software costs. For Android, that is essentially zero and this makes Shanzai + Android the cheapest possible platform for Africa.
Battery life: most is taken up by fancy screens, wifi, 3G, GPS. Kill all that for a low-cost phone, stick a solar panel on the back, and the battery will last 2-3 days of real use. Furthermore, it's not a week between power outlets, they're everywhere, they just cost money to use.
Rugged? Hardly the point. When you earn a
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Symbian went too far with lockdown, and has never recovered. Lets hope t
Re:About bloody time! (Score:5, Informative)
Ouch. I didn't think Nokia would ever muster the balls to kill off Symbian (which was clearly the only logical move after the iPhone ate its lunch, even more so after Android started making inroads).
What? Symbian has a beautifully designed kernel, with power management at every level of the stack, able to run isolated personalities so that it can run the hard-realtime stuff for controlling the radio on the same CPU as the apps. It has a microkernel design with support for capabilities (for running semi-trusted code), and concurrency at every layer from the nanokernel up so it will scale happily on the next generation of phones with multiple cores.
Linux, in contrast, is a pig on mobile devices. Power management is accomplished by hacks on top of hacks. Hard realtime is a joke. It's there purely for buzzword compliance.
Unfortunately, the userland stuff for Symbian is a pain. It used to use a version of C++ for userspace development that exposed some of the very low-level memory management stuff. This was important for phones with no MMU, but is a waste of time now. It's not required (in fact, you can just use Qt), but a lot of people tend to judge Symbian by either that or by the crappy UIs that a lot of manufacturers (including Nokia) have built on top of it in the past.
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The irony is that with Qt, the userland started to look good for Symbian.
Though the _real_ problem is the fragmentation. And I am not talking Steve Jobs make-believe fragmentation. When I still used to follow Nokia & the Ovi blogs closely, they would announce Application X which is available for Symbian 5 devices, second release, fourth generation, with touchscreen and the optional chicken attachment. The E75 still does not have free navigation even though it supports Ovi Maps in its newest iteration. E
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1) You lose easy access to the largest repository on Earth (Debian's). And Debian has a dedicated ARMel distribution. This is _massive_
2) When I still used RPM-based distros, I could make the package DB go boom by just installing/uninstalling stuff
3) I know how to package DEBs. Not true for RPM.
4) The decission was made behind closed doors.
5) I use Debian for laptops, desktops, servers, I would prefer to use Debian-esque on my mobile.
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They do provide a POSIX compatibility layer (PIPS), so you can recompile POSIX code. The only big thing missing is fork(), which can't be implemented easily on the Symbian kernel. That's not a huge problem - fork() is horribly inefficient in a modern *NIX system anyway (it requires marking the entire address space as Copy on Write and doesn't interact nicely with threads).
Adding a syscall layer would probably be possible, but not really interesting - it's not like there's a large collection of binary-o
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It's on the map, in another region: QNX.
Acquired by RIM recently, so expect the BlackBerries to run it in the future.
(Unfortunately closed-source again after acquisition)
Why ditch it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Making themselves yet another Android vendor would give little reason for people to prefer their phones over somebody else's.
Also I find Nokia's approach interesting. Their distribution is a very standard looking one, and porting applications to it is extremely trivial. Anything that compiles on ARM will run outright, and only needs fixes to the UI. Lots of command line tools can be used without changes.
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Making themselves yet another Android vendor would give little reason for people to prefer their phones over somebody else's.
Different is not necessarily better. As a consumer I can buy a Droid phone and in the future buy another driod phone from another compatible manufacturer and still use the same apps. If I buy a Nokia, I am stuck buying Nokias if I want to use the same app.
There is also the catch 22 of any new OS; Few apps are written because the install base in not high enough, Install base is low because there are few apps. iOS avoided that issue because they were the first on the block and every developer wanted to get on
command line tools (Score:2)
"My first question is; how many people will be running command line tools on their phone?"
Count me in, cowboy! That is one! :)
"Second the code must run on an ARM so must be written for an ARM. Can I easily port my Android or iOS app to MeeGoo? I doubt that very much."
But, we can't count on you?!
Re:Why ditch it? (Score:4, Insightful)
My first question is; how many people will be running command line tools on their phone?
