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For example Nokia owns all of their manufacturing fabs (over a dozen); most of them not in China / half of them in the EU.

http://www.nokia.com/about-nokia/company/production-units

You can check some of the rest as an exercise in using Google, etc.

Aye, some manufacturers do care; this is one of the most striking (almost to the point of being funny) example of that :)
Surely in some optimal scenario, of course; but from what I can tell after contact with few Nokia phones meant as long lasting ones (even if only to the half time of the above one), it can be definatelly felt in daily usage. And it seems it can be done even with some smartphones...

Aye, some manufacturers do care; this is one of the most striking (almost to the point of being funny) example of that :)
Surely in some optimal scenario, of course; but from what I can tell after contact with few Nokia phones meant as long lasting ones (even if only to the half time of the above one), it can be definatelly felt in daily usage. And it seems it can be done even with some smartphones...

Aye, some manufacturers do care; this is one of the most striking (almost to the point of being funny) example of that :)
Surely in some optimal scenario, of course; but from what I can tell after contact with few Nokia phones meant as long lasting ones (even if only to the half time of the above one), it can be definatelly felt in daily usage. And it seems it can be done even with some smartphones...

Well...

"standby battery time of up to six weeks" , and that seems cautious considering the specs say "up to 48 days", which would be just below 7 weeks (talk time "up to 13h" there, so realistically 10 probably)
"up to 12 hours talktime (GSM) ... standby 26 days between charges"
"18 hours and 30 minutes talk time (in GSM mode). 29 days standby time"

The last two are smarthpones. Yes, those are largely best case scenarios, but they are easily felt in daily usage. Their touchscreen devices aren't that bad, either; so it seems some manufacturers do care.

Well...

"standby battery time of up to six weeks" , and that seems cautious considering the specs say "up to 48 days", which would be just below 7 weeks (talk time "up to 13h" there, so realistically 10 probably)
"up to 12 hours talktime (GSM) ... standby 26 days between charges"
"18 hours and 30 minutes talk time (in GSM mode). 29 days standby time"

The last two are smarthpones. Yes, those are largely best case scenarios, but they are easily felt in daily usage. Their touchscreen devices aren't that bad, either; so it seems some manufacturers do care.

Well...

"standby battery time of up to six weeks" , and that seems cautious considering the specs say "up to 48 days", which would be just below 7 weeks (talk time "up to 13h" there, so realistically 10 probably)
"up to 12 hours talktime (GSM) ... standby 26 days between charges"
"18 hours and 30 minutes talk time (in GSM mode). 29 days standby time"

The last two are smarthpones. Yes, those are largely best case scenarios, but they are easily felt in daily usage. Their touchscreen devices aren't that bad, either; so it seems some manufacturers do care.

Well...

"standby battery time of up to six weeks" , and that seems cautious considering the specs say "up to 48 days", which would be just below 7 weeks (talk time "up to 13h" there, so realistically 10 probably)
"up to 12 hours talktime (GSM) ... standby 26 days between charges"
"18 hours and 30 minutes talk time (in GSM mode). 29 days standby time"

The last two are smarthpones. Yes, those are largely best case scenarios, but they are easily felt in daily usage. Their touchscreen devices aren't that bad, either; so it seems some manufacturers do care.

Gee, thanks for "allowing" this, you're all too kind. Of course the Nokia N900 has had Skype over WiFi and 3G since last fall, and with the latest update does Skype-to-Skype video calls as wells (over whatever TCP/IP connection you have of course, including 3G)! But I'm sure it will be a great innovation and a lot of fuss about it when the iPhone 4G or whatever invents video calls later on.

MeeGo & Qt (on which MeeGo UI is being built upon) to the rescue, eventually? Qt Embedded can run without X, via QWS. Maybe there won't be much of a problem with having a MeeGo variant which gets rid of X (hence also compatibility with Moblin / non-Qt software...)

