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Oh the irony ...
https://www.nokia.com/nokia-on...

For other definitions of 'minimalist'.

https://www.kyoceramobile.com/...

If you absolutely need it there's even a Opera browser.

Charge it about twice a month. Used it to crack open pistachios that weren't precracked enough. Still available used and for use on the Sprint network (or Ting). Costs about ~$15-20/month.

Has some nice headset options as well, plus bluetooth.

In Europe I know they get a lot of other fancy feature phones. You can get the Nokia 3310, but not sure about the frequencies compared with the US.

https://www.nokia.com/phones/e...

Apple Watch is literally the only smart watch that can be somewhat acceptable to wear with a suit. It still looks somewhat goofy, although the stainless steel variant somewhat mitigate the issue. Being Apple brand makes it semi-ok for most semi-formal occasions. If you even remotely care about fashion or don’t want to look like a tech support guy, you probably shouldn’t be wearing something that looks like a diving watch to work.

In terms of fitness trackers, there’s Withings, which offer some watch-looking but very limited trackers. I don’t know if you would actually get any benefit out of one, but there’s that.

The Activite or Nokia Steel are interesting to me... you woulnd't know it from the appearance, but they're a bit thick.

https://health.nokia.com/us/en/steel-hr

Fully waterproof, 8 months on a disposable Lithium battery.

I really only want a sleep tracker and maybe a wristwatch, so taking it off to charge makes it useless. The HR model has some additional functions, but you have to charge it every couple weeks and the usefulness and any accuracy of wrist-based heart rate monitoring is... dubious.

Does anyone on Slashdot who owns one know more about them?

Rajeev Suri and Tim Cook wouldn't exactly make the cutest couple. To say nothing of either being the other's type.

The management gets bonuses based on short term goals.

Read up on a company and their corporate governance / executive compensation policies. IBM and Nokia both reward both short and long term goals - and each describe it in extensive detail:
https://www.ibm.com/investor/s...
https://www.nokia.com/sites/de...

I'm a long-term investor in IBM, so I'll focus on them in some detail. IBM has a policy to spend 6% of their annual revenue on research & development. Most long investors (myself included) would rather see IBM increase that number to match their peers in the industry (~10-15%) vs. using that same money to pay out dividends every quarter. Additional concerns include the constant turrnover of talent - both voluntary and involuntary - which most long investors agree has lead to the demise of what was once a world class consulting organization. Some argue that the Indian IT firms (Tata, Wipro, Infosys, etc.) with their inherent lower cost structure was the root cause - but I disagree, IBM dropped the ball on this and is now quietly trying to become a "cloud" company to hide their mistake. A third concern within the past few years is their company reorganization. You cannot compare an annual report from 2012 to the one that will be released in 2017 and attempt to determine how well the company has done. Why? All business segments of the company that existed in 2012 no longer exist due to IBM reorganization. I'm keeping an eye on how well they perform over the next few years post reorganization with the new businesses they are diving into. May well sell my stake if their key financial metrics do not pick up by 2020.

Long post to say - you can criticize a company all you want for the way they do business - but please do not try to simplify it down to "its because of the evil management doing cost cutting to make fat bonuses!". Its a bit more complex than that.

Agreed on IBM. I work there, and we made a fuck load of money last year.

And lots of patents. And even some mainframes. But little that could be seen to change the computing market. Nothing nearly as powerful as Microsoft's move into telemetry and user data and certainly nothing like Amazon's Alexa or Lambda environment or Google's mass scale delivery of hardware security. If you work in computing then you have to know what Amazon and Google are doing. If you work in building advertising systems for desktop users then Microsoft is still, at present, important to learn about and follow. Why should I care what IBM does? If they need my interest, what can they do to capture it?

Nokia still exists, they make lots of money on building the networks which make phones work and may even come back into phones soon. However at one time, as with IBM, they effectively controlled the entire direction of their market. They could just decide whether a category of phone came to exist or not. The Hubris of the phone division management, who believed that their brand was enough to keep them in place killed them as surely as IBMs belief, until too late, that they had no need to develop their own PC operating system.

In a thirty years, there will probably be Windows installs of companies that were never able to move off and are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to keep some critical application running in exactly the same way it ran in 2025. Microsoft will still be raking in the profits at their expense. However in a few years time no serious new application will even consider using Microsoft software elements and shortly after that Azure will be seen to have been the temporary stepping stone it is on the move towards the cloud.

It's not just upgrades. What happens when some other part of the computer dies and you need to get your data off?

