Nokia Reasserts Control Over Symbian OS 135
jfruhlinger writes "Nokia is asserting its control over the Symbian OS that runs many of its smartphones, taking the tasks of developing the operating system away from the independent Symbian Foundation, which will now focus on licensing and intellectual property issues. Of course, this also illustrates Symbian's importance to Nokia's smartphone plans, even though the company is also developing phones that run the Linux-based Meego OS."
I just can't help myself, but to see Symbian dead (Score:2, Insightful)
I just can't help myself, but to see Symbian dead in its tracks. In User Interface so far behind, that no matter of add-on modules can save it from obscurity.
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SJ, is that you? Don't forget to take your liver medicine today.
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When moronic drivel like this is modded "insightful", you know Slashdot is no longer a site for geeks and nerds.
Re:I just can't help myself, but to see Symbian de (Score:3, Informative)
"Its easier to port a shell than a shell script"
Seriously, a shell along the lines of iOS or Android could be easily written for Symbian.
Good (Score:1, Interesting)
This is good for both Symbian and Nokia; they can stop pretending that Symbian is a reasonable choice for non-Nokia companies (that would be better off with Android or MeeGo, operating systems that are designed to be vendor independent and don't require tons of Nokia specific knowledge to build).
Symbian still has lots of life in it, now that Nokia is getting their shit together (through massive technology refocus on Qt Quick, ending silly projects like Symbian4 that were only hammering nails on Symbians cof
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For a smartphone, the app market is very important. How can Nokia compete with Apple, Google, RIM, and Microsoft for developers? I'm afraid that they will win the battle of the spec-sheet, but nobody is going to care.
If I were Nokia, I would start selling devices that can be loaded with Symbian or with Android, much like Palm did with Treo a few years ago.
My best prediction is that Symbian will do well in some vertical markets, but will never get very far in the consumer market.
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What they should do is add opera like gestures to acess stuff instead of having to go via multiple sub menus.
As for how they can compete? By having the entire world minus north america develop app for them. And probably north america too as they switched symbian apps to be QT based for cross platform com
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I think that depends on what factors you are judging. From a technical perspective, the death of Symbian might be as much of an atrocity as the deaths of OS/2 and Amiga.
From a business perspective, it might be an atrocity if Nokia continues to let their (perceived) relevance in the smartphone market slip away. They may be sealing their fate by continuing to invest scarce resources in something that has such a slim chance of succeeding. Even if they can make a bette
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
You miss the modus operandi of Nokia. They offer wide range of devices, starting from $20 (without contract!) S30 ones, via S40, Symbian, and now Meego. Each category made affordable to greater number of people, over time. "Slim chance of succeeding" is a misunderstanding.
"iPod is the only one that matters" is telling - you don't see how that's appears to be so only in very few atypical places (BTW, for a long time Nokia alone sells more music capable phones annually than the total number of iPods ever produced). Similar with "domination" of iPhone...
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I was talking about the smartphone market. If you look at a snapshot of market statistics, you would think I'm nuts. Instead look at the trends. If you were running the smartphone division at Nokia, would you be happy with their performance since the iPhone debuted?
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But this is also about smartphone market, about expanding it to lower price segments. Yes, look at the trends - for example at "annual increase in the number of Symbian handsets shipped" ("percentage of growth" is deceiving when one player has a big share already...)
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In North America, the biggest impediment to expanding the smartphone market to lower price segments is the carriers. An iPhone 3GS is only $99 now. When Verizon starts selling the iPhone, I expect that will drop to $0. You can already get very cheap pay-as-you-go Android phones (that suck). So I think anybody who wants a smartphone, could get one. The problem lies with the plans. It's very hard to get a decent dataplan in the US for less than about $70 / month. I don't think there is much Nokia can do about
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"Music capable" phones are somewhat misleading. A lot of phones play music, and for most it's a bullet point on a checklist that most people are not interested in.
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"iPods sold" a bit similar, many of them are no longer in service.
