Nokia N8 to be final Symbian N Series device, all MeeGo from here on out | Hacker News Reader

Nokia N8 to be final Symbian N Series device, all MeeGo from here on out

engadget.com

18 pointsbensummers7 comments

Also from Engadget, here's a look at the MeeGo tablet UI:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/22/meego-for-tablets-gets-a-...

It's looking pretty slick for an alpha. But then again, they're building on a solid base with all the lessons learned from Maemo/N900 combined with the cutting-edge UI framework development happening in Qt.

If they can continue the path they took with the N700+ series, this is maybe the most interesting piece of news in the smartphone area since I can't remember when (maybe the Palm stuff).

Android/iPhone are nicely iterating and improving, but this news shows a change of strategy which can reinvigorate the competition with another strong "open" player.

On the long run I would bet on Nokia against Android, because they can do the iPhone on the mass market (they are a mass market by themselves) without the fragmentation problem of Android. If well done and if Apple keeps the big brother like control on the apps etc. the iPhone would slowly go back to a super profitable niche market and keep doing an insane amount of money, but in a niche market.

Nokia have displayed incompetence for the last 3 years.

What makes you think they're going to change that now? :)

I remember being really excited that this would happen around 2005 when the N700 and N770 were released.

Yeah, it has been something of a long wait with Nokia on these things.

Speaking of the N770, it is really weird to think that only recently have the popular pocket computers caught up to the old 770 in screen quality.

That Meego pre-alpha demo video in the other comment is looking very nice. And they have proven they can put out a nice little tablet a few times now. It feels like they only have a few details to fix, then scale to a few form factors. But it has felt like that for a while and meanwhile iPhones, iPads, and Androids have pulled ahead, and the full flock of Android tablets seem likely to beat a super dreamy N1000 or Nwhatever to market.

This sure makes me want to buy an N8. It's deprecated from the start!

Don't be silly. Symbian is simply moving down-market. It will become Nokia's main offering in the mid-range category, which is currently dominated by "featurephone" operating systems.

For a historical comparison, think of the old Symbian as Windows 3.1 and MeeGo as Windows NT.

In this analogy, the new Symbian is like Windows 95: it's a low-cost solution that catches up to the state of the art in the UI department while also providing API compatibility with the same vendor's high-end operating system.

(Symbian^3 and MeeGo are compatible on the API level because both use Qt. The next version of Symbian will throw away the old Symbian UI layer entirely in favour of a new one that's built entirely in Qt.)

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