Good question. We have enough headaches with people losing data or needing it backed up. The answers aren't pretty even before the device has died and it's a software problem as much as a hardware one:

I have been holding a friend's Nokia dumbphone because of a broken screen and precious photos. We started with well-preserved manuals and trinkets, *BUT* no cable or the "Windows driver" CD. Reminds me of spywared PCs that needed proprietary Mobo CDs back in the 90's when the owners had no access to them and no internet / CDRs quite existed. So, local smartphone stores and even MS (Nokia!) gave the runaround for support and accessories and we've been stuck improvising. Difficult research, then receiving a standard USB cable when I thought I was getting their proprietary flavor, then finding that all the forum links to Nokia's legacy support sites and download links for dumbphones are *dead* links. The official MS mobile handler software is not "detecting" the phone that Windows is aware is plugged in. The whole thing feels something like Winmodems / Winprinters felt on Linux.

I have a feeling the problem is that we're on Windows XP from this ~2005 phone release and emulation may need to be tested if worst comes to worst. And/or we might need $60 for a shady Ebay or 2nd-hand Amazon kit to venture the chance that the now-redundant cable comes with the correct OEM driver CD.

In a decade or so when tablets and today's generation of giant smartphones is ready to croak people will too be wondering where their mobile photos are (those they didn't dump on Facebook). The answer is "(Google|Apple)'s cloud. The *real* answer in practice, is "/dev/null" because 4/5 users I deal with couldn't care less to ask their PC-literate progeny or techs or friendly smartphone store guy to record the account login and password that was rushed used years when they bought the new device or moved the old data out. And those people either close shop, lose their memories or deflect blame anyway. Not. Pretty.

Am I the only person who's starting to lose track of who owns the rights to what after Nokia sold off its phone business to Microsoft?

I was under the impression that the right to use the "Nokia" name (which MS got the right to after buying the phone division) was due to expire after some time (#) and that was why MS were phasing it out.

The previous story linked in the summary seems to imply that MS sold off the ex-Nokia feature phone business to FIH, but they're still apparently making feature phones as "new Nokia phones" [my emphasis]

Yet Nokia itself announced it was licensing its name to a (different) manufactuer- HMD Global for similar purposes.

So what's going on? Does MS still own the name- or have a license to it- for smartphone and tablet use. Or has Nokia got it back? I can't see either party signing an agreement that would let them both use it for competing products in the same field (i.e. phones and tablets) at the same time; that sounds unworkable.

(#) This seems to be fairly typical when another company Y buys out X's widget division; they get the right to use X's name for a while (and presumably a non-compete from X, not that X is usually concerned with re-entering the field they've just left). I assume (for example) this is why the "Samsung" M3 external USB hard drives have been rebranded as "Maxtor" but remained otherwise identical- Seagate (who have long owned the Maxtor brand) bought out Samsung's HDD business a while back.

One of the most essential parts of the 'immersive' experience of VR is 3D. Many VR cameras, like the Nokia OZO, do good 3D -- the cameras are spaced reasonably close to the distance between eyes, and the cameras are wide enough angle that you can calculate good 3D info from the multiple views. It's odd that Samsung is putting out just a 360-degree camera, not one that captures depth, when their display will clearly show 3D.

Nokia do make mobile phones.

By this, do you mean "the corporation named Nokia manufactures, in addition to mobile telephony infrastructure equipment, mobile phones", or "there are mobile phones that happen to be sold by Nokia", or "the corporation named Nokia makes mobile phones that they sell"?

If the former, are you referring to the phones made by Nokia's Indian manufacturing facilities? Those were one of the parts of the Devices and Services business not sold to Microsoft, as part of the deal selling most of that business to Microsoft, due to them being "subject to an asset freeze by the Indian tax authorities as a result of ongoing tax proceedings"? If so, that press release says that Nokia will use them to "produce mobile devices for Microsoft", so that they're Nokia-made but not Nokia-sold. I.e., Nokia is just acting as a contract manufacturer for Microsoft here, so they make phones in the same sense that, say, Foxconn makes phones; it's not clear that they have a long-term interest in being in the featurephone business. (Yes, I am familiar with the term "featurephone".)

Microsoft appear, at least for the short term, to still be interested in making featurephones, so, if, as, and when the tax issues are resolved, Nokia may sell the Indian facilities to Microsoft as well, finishing the job of getting rid of their mobile phone handset business.

I think that the story has a misleading content, as it is not the Nokia itself, it is just some OEM from China with a license to use Nokia brand.