But I guess you'd be still surprised. From where I live (a decently prosperous late EU memberstate) - not only I can probably count the number of iPods I've seen on the fingers of one hand (excluding my iPod of course) - the standard mp3 player was something like chinese S1 devices.
Now most portable music listening seems to happen from mobile phones, and typically so called "feature phones" (also touchscreens though, like Samsung Touchwiz or
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Here there are many 2002 era iPods still in use.
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How many aren't? (and you know...here there are many mobile phones used for music listening)
Yes - problem is, we operate here mostly on perceptions; solid and precise regional data are hard to find. But just looking at things like wages throughout the world (NVM how Apple products tend to cost much more where wages are low(*)), how iTunes Store is not available in most of it, how there was an explosive growth in number of mobile phone users in so called developing countries, or looking at geographical break
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Most music on iPods is not from any music store.
iPods are available almost everywhere, even Afghanistan.
Sure, people have mobile phones, but they are poor music players. In parts of the world where mobile phone service is spotty at best, iPods are preferable.
I haven't seen anybody listening to music on a mobile phone, except for iPhones.
Sure, that situation may change, but for now iPods are still the king, queen, and jack of the music player business.
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But iTunes indicates which markets Apple considers to be somewhat "worthwhile"...
Sure, iPods can be found everywhere - question is if they are present in any appreciable numbers (you don't seriously think there's much of anything in Afghanistan, except among foreign forces?)
"Poor music players"? They are perfectly fine, I can assure you (is that about how US handsets were traditionally castrated?), and people are happily using them. Also, you saying "in parts of the world where mobile phone service is spott
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It's about functionality available, not the number of apps (how many single e-books, radiostations, audiobooks or website(!s) UIs packaged as a single app do you need, instead of universal apps accessing those formats?)
And so far Symbian is the furthest in consumer market...
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Well, Japanese seem to also think it's a reasonable choice (though their flavor is not part of S60 lineage of course)
And a few dozens of millions of phones are already there - Qt SDK supports Symbian versions which are hitting 4 years now.
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Really? Last I heard they pulled out of the Japanese market. This article is from 2008:
Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone maker, said on Thursday it would stop selling and marketing its mobile devices in Japan because its market share there remained below expectations.
“In the current global economic climate, we have concluded that the continuation of our investment in Japan-specific product variants is no longer sustainable,” Timo Ihamuotila, executive vice president at Nokia, said in a statement.
http://www.japantoday.com/category/technology/view/nokia-to-pull-out-of-japanese-market [japantoday.com]
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The parent was talking about reasonable choices of non-Nokia companies...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOAP [wikipedia.org]
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/12268_11_Symbian_phones_announced_by.php [allaboutsymbian.com] (also those are S^2, not MOAP, S60 lineage after all)
Unavoidable (Score:3, Interesting)
It was obvious when they started that they weren't going to get a large Open Source development community around the Symbian kernel and libraries. It just was not interesting compared to Linux. But unfortunately they were so proud of their kernel that they weren't willing to listen to that (and yes, I had the chance to tell them, and was pretty frustrated that they didn't believe me). Now that Nokia is making its major development direction around Qt over either Linux or Symbian, there is even less interest in Open Source development of the underlying Symbian platform. The sad thing about this was that Symbian was a profitable business before they Open Sourced it, making about 10 to 15 Million per year, not a ton of bucks for a company like Nokia but it was self-supporting and I never saw a reason to destroy that since they weren't going to get the community. It would have been better for them to concentrate their Open Source work on Linux.
Add to this the recent switch from Maemo to Meego, and it pushes Nokia's plans for Linux further back, even though n900 PR1.3 works excellently. So Nokia has to scramble to shore up Symbian for another generation of phones.
Re:Unavoidable (Score:5, Interesting)
After owning Nexus for about a year, N95 and N86 combined for over 4 years. I concluded that Nokia still makes excellent Phones. Things just work. Problem is, in this day an age of internet, Nokia is finding it hard to make things more than a Phone. Having said that, they did pretty well integrating media and camera into their phones.