Plenty of really excellent GUI apps (some of them made with Qt) are simply front-ends to complex command line utillities.
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I was (no longer since the crappy N97) a great Nokia fanboi. They simply make the best hardware, and have kept understanding that a smartphone should be a phone with PDA functions and not the other way around. The OS has nothing to to with it; its only advantage at one time was that is was the only game in town, especially at a time where the competition was windows mobile, which is a
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What Symbian? What I have is a N900, there's no trace of Symbian in it as far as I can tell. What runs on the N900 is a very standard looking Debian based distribution.
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Not supported on N900 certainly, but that makes sense. As far as I can tell, Nokia has no intention of switching away from Maemo on N900, Meego will be used for a future device.
Or you mean Nokia is going to release an Intel based phone?
Lots of reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
The first that comes to mind is how Android is all about tossing aside everything that is open source as we know it and reinventing the wheel. The catch is that the wheel has not necessarily been improved, and now it's all under the control of Google, who does development behind closed doors and only allows hardware vendors to participate in the process. The rest of the world gets Android code when Google feels like releasing it.
The open source world has TONS of excellent APIs, no sense in not using them. Makes development a lot easier when you don't have to worry about each subsystem yourself. And hey, if your hardware vendor isn't run by bean-counting, control freak assholes, you can participate too.
But the main reason Nokia won't go Android is because that makes them dependent on Google, which even Android vendors like Motorola cite as a risk. Google wants to ride other vendors to get their services out there and make money, and that's a realm Nokia wants for themselves.
Following along with this, I'm amused that people put WP7 in league with Android or MeeGo. It's more like an iOS 2.0 you can license, and well you only need to read my post history as of late to know my opinion on hyper-restrictive OSes like iOS and WP7.
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It seems that even hardware vendors don't have much influence on Google for Android development. Most of them don't get the build before the rest of the world does. So it means that if you're not HTC or one of the close partner, you'll always be lagging. And even the close ones have little input into the development process.
Nokia does not want the phone market to become like the PC market, where you have one Microsoft and lots of OEMS.
Meego is an Open Source project done right, with open development, re-use
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()()
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My bunny is clearly superior to yours. Also, it acts as a Kirby if need be.
java. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:java. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:java. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe I'm a dreamer...
Re:java. (Score:4, Insightful)
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That is simple. The Infoworld guy and most people have an American viewpoint myself included about Nokia. Nokia is still the biggest cell phone maker on earth.
In the US they are sell a few super expensive smartphones and a few super cheap phones. If the push out MeeGo it will have a huge marketshare in a flash.
The real reason for Nokia not being a big deal in the US is that the majority of US cell phones use CDMA vs Europe and many other places that GSM only. Nokia just doesn't have many CDMA phones and Nok
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
In my case because there is a market for people that don't want to develop for a dumbed down linux and want a real development environment.
Also of note the fact that they recently increased the planned releases for Symbian^3 (four phones now on WP) that Symbian^2 phones keep being released in the Japanese market and Symbian^1 is alone probably domnant in the smartphone market overall.
If they could finally get a Symbian SDK working on linux I would jump on it immediately. Linux needs terribly high specs, Symbian is impressive in this sense and I could easily keep two/three test phones for hobby development.
But I digress: if the choice is a linux distro and Android I will buy the linux distro, so I can install every possible package I already have on my desktop/laptop.
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But I digress: if the choice is a linux distro and Android I will buy the linux distro, so I can install every possible package I already have on my desktop/laptop.
This is such a huge advantage, but the market of people who want it is so tiny no company will ever chase them.
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In that case, it's a good thing that BMW and Audi are already using Meego for their under development car computers.
High-end cars is a market worth chasing.
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But I digress: if the choice is a linux distro and Android I will buy the linux distro, so I can install every possible package I already have on my desktop/laptop.
I completely agree with this. Also - I am hanging out for the ability to do x11 forwarding with ssh. ssh -Y -C will be THE killer app for me. I would have bought a n900 long before now just for this if the handset didn't happen to be such a large and ugly brick.
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Huh? When did you try to run a Symbian SDK on Linux last? I am running QT Creator 1.3.83 on a 3 year old, 300 euro Compaq Presario C700 w/ 2Gb RAM, using 32bit Ubuntu 10.10; and it runs great.
