Ovi Lays an Egg

David, you forgot to include Symbian signing for Nokia and Samsung handsets. This usually runs around $20 per signing.

That said, because of some of the things we do with wifi scanning on the buddycloud client, we have to sign four different versions: one for each varient of S60 with different ways of handling wifi. So figure on each code fix costing $80.

We've also found the approval process SLOW. We tried to use Symbian.org's Horizon free signing system but they always loose the order and it ends up taking them about a month to get the 4 binaries signed. We've gone through this a couple of times and it's never improved.

Then it takes Ovi at least two weeks to get the binary into the market and through their content approval process.

It's all total effing built-by-a-committee bullshit.

My money is on Android's zero bullshit approach winning out over Nokia's sloth and Steve's ego.

Nokia ran an ad down here in Buenos Aires for the N95 which used the tagline "It's what computers have become" (in English, but that's another story).

The problem for Nokia is that their tagline is correct, and they make wonderful telephones. They just still haven't figured out how to make a good pocket computer like Apple and Google/HTC do, or good platform to build apps on, or a good way to distribute them.

Ditching Symbian for Maemo rather than Android was probably a terrible decision - now they're going to be bogged down trying to play catchup with RIM, Apple and Google and I just don't seem them pulling it off. They should have focused on making hardware and left the rest up to somebody else.