Stuff like simple Bluetooth pairing worked flawlessly between my car and the N95/N86. With Nexus, it frustrates, sometimes it just wouldn't pair, when it does, often it picks up, the call stays on the phone speaker/mic. I mean really, Google, what gives. This same car had no issues with either of the Nokia. So there is definitely something to be said about the symbian kernel (something positive).
Battery life, they were great too. Further, after the N86 came the Nexus one. The day I got the Nexus one is the same day my Photo and Video collection stopped growing. I miss that from my N86. I have a collection of my kids pics and videos for almost everyday, with a decent 8MP camera, the pics aren't SLR quality, but not bad. I would go back to N86 if it wasn't so sluggish. I would really really give up internet browsing on a mobile device to have a fast peppy N86. N8 is tempting me, but where are the apps Nokia.... argh... Nothing is perfect.
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I agree, with one caveat: Nokia' bluetooth stack is a little flaky if you use it as a bluetooth modem. I regularly have to reboot my E71 because the connection hangs.
Mart
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Spoken like someone who never had a N97... (for the record - my N95 was a wonderful phone!)
Only phone I've had that seems to forget everything (basically reset itself to factory defaults) if I let the battery die on it...
No threaded SMS (I can forgive the N95 for not having this, but this was inexcusable on the N97 - even as an option for the Nokia apologists who don't want it), no core memory to speak of (ooh - 128 megs!), tons of tools (that Nokia makes - like OVI Maps) that only install to c:\ and hardly
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How the hell do one make SMS threaded? Unless there is some magic data i don't know of, one only have time and contact data to use for defining the "thread".
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Message threads? Basically it breaks down all your text messages by who sent stuff to you.
The N97 just dumped every single text message into a single folder. Fun ehh?
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ok, so it is not threaded in the email/usenet sense, but just being able to filter out the messages based on contact(s) involved.
Odd that the N97 would not be able to do so. I have a feature phone on hand that can do that if i tell it to (sort messages by contact, that is).
Re:Unavoidable (Score:4, Interesting)
This is proof positive to me that Nokia's definitely a hardware company that doesn't know when it needs to give up it's software side. Maemo/Meego's been delayed, they're still using their awful Symbian OS. They're past the point of needing to shore up their software and just push something usable out.
How do you go from 70% market share to 40% with an all time low of 35%? Being an iOS fanboy, I've got a lot of criticism for the Android platform, but as a consumer, it looks more and more viable than Nokia's offerings. No matter how nice the camera or the hardware is on the N8, the software is still obscenely subpar.
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70% (was it ever that high?) to 40% to 35% happens when that's only a small part of total market, a percentage of percentage; and when growth of that part finally happens in places which were previously fed with locked-down RAZRs/etc. by carriers (shunting Nokia)
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My first two phones were Nokia feature phones.
Nokia is no stranger to locking users out of their hardware at the whims of carriers. Nokia knows what side it's bread is buttered on.
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Perhaps on feature phones. But their smartphone range is a no show in areas where carriers love to "neuter" features (to get people to use one of their "services" instead), because said features is a major part of nokia marketing.
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Or maybe there's more nuanced reasons why Nokia smart phones didn't sell well in this country, including the reluctance of consumers to buy into expensive data plans and phones that were difficult to use? American carriers did carry nokia smart phones until about the 2003 or so, then carriers realized no one was buying them.
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Pre-2003 there were hardly any Nokia smartphones to speak of in the first place, certainly nothing mainstream.
And you know what, in most places I'm familiar with, people generally tend to like Nokia phones - because they are easy to use (when it comes to S30 legacy and S40 lineage, what would form the bulk of sales during the last decade; and being familiar with them makes S60 decent BTW, since it carried over many UI concepts...even if its complexity outgrew them)
No, there appeared to be some amount of Nok
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Bullshit.
Nokia phones -suck- from a usability standpoint. There's a reason why Nokia's not seen as a hot brand in their own back yard, Finland, and why iOS and Android are quickly gaining ground.
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Yes, that is what pundits marvelled with their newfound smartphones (by no means worse, typically better, sure), in few places where Nokia virtually didn't exist in the first place, would like you to believe. Or where people can afford "hotness"...