Nokia E75 (S60 platform) does Internet streaming over wifi rather nicely. I bought it to listen to my beloved WOXY, but alas, they are dead right now.

-l

Well, Nokia's status in USA is a bit pathetic. Otherwise, Nokia is rather known and respected for bringing Internet and some kind of "programmable device" (count J2ME please) to unheard places and poor people.

For example, I was particularly impressed by their devotion and sparing time to tools such as free "life tools" for India/Africa/Asia http://europe.nokia.com/ovi-services-and-apps/nokia-life-tools/main

I've talked with my coworkers about this a few times.
We agree that the future will involve something much like a Nokia N900 with a couple of USB ports on it.
The basic idea is that you get to the office, plug your 24" LCD into the mini-HDMI port on the device, plug your keyboard and mouse into the USB ports and away you go.
Network access would be provided either by wireless or VPN via HSDPA.

As a Qt developer and an n900 owner, Nokia's efforts to extend the Qt platform to portable devices is extremely exciting.

Don't forget that Qt has been an inspiring cross-platform toolkit for years and is the framework behind KDE.

Along with some great improvements to publish to phone support in Qt-Creator (Qt's LGPL IDE), we are getting expansions to the api which include: bearer management, contacts, location, messaging, multimedia, and sensors, among others.

For more info:
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2010/04/27/nokia-qt-sdk-what-is-in-and-what-is-not-and%E2%80%A6-what-is-it/
http://qt.nokia.com/products/appdev/add-on-products/catalog/4/new-qt-apis/mobility

Here are a couple of proposals that I'd consider more realistic. Both of these really do involve voting with your wallet. (1) If there are no options that avoid DRM and lockdowns, don't buy. This is my current attitude about the Kindle and iPod. I'll buy one when there is a non-DRM'd library of books available for it that is roughly the same size as Amazon's current catalog. (2) Buy the lesser of two evils. E.g., I believe Android is significantly less locked down than iPhone, so if I were choosing between the two, I'd buy an Android.

I'll add another: 3) buy an Nokia N900, as it's not locked down at all.

Buy it for what it is, or don't buy it at all. Your choices don't get any more granular than that. - Mark Pilgrim on the iPhone

I'll never get this obsession with buying Apple products - supposedly it's because they "just work", but when you have to void the warranty to get it to do what you want it to do, you're obviously admitting that it doesn't "just work". Why buy it when you can get something that is designed to be open and hackable?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for hacking and modding and sticking it to the man, but since when is forking over your hard earned cash (to the man, no less) for a device that is hack-hostile "sticking it to the man"? Why not instead encourage companies that are encouraging you to be more than a consumer?

We've had this platform for years. It's called Qt. It's free, it's open source, and it runs just about everywhere, on just about any OS.

It even includes numerous classes to make network-aware application development damn easy. It's much easier than performing AJAX requests and handling their responses, for sure.

Best of all, it is written in C++, a proven, well-supported language that performs very well in most circumstances, and is suitable for large-scale development. It's a lot better than that hack they call JavaScript, which starts becoming unmaintainable once you go beyond writing an onclick handler.

We've had this platform for years. It's called Qt. It's free, it's open source, and it runs just about everywhere, on just about any OS.

It even includes numerous classes to make network-aware application development damn easy. It's much easier than performing AJAX requests and handling their responses, for sure.

Best of all, it is written in C++, a proven, well-supported language that performs very well in most circumstances, and is suitable for large-scale development. It's a lot better than that hack they call JavaScript, which starts becoming unmaintainable once you go beyond writing an onclick handler.

There's no other platform in the world that can boast this level of flexibility -- not even close

Qt will let you run a single code base on OS/X, Windows 7/etc, Linux and any platform that Qt/Embedded has been ported to. Not just trivial apps like Reversi, but also ones using multithreading, networking, etc. There's also a fair degree of cross-platform multimedia support too, although that's a work in progress. Personally I choose to use PortAudio for cross-platform audio aupport together with Qt.