-> If they could finally get a Symbian SDK working on linux I would jump on it immediately.
Well now is your chance. Here's some more information for you:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/09/nokias-cross-platform-development-strategy-evolves-with-qt-47.ars [arstechnica.com]
meego is much more interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:meego is much more interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
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Too many cooks spoiling the broth (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently had to replace my phone... (Score:2)
... and it annoyed me to no end that I couldn't just get something like my old phone, a Nokia 6150. All the phones now either flip or slide, and are chock full of "features" which are really thinly-veiled attempts to get you to cough up more money for a data plan.
I just wanted a regular phone with a 12-key number pad that could send text messages with predictive text input. Nope. Not offered anymore. Hell, I can't even send an email to someone without using a data plan and some email "service". (On the Noki
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That's not true. Nokia still have a lot of these phones and in candybar form-factor too. Admittedly mostly they aren't offered by ordinary carriers, but I have seen them in real life being offered by Tesco Mobile (if you are in the US, Tesco is a major UK grocery/everything monopoly like Walmart). They cost something like €20 or €30 (that's without signing your life away on network commitments as well!) Mostly the only issue with these (and why people don't go with it) is that it is targeted at th
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Nokia 1616
Nokia 1800
Have fun :)
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Or C1-00; only a slight change to 1616, but seems to come with much bigger battery. Suffice to say, standby times are insane.
It had it coming (Score:2)
Android is good because it has a Linux background meaning there is a lot of experience with it yet it's ever more fragmenting.
So I find it entirely logic that the largest phone manufacturer bites the bullet and goes with a much more mainstream fork of Linux.
With the success of ARM-bases processors in mind it might be somewhat dangerous to get too cosy with Intel but hey, they already have experience with the other Linux offshoot M
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Nokia would have to fall on really hard times before selling out to Microsoft
and they don't need to. The E7 phone can work with Microsoft Office documents better than Word does, and you can even create powerpoints on the thing (no doubt to send to your PA with instructions to 'just tidy up the edges', but if you're targeting sales account managers and the like, this is the kind of thing that makes them sit up).
So why would they 'downgrade' themselves to sell out to MS. In the mobile world, they *are* the Mi
Sure is some FUD here (Score:2)
a) Symbian foundation "shutting down"? Well, sure a [citation] would help.
b) Even if so - it was of only so-so use for Nokia. They are basically the only Symbian developer worth anything. FLOSS Foundation spin-off shutting down does not mean that Nokia won't continue it.
As for Symbian itself - it's not that bad. It lacks some polish. Well, seriously lacks, including the infra-structure. But it has some nice feature - like ability to run native code which Android badly misses (some poorly-informed guy should
Bad Journalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Very badly researched articles and Summary:
Symbian Foundation closing does not imply that Nokia will stop Symbian Development.
Symbian 4 being transformed from an incompatible system into an upgrade path from Symbian 3 does not make it go away except for the name.
And another one:
"Symbian 3 made it onto a couple of phones, but no one really noticed or cared"
The first Symbian 3 device was only just released (N8) and reviewed by the usual websites, and 2 more are announced and prototypes released and shown at the Nokia Fare (C7, E7).
I'm to lazy to actually read the whole articles but there's probably more nonsense.. bad Journalism.
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I especially liked the tidbit on how MeeGo "made almost no headway after several years."
The reality says that it was announced in February this year, and is near its first platform release with Nokia contributions and touch support.
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Judging by obviously inadequate Windows Phone 7 mentioned in it out of the blue, it's from Microsoft.
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Why would microsoft suggest they switch to Android? The article is poor and borderline flamebait. It starts with a falsehood, suggests a swtich to android, then throws in a completely irrelevant "copy and paste" windows 7 issue in there. Terrible article.