Look at what people actually use and buy [opera.com], what they choose worldwide(quite a lot of recent Nokia phones there, mostly S40 which this was about), also "lesser" people in "lesser" places.
But hey, maybe I'm imagining those stats too, just like what I hear about reaso
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How large is development community around Android kernel and libraries, anyway? (opensourcing Symbian supposedly was a response to it...) I've heard there's some amount of NIH Syndrome, etc.
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Google have already run afoul the Linus way of doing patches when they tried to dump a whole new scheduler into the mainline source.
For something based on open source, android development at Google is very closed. They do development in their own, in-house branch, and only at release do they push the changes to the public branch. Consider that there is a 2.3 release around the corner, but as of yet there is no knowledge about what is coming.
But to be honest, Nokia handled maemo in much the same way. They di
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well crap, talk about me not noticing who i was responding to until now. Wish i could email you a beer.
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I am not a programmer, so I have no idea which platform is easier to develop for, but having owned every single Maemo device Nokia has shipped (N770, N800, N810 and now N900), I loved them.
The N900 is by far the most tweakable device I've ever used, and the most open. How many smartphones out there can run a custom kernel that allows overclocking, shh-ing into the phone, and editing text config files? How about upgrading, downgrading and replacing individual packages?
The community built around these 4 gener
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The N900 is by far the most tweakable device I've ever used, and the most open. How many smartphones out there can run a custom kernel that allows overclocking, shh-ing into the phone, and editing text config files? How about upgrading, downgrading and replacing individual packages?
These are great features I want in a computer, but not a phone. The last thing I need is for my phone to stop booting because I got some config all wrong and now I can't even make calls on it.
Illustrates importance? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, this also illustrates Symbian's importance to Nokia's smartphone plans, even though the company is also developing phones that run the Linux-based Meego OS.
To me this illustrates that Nokia is not aware of the 80/20 rule and has no focused coherent strategy for their OS platform.
At the same time as Nokia's competitors are hard at work proving the world needs only one smartphone platform, and it's their one platform, Nokia is one company making two platforms...
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Re:Illustrates importance? (Score:4, Interesting)
they simply cannot forget symbian, because:
1) they are still relevant because of huge number of symbian users
2) meego is not ready and will some need time to mature
3) if there is problem with meego, or meego adoption and symbian is obsoleted, they are dead.
+ they need OS for low/mid-end and symbian is better for that than meego.
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Don't confuse "uses" with "has".
When Nokia ships a phone with customized Android, their money/time investment into it is magnitudes lower than that of creating another platform from scratch (relatively speaking).
Although, you reveal another problem of the industry, which is treating the OS just some nuisance they need in order to peddle their low-margin hardware, with no regards for consistency, quality, or long-term effects.
It's why smartphones, tablets and PDA were dying as concepts, before Apple came and
Nokia isn't making clear why we should care (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been following the Meego 1.1 release news (I enjoyed http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/11/the-meego-progress-report-a-or-d/ [visionmobile.com]), and have read up on a few other Nokia stories (N8 reviews, rumored N9 devices, etc.) and I don't quite understand what their long run goals with Symbian are. I mostly read bad opinions of it, e.g. Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/14/nokia-n8-review/) loved certain aspects of the N8's hardware but didn't like the software. Symbian is probably the main thing keeping me from getting an N8 (that and the screen is disappointing). Nokia has announced there will be no more high end phones (higher than the N8) that will run Symbian, they will all run Meego. Phones are always getting more capable and I imagine the Meego stack will be optimized going forward, so how many interesting phones going forward are even going to run Symbian?
Given that Meego isn’t ready, I could be a lot more interested in Symbian if Nokia released hardware that they promise will support Meego when 1.2 is released, but for now runs Symbian. I was hoping that would be the case with the N8 since I really like the camera on that phone, and it literally seems to have no competition right now, but I can find nothing online speculating that Meego will ever work on an N8. Going with a transition strategy would let them release more phones even though Meego isn’t really ready (I hope it is ready in Q1, but maybe it won’t be working all that well into Q4 or later.
