Nokia to use Linux for flagship N-series phones
reuters.com
reuters.com
They announce the N900 and then soon after give a confusing message about MeeGo being the way forward and it not being supported officially on the N900. They deprecated the device almost immediately it became available. What commercial developer would try to produce applications for it now?
Now they announce the N8 with the amazing Symbian^3. Everything will be awesome about it according to press releases. Now, even before it becomes available Nokia announces it'll be the last N series device running Symbian. Another device deprecated just as it gets out the door.
Nokia, I used to like your devices. You made great phones. But please give them some future proofing and stop abandoning them the moment you release them.
Anyway, let's see how long MeeGo sticks as the go-to platform.
Think of it as pre-notifications vs notifications vs limited backgrounding functionality changes on iOS. The older apps still work fine, they're just not taking full advantage of the newer features.
You could argue that Nokia should have been doing this R&D behind closed doors but considering the openness of the platform that may or may not have been a wise choice.
I'm glad to hear they'll be focusing on Meego as their flagship OS, since it's been at best a hobby until now. But somehow the platform has had as much fragmentation as Android even though they are a single company producing all the hardware and software (and only four models ever produced, at that).
I just perceive that company at least as customer unfriendly, maybe even -condemning.
PS: On an unrelated note, I found the line:
<^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Graphic on Nokia N-series losing to iPhone: here ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^>
incredibly funny.
That's the best I can say about it :)
So hopefully this will be a more concerted effort.
I do find calling pretty unresponsive.
Unlike the iPhone, n900 apps are not just gimmicky website remakes or games, they're actually incredibly powerful and useful.
Here's an interesting summary about it: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3764/two-omap-3430-phones-noki...
The problem is symbian is clunky. The UI looks old and boring. It is slow, it is written in C++ with complicated interfaces. Not great software for a limited device like a phone.
Its also worth noting that it is not only Symbian, but Nokia's conservative and limited vision on innovation.
It's a real-time OS that has a long history of running on weaker hardware. Consider that most new Symbian phones have an ARM processor clocked at ~400mhz (the fastest have a 600Mhz CPU) and have 128MB of memory. This has a big impact on price, Symbian devices are (much) cheaper than the iPhone/Android devices.
The problems you are complaining about are connected to the UI, which indeed is no match for the UI of the iPhone or even Android. Even so, Symbian will make for a great middle-level and low-level OS. Due to the low hardware requirements Nokia can lower the prices and offer longer battery lives.
Symbian was designed for even weaker devices than I used when I developed for it years ago. As a developer, you're dealing with technology designed for hardware that simply doesn't exist anymore. When you have enough hardware to deliver what people want (like a full web browser) you have enough hardware for a decent OS.
The UI offerings of manufacturers are converging to not being a differentiator. When that point is reached the war will go on how well your software manages the limited resources.
My current smartphone is massively more powerful than my old Symbian smartphone and gets better battery life as well (and is smaller). We've seen massive gains in the power consumption of components inside computers and phones.
> When that point is reached the war will go on how well your software manages the limited resources.
That's never been true. Nokia is losing the smartphone market to a company that ported their desktop OS to a phone! The original Palm OS is no more because it was designed for devices of the day, not for devices of the future. What is considered "limited resources" changes daily and it doesn't matter how well your OS handles them if nobody bothers to write software for it.
Uh, what do you think the whole "embedded" thing is?
What happens is that things get cheap enough that they tend to find new uses.
For example, in the phone world, making more features available to the phones that billions of not so wealthy people in China, India and Africa might aspire to own.
Except the software doesn't get any cheaper. The whole argument is that Symbian is hard to develop for because it's designed for hardware that frankly doesn't exist anymore. The software is more expensive. Android is cheaper for other manufacturers to use than Symbian is for Nokia.
That is simply not true. Nokia still churns out tons of phones that don't even run Symbian, but S40, which is another step down. And they sell like hotcakes, too, even if the profit margins aren't huge. And they'll continue to sell well for the immediate future.
Clearly, Nokia has lost its grip on "the future" and isn't very competitive with things like Android and the iPhone, but to deny that the biggest chunk of the cell phone market exists is a bit absurd.
Now that Symbian is being pushed down in segmentation by Meego, it is getting closer to oblivion, but I'll have to see it before I believe it.
I'm not sure about other countries, but here in India it's exactly the opposite. Though iphone and android are steadily increasing in mindshare.
>Not great software for a limited device like a phone.
Not everyone buys a phone for apps, most people (atleast here) look for better voice clarity/battery life/multimedia capabilities rather than apps.
>Nokia's conservative and limited vision on innovation.
I think "slow" is the correct word here.
So the question is: can a mobile phone company reinvent itself to build small handheld computers that happen to make phone calls?
I really hope they do well though. IMHO they make great hardware.
People flocked to iOS because it was unique and innovative when it was new, and because it runs on great hardware from Apple. People are flocking to Android because it's an open-source alternative that's in some ways superior to iOS, and because it runs on a skyrocketing number of devices from countless manufacturers and on countless carriers.
For MeeGo to win serious developer-share, it will have to either come on hardware more compelling than Apple's, or outdo Android on technical capability / developer experience or overall market penetration. To my naive eye, neither of these seem likely. So what's the deal here? Am I mistaken about MeeGo's prospects, or is this just a massive case of not-invented-here?
(Lest I be accused of ignoring the overriding issue of user response to the two operating systems, I'm working under the assumption that MeeGo doesn't currently have anything significant to add to the user experience provided by Android on smartphones. Am I wrong about that?)
different developing environments cause developers to think, and develop, differently for the devices lined within those environments. MeeGo offers something Android does not, and that is not only a "truer" linux stack that is not based on java. But this also gives a flexibility for programmers to use languages that are more within their preferences (read: not java, maybe C, maybe scripting languages, what ever).
I think meego is something more developers are going to feel comfortable with as the gap between developing for traditional desktop/mobile devices and handheld devices will shrink. Can you pack an RPM? cuz that's all you need (as far as i understand) to distribute your app to meego.
just my 2 cents
Of course creating packages is bit more involved, but current Maemo uses standard Debian packages, so its not really anything special.
edit: Also, Maemo is much older than Android as a project/product.
You can argue how big of a risk that is if they adopted Android, but that's probably the thinking behind avoiding it. Personally I think it's a smart move for them, if they can execute well.
Even when Symbian was a consortium, they didn't want Symbian to do doing a lot of things (the UI team was one of the first to get the axe when a first round of cuts occurred). There would also be political battles about whether Symbian should be implementing other aspects of the platform.
I'd say MeeGo is already compelling to developers purely as an experience, not so much as a great market for apps. With Qt/Python etc. that will be even more compelling.
From Nokia's point of view, it's OS wars all over again. They are branding themselves as a software/service company, which profits by selling hardware.