Symbian is dead? (Score:5, Insightful)
a) News of symbians death are IMHO highly exaggerated. I right now would place a bet that symbian OS will be a significant palyer in the market for the next 5-10 years (maybe more). Why? Go to Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Africa, Russia etc. many people there dont afford iphones, but low-end Nokia devices are pushes out in numbers you cant imagine. And the current mid-class devices (e.g. Nokia e63), which you can already buy there will be the next low-end devices. So - taken into account the fact that Nokia can build successfully push out phones counted in 10s of millions and be profitable on a much smaller margin for revenue, you think they should experiment around?
b) Android: Nokia stayed away from bundling the devices with services from other companies, because then you would invest in developments where somebody else dictates the rules. So should Nokia accept to help advertise and develop a platform, which makes them googles slaves? As a happy Nokia customer i say: No.
c) customer base: If it want something for playing i'll buy and additional android device,iphone,psp or wii. If i want a workhorse, i'll buy the next Nokia phone - if possible a symbian one. I have all the software i need for it, namely dictionaries, pim tools, mail client, podcast downloader, internet radio, youtube client, skype, messaging clients, google maps (and nokia maps), office documents editors. Moreover it runs java programs. This is my definition of "what do i primarily need?". I wont sacrifice running this stably for an unknown gain in other things.
So to say it shortly - the customers interested in having a cool looking web-surfing device Nokia already are lost for Nokia. Their potential customer base are people who want a cheap phone or something which "just works", with a little hooks as possible. For that they should take their time and keep the keys in they own hands.
It gives then an edge (Score:3, Insightful)
Unix is free, open and a offers a powerful community.
Google only offers open layers down to a 'base' that maybe hardware or software.
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Plus the potential to run Android apps under MeeGo, probably even natively at some point.
TFA is FUD, Symbian not dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, any posting on Nokia/Symbian/MeeGo will have the inevidable person calling Nokia to adopt Android but this one gets the cake, claiming that "Symbian's dead, and MeeGo won't cure ailing Nokia". Nokia's recent press release (Engadet coverage [engadget.com]) claims the exact opposite, e.g. that Symbian and MeeGo are gaining unified development environments via Qt and Symbian is now a consolidated effort, unifying the seperate Symbian ^x releases into a constantly evolving release model (which means that older phone models will get constant feature improvements instead of just bug fixes). Nokia had a good Q3 and last I checked, they still held the majority of the mobile phone market. Talk about missing the point.
Why are we giving these people creedence again? Oh yeah, he writes for InfoWorld, that must mean he's on to something.
Symbian is not being scrapped. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nokia is not closing down Symbian, it looks like it might close down the Symbian Foundation (http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/12215_Nokia_accelerates_Qt_focus_con.php)
The new CEO, mr Elop, has stated that Qt will be the main API for both Symbian and MeeGo, and that the two different Qt-based UI's for Symbian and MeeGo are either scrapped (Orbit on Symbian) or deprecated (DirectUI on MeeGo). Also, evolution of Symbian will proceed more smoothly so the numbering system (^3, ^4) is dropped.
Finally, it looks like people can upgrade their devices to later versions of the OS.
In a couple of weeks is the Symbian Smartphone Show or whatever it is called now (http://www.see2010.org/).
Product Differentiation, anyone? (Score:2)
Come on Nokia (Score:2)
I really want to know who messed this up...
They have an alternative to Symbian, it's called Maemo
Someone came up with this MeeGo thing, which is great, but it shouldn't be against Maemo
They have a cell phone with Maemo, the N900
The should begin getting Maemo to run on other platforms (maybe even the X8 one) and instantly fire anyone who starts whining about it
Some think Symbian will be around a while... (Score:3, Informative)
There are two reasons why Nokia won’t be abandoning Symbian anytime soon.
Firstly, Symbian is tightly integrated with Nokia’s variant management process. Nokia is the only OEM that has mastered variant management, i.e. being able to generate 100s of variants (SKUs) at the press of a button. That’s how Nokia can deliver 100s of customised smartphones to operators and retailers around the world. This variant management process is ‘hardcoded’ to Symbian, which means that replacing Symbian would seriously compromise Nokia’s ability to cater to operator requirements around the world and it would seriously hurt its market share.
Secondly, Nokia’s economies of scale rely on in-house control of core components, and the operating systems is one of them. If Nokia were to license Windows Phone it would reduce its differentiation to industrial design and Ovi alone. In the case of Android, Nokia would have to branch Android (and to sustain the cost of Android development), port Qt on Android which means another 12+ months for a stable implementation. While this remains a long-term possibility, it is still a gamble when Nokia’s priority should be to focus on killer devices and not a killer OS. Qualcomm’s BREW MP is another candidate but only when Qualcomm has a good developer platform story and that means waiting for BREW MP to launch a web-based platform akin to RIM’s WebWorks.