One more gripe for Nokia - I sure hope they aren’t considering releasing an N9 with a camera that doesn’t match or supersede the N8. The leaks (which could be totally bogus) implied the camera was not as capable (smaller sensor size, no Zeiss, less pixels). What the hell. I’m not going to feel great about spending money on a Meego phone when older Symbian phones can outperform it in ANY area (GPS, call quality, speed, picture/video quality, you name it).
One big plug for Nokia - good job making offline map viewing a key part of Ovi Maps. One of the things I hate about my iPhone (and Android phones I’ve tried) is that getting Google to cache maps seems like a super pain - I don’t want to install third party programs just to be able to use this fancy piece of electronics with huge memory, nice display and a GPS as a stand-alone GPS. It is the main thing that got me to investigate Nokia as an option to move to from iPhone instead of Android. But I’m not really sure I can wait long enough for Meego and Symbian isn’t inspiring enough.
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Nokia talks about open source. How about instead of a symbian or meego phone - one device architecture that can run both.
The handset division can then focus on compelling hardware.
An open hardware spec where the customer can choose what OS to run. None of this jailbreaking or locked bootloader rubbish that plagues ios and android devices.
Too bad nokia's support model is stuck in 20C.
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They only said that N-series will go with Meego from now on, it leaves plenty of space for Symbian (and devices with the latter exploit the somewhat more frugal hardware requirements, so a port of Meego is not feasible; though "no more S^4" apparently means its features will be gradually brought, via updates, to S^3...)
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It's unfortunate, bec
Not the last Symbian N-Series phone (Score:3, Informative)
Nokia has announced there will be no more high end phones (higher than the N8) that will run Symbian, they will all run Meego.
That has been heavily reported, but it is flat out wrong. They announced that the N8 is the last high-end phone to run Symbian^3 - future phones will run Meego or Symbian^4: source [nokia.com].
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There are TONNES of 3rd party apps that allow you to use offline maps.
I use copilot live on android, it cost me under 40 bucks AUD, works as advertised.
I understand N900 still doens't have turn by turn (mistaken maybe?) so I can only compare to my old N5800 which did have turn by turn, but it ran like a dog compared to any 3rd party nav app on my droid
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I wish I had a chance to follow this topic after my lunchtime post as I see a lot of replies I'm interested in.
AC points out leaked images of a supposed N9 were of the E7: This means my camera comment may be unneeded - I hope so.
Hyartep says the n8 is a cameraphone and the n9 will have other selling features: This may be true, but it is still disappointing and doesn't entice me as a customer. The camera is now a very integral part of a flagship phone and when you've already done that much design work AND
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"CockMonster says it is unlikely Nokia is capable of backporting Meego to N8: I read of people speculating the machine just isn't powerful enough, but haven't come across details on why the hardware isn't capable of doing it. If it is a hard task that Nokia doesn't want to be bothered with, they need to streamline their future offerings and use standard architectures (as was suggested in another post) to get both OSs working."
It doesn't really matter whether the N8 could/will/won't run Meego; Nokia's smartp
Qt is pretty simple.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Speaking as 50% of a Symbian development team... (Score:5, Interesting)
...I have this to say about Symbian:
JUST.
DIE.
Seriously, it is the most god awful programming environment I've ever had to use, and I have worked with a lot of different mobile operating systems (including some you've never heard of). Symbian has about five different (incompatible!) string classes. Symbian has its own home made exception mechanism built with macros and longjmp() which only allows you to throw integers and doesn't unwind the stack when you throw an exception. But that's okay because Symbian's also got a thing called a 'cleanup stack' which is a complicated and fragile way of allowing you to automatically do the cleanup in only 95% of the code it would have taken to do it manually. The Symbian standard data storage objects allocate memory in their constructors but don't free it again in their destructors. Somewhere, Bjarne Stroustrup is screaming.
The operating system itself is just as bad: it's a microkernel protected mode operating system with a strong emphasis on message passing... but it's also got a big writable shared memory area for use by the kernel, thus meaning it combines the worst aspects of microkernel operating systems (multiple slow context switches when calling OS components), protected mode operating systems (MMU and cache overhead) and unprotected operating systems (bugs can scribble over kernel memory and crash the system).