Are you talking specifically about this, or is that just Nokia's implementation of it?

If I count correctly, Qt supports 7.

When the industry as a whole moved from C and C++ to Java in the late 1990s, one of our main problems was the bloat that Java brought to the table. Memory consumption was a real issue, as was its slow nature. Things have improved somewhat, mainly driven by vast hardware advances.

Interesting take - unfortunately incorrect. Java's performance issues were almost entirely due to the interpreted nature of its code. When it was originally released, all Java code was interpreted by the JVM. The result is similar to running code through an emulator ... often usable, but certainly not competitive with native applications. The introduction of Just-in-time compilation to Java (via HotSpot and similar runtime engines) made all the difference in the world. By Java 1.2 (1998), the JRE came equipped with HotSpot and basic performance became an (often inappropriately cited) non-issue. Hardware advances played as much a role in speeding up Java as it did any other language.

Now, when we moved from C and C++ to Java, we did get a huge productivity boost, even if our apps themselves were more bloated and ran slower. Apps that would've taken us a year to develop using C++ could be finished in a couple of months using Java. We could also develop much more complex software than we could using C++. So Java did offer some real benefits, and that's why it became popular.

More info can be found with Google.

Most of the benefits offered by Java are those bestowed upon an application by virtue of running in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), including automatic memory management (garbage collection), strong exception handling, cross-platform portability, sandboxed code execution, security controls, dynamic class generation, to name a few. Java's syntax is also familiar and effective, and caters to many newer programming models and paradigms. Nothing about Java allows applications to be more complex than they were before... I dare you to find something as complex as the Linux Kernel, or something whose complexity is handled better in Java than via a C++ toolkit like QT. Java's advantages have always been related to its abilities to simplify coding challenges, allowing more effective, secure, and functional code to be produced faster (and with a lower learning curve).

We can't say the same for Flash and HTML5, however. They both suffer from far worse bloat than Java ever did. For instance, take watching videos on YouTube. I just did that using Firefox on Linux, and the Firefox process is now using 3966 MB of RAM. That's its resident usage, not virtual usage, as well. Its virtual usage is currently 4512 MB.

This is certainly a bit subjective. For example, my Firefox running on Linux watching YouTube is only using 80MB of memory, with Flash's "npviewer.bin" adding another 10MB. However, RAM usage is not a bad thing. Traditionally, when RAM came in far smaller quantities than it did now, developers frequently traded extra CPU cycles and disk I/O to conserve memory. Now, it's almost the opposite. A good application, especially a foreground application like a web browser, will use RAM liberally to conserve bottleneck resources like CPU, bandwidth, and I/O. Most of the time, the application profiles the environment that it is running in and chooses how much RAM it will use for optimization based on that profile. A system with 1GB of RAM will likely have big applications like Firefox use significantly less memory than one with 8

There you go: http://www.nokia.com/about-nokia/financials/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Sales

Nokia sells around half a billion phones annualy, huge part of those are digital media players whether you like it or not. And Apple sold only 220 million iPods, total.

People have feature phones AND an iPod. They don't play music on their feature phone. ...in the market you're familiar with! (look at how the fabulous marketshare numbers in the Wikipedia article above talk about US market only...that's not a coincidence)

But, for example, in my place...I suspect I could count on fingers of one hand the number of times I've seen an iPod (for the record - not counting my iPod), plus I have yet to witness an iPhone or iPod Touch outside of a shop. And my country is still supposedly quite developed one, a new member of the EU, and so on. There are certainly many "poorer" out there...

And from what I see, how a few years ago (even in my quite developed one) cheap chinese S1 mp3 players were the dominating form of consuming media on the go, now so called "feature phones" are the standard. Smartphones too, actually...but not a lot of them are iPhones.

iTunes (or music stores in general...) is similarly not so global phenomena as you were led to think...

