Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jhsto | Hacker News Reader

I'm on a high horse (I'm able to afford an iPhone), but what kind of problem does this solve? To me, it looks like Nokia now has Android, their own operating system, and this to upkeep. Does anyone else remember what happened when they last time partnered with an experimental mobile operating system? I think it was Microsoft last time.

Would love to hear some reasoning from the folks from HMD about this.

View on HN

HMD uses Android for smartphones.

KaiOS is for feature phones only. It has to run just few basic apps. It's not a platform for Nokia.

Funny fact: Nokia sold 75 million phones last year. Only little over 4 million of those were smartphones.

Windows Phone is discontinued, but sure as heck wasn't experimental. I've used it flawlessly since about 2011 with rock-solid stability and battery life.

What I meant was that I don't follow why does Nokia rock the boat with their choices of operating systems. They already have their own software running on the likes of the renowned 3310, so why not spend the engineering time to extend that instead of risking another platform becoming discontinued? That's what I would want to hear more about.

Ah, understood. I hope I didn't sound offended, just confused until I read your reply.

I agree that it is similar to Google in that they seem to hedge their bets too much (like how Google has two OS, two languages...etc etc). I would really like a third popular OS...there are so many out there, but with no steam (this, firefoxOS, sailfish...)

I remember. There was excellent Nokia hardware and shit software. The only way to get access to proper APIs that the other 2 platforms had was to become a Microsoft partner. The blame for that debacle rests entirely with Microsoft. They had lots to say, but not an ounce of willpower to back it up.

to be fair, by "shit" I mean boring or uninteresting. The core components were lean and performant, no complaints there. However, it was near impossible to make new/exciting/relevant software for the WP platform if you didn't have their blessing to do so. It was a grave sin imo. An underdog mobile OS needs all the talent it can get; they sabotaged themselves.

Symbian programming platform was a nightmare: C++ with no exceptions, no STL and no RAII. You couldn't use any normal C++ programming idioms, you had to use Symbian-specific memory management primitives. A quote from TheRegister article:

> "Symbian is the only platform that has to spend one day teaching people how to use strings before they can code in it. The approved method is that you create an HBufC (a Heap allocated, BUFfer that is Constant), then Call Des() on it (which returns a TPtr - a pointer to a writable descriptor),"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com