Let's not talk about the development environment, which is a chronically slow maze of perl scripts and autogenerated makefiles using a badly parsed and badly documented scripting language and which forces you to arrange the source files how it wants them, and not how your project wants them.
Symbian's big problem is chronic Not Invented Here syndrome. Everything is weird and different. It feels like the original designers didn't have enough oversight, and their pet ideas ran away with them and became top-heavy with kludges because nobody forced them to refactor the underlying concept once the problems arose. Those damned strings are a perfect example. Once they invented HBufC (an immutable string which is resizable and assignable!) someone should have said, um, guys, I think you're doing it wrong.
Usually at this point someone pops up and says something like, but C++ didn't have exceptions when Symbian was designed! (There's been solid support for exceptions in C++ compilers for about 15 years now.) Or, but this whole cleanup stack/string descriptor nonsense is needed to make applications run well on low memory systems! (No, good application design make applications run well on low memory systems.) Or, but you can do all those things if you use OpenC++/PIPS! (Unless you want to write code with a GUI.) These are not good reasons why we need to perpetrate such an abomination of an operating system. They are good reasons why it needs to be taken out and shot and stop sucking up programmer time. Even Windows CE is less evil to code for than Symbian, because even though it sucks, it at least allows us to use the programming skills we learnt on other platforms rather than forcing us to learn everything from scratch.
Now: things have gotten a lot better recently. Symbian did do a major push to modernise a lot of this crap with projects such as OpenC++ (real C++ on top of Symbian, although it's not useful for GUI code) and replacing the ghastly Series 60 API with Qt. The Qt stuff is particularly interesting because it also acts as an OS isolation layer, which means you can do things with the sane Qt APIs instead of the insane Symbian APIs. I'll admit that I've never had any contact with this, because our product is really aimed at Series 60, and it is faintly possible that if they do a good enough job they might make Symbian usable again. But if you're going to write code in Qt, why not just target Meego instead? And even if you do use Qt on Symbian, it's still built on top of all the Symbian crap underneath, and as soon as you stray out of Qt's comfort zone you are going to have to start wading through that crap.
Please. Let us work together to make the world a better place and just let Symbian die.
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> But if you're going to write code in Qt, why not just target Meego instead?
Because of 100s of Millions of Symbian phones with potential customers?
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I agree with all your comments about Symbian development.
"I'll admit that I've never had any contact with this, because our product is really aimed at Series 60, and it is faintly possible that if they do a good enough job they might make Symbian usable again"
Well, it's really good, on the newer devices (N8 and onwards, post S60). Here they have the potential to minimize the role of Avkon and have a Qt UI pushing the pixels. The SDK is pretty painless, and development moves fast (you can follow it through g
Re:They're still around? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have a n900 for personal use and an iphone for work.
The n900 is a decent phone but is starting to fall behind. The open source of it is nice, but doesn't make up for the flaws.
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Tell me when you can do multitasking (I currently have 5 web pages, one terminal and mailbox open) and dual/triple boot on your working toy. And BTW, I have done the comparison with a co-worker here - his iphone 4G drops calls like crazy unlike my 'falling behind' and 'flawed' n900.
Stop pretending you have a N900 - stick to your beloved toy and leave the minority of us alone. Just go away.
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Damn, that must be one huge screen to have all those up and readable at once.
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On iphone you can do some kind of multitasking, but is not even a shadow of what you can do in the n900, nor you can do it with th
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Actually one of the disadvantages of the N900 is that it's too small (screen & keyboard).
Whenever I have to use some form of public transport I usually take my 5" Archos Android tablet with me too, since its larger screen is more comfortable. And it doesn't hurt that Android offers far more apps than Maemo.
OTOH writing your own Android apps can be a pain in the ass, since they did such a half-assed job with the debugging capabilities of the SDK's emulator. But that's something for a different topic.