I do actually use Windows Mobile, as my phone is HTC Touch HD. Granted its the customized WM, but the system is still same.

I hate that Microsoft is going the Apple route with Windows Mobile 7. I'm quite certain I won't be buying any phone with it, nor will I go with Android as the privacy intrusion with it is not a good thing.

Whenever I need a new phone, I guess it'll be Linux phone this time. Nokia's N900 is already top-of-the-line and I probably should had went with it already.

Even though I own my own smartphone, ...where I work (a very large IT company) there is an increasingly lengthy list of requirements and checks for any device connected to the corporate network...

This is the big issue with ownership & management - requirements for devices to utilize company resources (and whether or not the device needs to utilize company network resources). If the device will connect to the company network, the IT department has a very good case for managing (and/or owning) the device. It really comes down to network security, and disallowing rogue devices from connecting to the network. In a large company with many IT resources (and many to protect), it's far easier to say that the company owns and manages the device. In a small or mid-sized company, where there is less IT infrastructure to protect, or less need to weigh security against usability/ease-of-management, there is a better case to be made for user owned and managed devices.

Even though I own my own smartphone, where I work (a very large IT company) there is an increasingly lengthy list of requirements and checks for any device connected to the corporate network.

I value my choice and don't want my employer to get me a phone but if I use it for work it is an increasing amount of hassle

for example, the latest level on the Cliq locks out root and the holes to get root.

Get a Nokia N900. It's not Android, but it's Linux, it's a damn fine phone/skype/IM/facetwitter appliance, and it comes with xterm preinstalled and gainroot ready in the repositories.

Downsides: slightly heavy, slightly big, slightly short battery life (but maybe I ought to not use the screen as a flashlight, no?). That hasn't made anything impossible for me, it's just something I have had to adapt to.

Upsides: Nokia loves you. Nokia loves your nerdy peculiarities. They want you to hack it, see http://blogs.nokia.com/pushn900/

I'd start by downloading the full SDK here.

Then fire up Qt Creator, go to welcome screen getting started tab, and dig into the rather interesting and well-documented examples. Hint: QGraphicsView combined with OpenGL is probably the way to the future, especially if you're not interested in building traditional boring GUI applications.

If you want a little more help getting started, google "qt tutorial" for more adding-features-step-by-step type stuff.

I recommend http://zetcode.com/tutorials/qt4tutorial/ for learning the basics. Nokia also has some excellent tutorials examples and documentation.

I recommend http://zetcode.com/tutorials/qt4tutorial/ for learning the basics. Nokia also has some excellent tutorials examples and documentation.

I recommend http://zetcode.com/tutorials/qt4tutorial/ for learning the basics. Nokia also has some excellent tutorials examples and documentation.

i can do very effective RDC on my Nokia N900 and it has a 600MHZ ARM processor

No? Really. Taking a photo of a cheque?

Writing out a cheque, then taking a photo of it? No. You're pulling my leg. And this is an advance?

Why not just transfer the money using the phone?

We can do it here in Europe. They can do it in India and Africa for goodness sake;

http://europe.nokia.com/ovi-services-and-apps/nokia-money

You can use a higher capacity microSD card (with miniSD adapter), or use USB storage devices.

http://europe.nokia.com/support/product-support/nokia-n810/specifications

Storage

Up to 2GB internal memory Support for compatible miniSD and microSD memory cards (with extender). Supports cards up to 8GB. (SD cards over 2GB must be SDHC compatible.)

It supports SDHC (required for cards >4GB). A few years ago, when that documentation was written, the highest capacity miniSD or microSD cards available were only 8GB.

Today, there are higher capacity SDHC cards available. They still work: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=24245

You can use a higher capacity microSD card (with miniSD adapter), or use USB storage devices.

http://europe.nokia.com/support/product-support/nokia-n810/specifications

Storage

Up to 2GB internal memory
Support for compatible miniSD and microSD memory cards (with extender). Supports cards up to 8GB. (SD cards over 2GB must be SDHC compatible.)