Symbian may no longer be a symbiotic system, but will live within Nokia for many years to come as the workhorse under the hood of Nokia smartphones.
Too late for developers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nokia are at the point where they are actively having to pay developers to write apps. And we're not talking small apps here - big, branded apps for global companies, who are being approached by Nokia asking them if they'd like an app for Ovi. I couldn't tell you the number of clients I deal with day in day out during my day job who have already been rung up by Nokia. Even with an app developed at no cost, very few companies will take Nokia up on it.
It is simply not a space that people want to release software into right now. It doesn't get you press, and it doesn't get you sales. At least Blackberry have realised their previous app space strategy wasn't working, and are attempting to engage with mobile developers in a meaningful way. Nokia's left there without a clue.
Just switched to an N8, from an N82. (Score:4, Interesting)
And because of the way Symbian's been designed from the ground up to work with limited CPU cycles/memory, it runs exceedingly well with a 680 MHz ARM11 and a Broadcom GPU. Angry Birds has been ported to Symbian, Need for Speed Shift looks gorgeous, and HD videos play smoothly on the AMOLED display. Detractors crow over the gigahertz class CPUs on rival Android/iOS devices, but consider that Android practically REQUIRES that sort of CPU power for its eyecandy. A lower specced Android phone [allaboutsymbian.com] just doesn't cut it for speed. And while battery technology doesn't keep up with clock speed, GHz level CPUs are going to guzzle battery as well.
My phone lasts great for 2 days with wifi permanently on and push email running for GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo, with around 2-3 hours of calls a day and moderate web browsing and youtube. It has a power saving mode as well, that reduces display brightness and other settings in one go to consume less power.
For all the bullshit in this article, he never even talks about Nokia's Q3 financial performance [nokia.com]. They've sold 26.5 million smartphones, with an operating profit of €529 million, and net sales of €10.3 billion. Today in India, you can buy a Symbian based Nokia C5 for about INR 7000 unsubsidized (about $160). Just a couple of years ago that was unthinkable for a Symbian phone, they typically cost double or more. Nokia's pushing smartphones lower into the mass market with Symbian - they're able to standardize the hardware (600 MHz ARM CPUs as of now) and because of Symbian's scalability it can power these low end handsets. Meego will wind up for the successors to the N900 and probably be a netbook/smartphone hybrid OS, with appropriately beefy hardware and targeted at the high end market. And both Meego and Symbian will be bound by Qt for application development, so that there's no fragmentation going forward for developers. Qt is a proven toolkit, in use by Skype, Google Maps and VLC, and can be used to make desktop apps for Windows/Linux/Mac as well. And naturally everything here is true honest open source, not locked down or restricted like the 2 competing phone OSes(Android the OS being restricted by its device manufacturers even if it itself is open source). I see this as quite good - an incentive for developers to write apps that will reach the entire world, not just the US (there's 10 million downloads a day on Ovi Store as of now, it seems), while using standard development tools that can be used outside of mobile phones as well.
Re:Also rans (Score:5, Informative)
They could also do what Google did and create their own Linux based operating system and maintaining compatibility in applications
That's what MeeGo is. Unlike Android, it uses a fairly standard stack (e.g. includes X11), so porting apps from the desktop is trivial - recompile, tweak the UI a bit for the small screen, ship.
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Tweak the UI a bit?
Understatement of the thread.
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Re:Also rans (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh?
The N900 does actually connect to the tv. Sure, with wires, but still. It also connects just fine to Mac, Windows and Linux machines I have, allowing them all net access and/or file transfer. It also picks up DLNA servers in the house and can use them as media sources.
Nokia do a lot of things right. They've lost direction a bit over the last few years and the number of models they have now is just ridiculous, but if someone tightens the reigns and sorts out the business side, they've proven time and again how capable they are of producing solid, working devices with great user experience.
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Nokia were the early adopters, symbian predates android and ios by several years. The problem is they let it stagnate and get overtaken.