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You can use some Debian-compatible apps, as long as they're compatible with the platform itself (no x68-only libraries), things like double-click and drag&drop pose a problem and many applications react sluggish at best. And the less said about native apps like Canola (performance measured in "bugs per minute") the better.
Things may improve in the future with the new devices (larger screens, move to Qt), but after the half-assed job Nokia did with the N900 (e.g., that Ovi Store clusterfuck, no native ho
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I have an iPhone supplied by my company and it stays tethered to my dev box as a debugger. I never once had the urge to carry it around with me as I was happy with a plain dumb phone and an older (but much more capable than an iPhone PDA - the X51v with full VGA, 624MHz etc) for when I wanted to watch movies (without having to recompress them) while traveling. And sometimes I would have to do a little work while on the road, so a full keyboard, ssh etc were required.
That was until a year ago, when I switche
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The N900 is a great device that's insanely open, but the things you're listing have become pretty much everyday type things on Android and also, to a certain extent, iOS. The Skype support on the N900 is unparalleled, of course, and I haven't tried an actual PS3 controller on Android yet (do those work as Bluetooth HID devices? Because if so, the BlueZ module in CyanogenMod should pick it up fine, right?), but emulators are very standard fare these days, as is pairing a WiiMote for on-the-go gaming and WiFi
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I have two reservations about N900:
1. Resistive touchscreen; as I understand, it also means no multitouch in practice
2. Lack of applications. The official store has around 70. Sure, you can run vanilla Linux Gtk apps, but they look very small and are horribly inconvenient to operate on such a tiny screen.
Hence my choice was Nexus One. But now that it is no longer sold, and no other "guaranteed to be open" Android phone is there to take its place, the next upgrade round is going to be interesting.
Re:They're still around? (Score:4, Informative)
Did you check the repo(s) for N900? I don't see why the store and vanilla Linux apps would be your only (nor primary) source?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Resistive have advantages and disadvantages over capacitive. You don't have multitouch, but you can have more precision, use more than just your fingers (i.e. the included stylus), and have pressure sensiivity (and be able to do things like this [youtube.com]).
Regarding lack of applications, yes, there is very few in Ovi Store, but a lot more in the repositories. Is not in the order of the iphone or android apps, but could be enough for your needs.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Resistive have advantages and disadvantages over capacitive. You don't have multitouch, but you can have more precision, use more than just your fingers (i.e. the included stylus), and have pressure sensiivity
I've used resistive touchscreen devices exclusively before going for Android, so I am familiar with the advantages, and I do not consider them to outweigh the flaws. More precision is only needed when the UI is designed to require it, and such a UI is generally still more clumsy than finger-oriented one on such small screens.
On a tablet, though, I'd probably prefer resistive, because I don't see much point for multi-touch there, and there are more meaningful applications for higher precision.
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Why don't you think multi-touch is as useful on a tablet? Given there is more room to use your hand, it seems like the larger screen allows better use of multi-touch gestures.
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It's not that multi-touch is less useful, it's that tablets allow for more complicated, "more serious" tasks and their UIs, where the higher precision of a resistive screen is more useful. While the usefulness of multi-touch remains the same.
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The only task I can think of that is much more suited to a tablet that benefits from precision is drawing/writting, as a finger is still just as big on a tablet.
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People do pretty fancy things on capacitive touch screens too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8TBY7z79L8&feature=related [youtube.com]
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Are there resistive touchscreens out there that have decent pressure sensitivity?
You can still get pressure sensitivity on a capacitive touchscreen via a stylus. I'm sure Wacom tablets have better pressure sensitivity than any resistive touchscreen and that's how they do it.
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Regarding capacitive with stylus, afaik the capacitive (on iphone, could be d
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I'm not sure pressing lightly to select something matters that much. iOS gets around this with tap and hold. Some Wacom tablet do 1024 levels of pressure -- it is more designed as a drawing feature than part of interacting with the GUI in general.
There are already styluses out there that work on the iPad. I'm guessing they have a metal tip coated in plastic.
Re:They're still around? (Score:4, Insightful)
Little out of touch (see what I did there?) are you?