I agree with you 100%. Anyone who spends >$250 on a MID/smartphone to make phone calls is an idiot.

And on that note... check out the n900. I got one a couple months ago, and it's exactly what you're describing. It runs Debian ("Maemo"; though this may change to a Maemo/Moblin hybrid called Meego), full X11 with gtk/Qt, and a mobile version of firefox with flash. It includes skype out-of-the-box (including contact dialing from the main contacts system). It is outstanding.

http://maemo.nokia.com/features/maemo-browser/gestures/

It IS a videophone, is a word processor, is a spreadsheet, is also a map and a satnav, and is a super small computing device designed for visual display of information.

Fuck, I can even run multi user ssh sessions, DB servers and web sites on it. Y'know I reckon I could run mult user X desktops on the thing as well.

http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/

Where have you been for the last 5 years?

Projector too? Hell yeah!
 

Wow! Nokia N900, $569.00. That must be very profitable. It's possible to buy a laptop with a 16" screen, a 500 GB hard drive, and 4 GB of memory for that much.

and may all your phones be Nokias!!!!

Dear God, I sincerely hope so. Please, please, please....

To you my question: Is it really worth the hassle? You've made it clear that you don't like the walled garden, handholding and controlled user 'experience' of the iPhone. Why not look to an unlocked handset like oh, so many- which would cost you less in the long term, not require jailbreaking to install apps, have multitasking and a host of other features out of the box? You clearly are not a n00b who's only interested in a flashy UI and you want full control over the experience. So why buy an iPhone at all? You can get all the mobile SSH clients and multitasking you want with Blackberry/Palm/WinMo/Symbian/Android.
As for Symbian, well..there was this little handset that was the iPhone of its day around 7 years ago- the Nokia 6600.. It had all the features- multitasking, bluetooth (audio as well as file transfer), video recording, copy/paste (:P) and customizable themes. There were sites with millions of themes, wallpapers, ringtones (MP3/MIDI) and video ringtones and you could customize it to the extreme. (And every S60 handset since then- but this was the first one to start the craze).
I even recall seeing a TV remote control app that used the infrared port on the device! The 6600 was immensely popular here (India) and even today I see a few people carrying it around.
And speaking of contemporary devices, the N900 runs Maemo Linux-infinitely customizable and hackable, and has a decent 5mp camera with Carl Zeiss optics (standard on Nseries devices anyway)

Nokia is already working on that, albeit opt-in.

The Nokia N900 is better. It's got penguins. With laser beams.

nokia N900 runs flash from start, that is from november.
link

I recently bought a Canon Powershot A1100IS 12.1mp digital camera. When I plugged it in, Win XP instantly detected it as a camera,
and now I can just browse to it via Windows Explorer and copy off the photos I took. No need for any third party software (even though a CD was provided with some Canon software), thanks to the camera supporting PTP.
I found myself marveling that an almost decade old operating system could still work with a fairly new piece of hardware like this one, thanks to support for common standards in hardware.
The same way, my Nokia N82 supports MTP as well as mass storage mode, so since I already use Winamp, I can use it to manage music on it. For copying larger files, like movies (I got a16 GB microSD card recently), I can set it to USB mass storage mode for faster transfer.
And finally, I have a Creative Zen Vision W 60GB media player, which can play Divx/Xvid/mpeg and supports MTP. So again, I can manage music with Winamp or Media Monkey or even Windows Media Player. If I want to share songs or movies with someone, they plug it in and thanks to MTP in Windows, it shows up without requiring any further drivers.
Both the Zen and the N82 also support TV out using standard cables, so I've used that to show photos/movies when I visit a friend's place.

THIS, for me, is the real advantage of open standards for hardware. If I lose the accessories, I can easily use another miniUSB/microUSB/TV out cable, and transfer stuff between computers or share files with others. A vanilla iP[od|hone] is all about proprietary hardware and interfaces, and you simply cannot get this kind of flexibility and convenience.

All it has really taken is a bit of good UI design and they start losing sales massively to Apple

Massively?

From Nokias 4Q 2009 results:

Of the total industry mobile device volumes, converged mobile device industry volumes in the fourth quarter 2009 increased to 52.4 million units, based on Nokia's estimate, compared with an estimated 47.0 million units in the third quarter 2009. Our own converged mobile device volumes, comprising our smartphones and mobile
computers, were 20.8 million units in the fourth quarter 2009

They sold 20.8 million S60 (*) devices in 4Q 2009! How many iphones did Apple sell?

Ref: http://www.nokia.com/about-nokia/financials/quarterly-and-annual-information/q4-2009

(Well, that number includes a tiny number of Maemo devices as well, but if you think it's more that a few hundred thousand you're dreaming).

It's even Linux. Hell, it's Debian.

http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/

Somehow I managed to forget Nokia for being more open than Apple - and arguably - Google. I guess because so few people use, or will likely ever use, their smartphones. :)

You also forgot Palm, who have WebOS, which is more "Linux like" than Android (No forking here!) Palm's WebOS is often thought of by Android fans as being so Apple-like that they immitated the closed source nature of Apple. Nothing is further from the truth.

By the way, Nokia's market is limited to Europe (and the third world, but they don't buy smartphones in India, Africa, and the Far East), but there, they are the Blackberry of Europe with regards to smartphones. In other words, there are arguably more N and E series Nokia owners in Europe than any other smartphone. (Those *are* smartphones, albeit some of the older Symbian ones are more on the Palm Treo type of Smartphone technology than iPhone, very capable devices but very old-fashioned interface. Though it should be noted that they had a mobile WebKit browser before Apple did on the iPhone for Symbian's "Nokia browser"!)

Somehow I managed to forget Nokia for being more open than Apple - and arguably - Google. I guess because so few people use, or will likely ever use, their smartphones. :)

You also forgot Palm, who have WebOS, which is more "Linux like" than Android (No forking here!) Palm's WebOS is often thought of by Android fans as being so Apple-like that they immitated the closed source nature of Apple. Nothing is further from the truth.

By the way, Nokia's market is limited to Europe (and the third world, but they don't buy smartphones in India, Africa, and the Far East), but there, they are the Blackberry of Europe with regards to smartphones. In other words, there are arguably more N and E series Nokia owners in Europe than any other smartphone. (Those *are* smartphones, albeit some of the older Symbian ones are more on the Palm Treo type of Smartphone technology than iPhone, very capable devices but very old-fashioned interface. Though it should be noted that they had a mobile WebKit browser before Apple did on the iPhone for Symbian's "Nokia browser"!)

The Nokia N-Gage and its successor N-Gage QD, circa 2002-04. Both ran S60, and by definition supported multitasking, POP/IMAP mail etc.
They called it the 'taco' phone because it was shaped like one. Ergonomically suited for gaming, atrocious to hold and carry as a phone.
After it flopped, Nokia re-launched the N-Gage brand as a gaming platform for N-series, with the N81 being the first device. The N-Gage service was like Steam for mobile phones- you could sign in and download demos/buy full versions, upload your game stats and even multiplayer. Even this didn't work out well for them and the service was shut down last year.

The Nokia N-Gage and its successor N-Gage QD, circa 2002-04. Both ran S60, and by definition supported multitasking, POP/IMAP mail etc.
They called it the 'taco' phone because it was shaped like one. Ergonomically suited for gaming, atrocious to hold and carry as a phone.
After it flopped, Nokia re-launched the N-Gage brand as a gaming platform for N-series, with the N81 being the first device. The N-Gage service was like Steam for mobile phones- you could sign in and download demos/buy full versions, upload your game stats and even multiplayer. Even this didn't work out well for them and the service was shut down last year.