Maybe you should visit their website some day?
They are still the 800 pound gorilla in the cell industry. Just because you don't see them much in the USA, don't make the mistake of dismissing them.
Re:They're still around? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They're still around? (Score:5, Informative)
Negative? When not presented as "percentage of growth" (deceiving if one player is much closer to the absolute limit "total number of mobile phones sold"), but as "annual growth in number of units shipped" - it's a top player.
And will continue to be big, if only because of being pushed into lower market segments (what happened to S30, which is still around, and S40, which is still around - in fact, is the most popular phone platform on the planet)
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When talking about market share?
yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, unless you're into the Google maps latitude facebook youtube pinging skype goatse there's this thingy with which you can talk to other people without software disruptions or lag. Only 20-30 bucks.
rumours of death are premature (Score:2, Informative)
Re:rumours of death are premature (Score:4, Insightful)
They will only be a problem for Apple if they start to siphon significant developers away from Apple, Android, and Blackberry. They might be a problem for Windows Phone 7 though. That could be a battle.
They sell more phones than anybody, but not when you look at individual segments. For the smartphone market, they aren't doing very well and I really don't see what they can do to turn that around. Fantastic hardware isn't enough. In fact, I would say fantastic marketing is more important than engineering.
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You're right. I wasn't thinking globally when I wrote that.
In the US, you can't even get the N8 from a carrier. They need to get a carrier to subsidize their device if they want to compete here. They do a really awful job selling their top end devices in the US. Maybe they are just going to concede this market?
If you search for "nokia smartphone", you certainly don't get a positive impression of their efforts. Mostly you read stories of their declining relevance and their search for a new CEO who understand
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It doesn't matter if the hardware is faster. People aren't benchmarking their phones.
Only two things matter to users, as far as hardware goes:
1) Will it run the UI and applications smoothly?
2) If there is an OS update, will you be left in the dust?
The iPhone isn't just popular because it's pretty, it's popular because the UI isn't too busy. You know Android phones are in trouble when you can't rotate the screen (or if you tilt the phone and nothing happens for 3+ seconds), and when there's a Nascar app
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I buy them because they "just work", can be abused(Taking a few baths, going from +20c to -25c and back hundreds of times and being dropped repeatedly) and when it's finaly dies you can just use a spare/old one or buy a new one for 50$.
Another good thing is that their chargers have used the same connector and voltage for something like 15 years. Everyone have a nokia charger.
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Not true unfortunately.
There's the old fat one, the newer slim one, and now the micro-usb one.
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Anything in the E-series, Nokia's business line.
You have the E6x and E7x series if you want a Blackberry-like form factor with a full keyboard, or if you just want a good phone, the E5x series in soap-bar form factor.
All run a recent version of Symbian, all are full smartphones, although the ones without a full keyboard are of course a bit less useful in that regard.
And make no mistake, running Symbian is an advantage. It is a clunky OS to write apps for, but it's a real embedded real-time OS dedicated to r
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And for example N8 still has a small plug so you can charge it with your old charger too, even if the primary way to charge it is the micro USB.
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we can thank the EU for that: http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/06/10-companies-agree-to-standardized-mobile-phone-charger-in-eu.ars [arstechnica.com]
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Eh yeah, a non-proprietary charging method, using a cheap and widely available cable, connecting to a port that pretty much every smartphone is going to have anyway if they want USB connectivity. You can now buy a 5 car cigarette lighter micro usb chargers, instead of a specific LG/SE/Nokia/Samsung/Apple one, how is that hurting you??
Like you said, they can keep the old charging port as well, and that's exactly what Nokia has done with its latest phones. Again, what is bad about that? Would they have skippe
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Symbian is a really beautifully designed system. I used it back when it was called EPOC32 and have followed the development since then - the EXA2 kernel design is a piece of art.
Unfortunately, Nokia (along with other Symbian handset manufacturers) has spent the last few years piling a horrible userland on top of it. There's also some developer hostility from older Symbian developers, because the original APIs were designed for systems where RAM was really tight and required a bit more programmer effort