From their press [1] release:

"The N1 will be brought to market in Q1 2015 through a brand-licensing agreement with an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partner responsible for manufacturing, distribution and sales."

"The OEM partner is responsible for full business execution, from engineering and sales to customer care, including liabilities and warranty costs, inbound IP and software licensing and contractual agreements with 3rd parties"

[1] http://company.nokia.com/en/ne...

> The only problem with your critique is the actual fact that smartphones aren't that pervasive.

There are lots of problems with that post, but smartphone ubiquity is not one of them. 58% of americans have a smartphone. That number is only going to increase as smartphones get cheaper. By the time something like Uber is in small town america nearly all cell phones will be smart phones. Today you can buy a $50 smart phone without a contract. You can't play 3d video games on it, but you can certainly run basic apps and log into simple websites which is all that is needed for this utopia of user-ratings.

Obviously a dual-SIM phone can alleviate this problem, as can a modern phone with multiple SIP accounts configured, assuming then you have a good data plan, or can live happily as a simple hotspot-whore, (and most people could!).

To cite a reference, these Nokia phones have SIP support within the OS, so battery life is excellent, compared to having to run an App just for SIP accounts, (like SIPdroid).

http://developer.nokia.com/com...

The Nokia N9 and N900 phones also have SIP support within the OS and battery life is very good. Hmmm, I never bothered to look, but what about Jolla's Sailfish? For that matter, does anyone else know of another low-energy SIP stack in-use? I don't think iOS offers it, but I've been wrong before.

As to how to get your company telephone line (DID) in a workable state so you can access it via SIP, well, you're on your own slashdotters. (Hint: lowest common denominator is something like an OBi110 PSTN FXO adapter). In fact an OBi110 and a Raspberry Pi runny asterisk/FreePBX can forward incoming calls from a DID to any pre-configured (mobile) phone number.

That's a simple solution. At which point separate telephone bills become trivial and automatic.

On a platform where they're complete virgins?

The Nokia Asha is their best selling phone since the N900. I don't think this is lost on the company's new owners.

Lol, lie much? http://www.nokia.com/gb-en/pho...

What’s in the box...Nokia charger adaptor (CA-146C)

There are iOS-exclusive games and Android-exclusive games. Are there Windows Phone-exclusive games yet?

Apart from games, Android has AIDE, a Java IDE that works on a tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard. I haven't tried it on an Android phone, but I'm guessing it might work on a phone with a Bluetooth keyboard and an HDMI output when the touch screen emulates a trackpad. Does Windows RT have anything like Visual Studio, Eclipse, or anything else to develop apps on the device? Does Windows Phone even support HDMI out? Instead of HDMI out, Nokia phones have DLNA streaming, which apparently has too much latency for actual interactive use because it's designed for movies, not apps or games.

http://developer.nokia.com/com...

Platform and devices

These features are not supported in Nokia X software platform 1.0/Nokia X devices:

Magnetometer sensor
Gyroscope sensor
Libvwm (Widevine DRM lib)
Flash player
Live Wallpapers
Front camera
Camera autofocus
Speech recognition service
WMV Codec
VP8 video coded
WebP image coded
NFC
3rd party launcher support is limited notifications will not be shown for user if 3rd party launcher is active
Scrolling within homescreen widgets
Google services (porting needed): IAB, licensing, maps, push notifications
APK expansion files

Those of us who need more information on the technical side of the version of Android shipped with this phone can look here for more information. They include an APK checker (no, not Mr Hosts...) that looks for common problems (presumably anything that calls GMS)

No, this is not really true. I don't know where you come up with this number anyway. Nokia does not seem to report it. But here are revenue for devices unit in million EUR (with split into smart phones and other mobile phones) and profit for whole devices unit. This shows growing revenues (YoY) for each quarter over the complete year 2010 driven by strong growth of the smartphones business, while revenues from traditional mobile phone units fell. Overall profit fell YoY in 3 quarters but not terrible (and grew most of year opposite to what you are saying). The strong growth in smartphone revenue (and also comments in the reports) indicates that the smartphone unit was growing profits. In 2011 Q1 they announced that Symbian would be deprecated in favor of Windows Phone 7 (without having even phones ready) and everything changed, by 2011 Q2 they made losses and never recovered.

2010 Q1
revenue: 6663 +8%
other: 3325 -6%
smart: 3338 +28%
profit: 804 +25%

2010 Q2
revenue: 6800 +3%
other 3369 -4%
smart 3429 +12%
profit: 647 -15%

2010 Q3
revenue: 7174 +4%
other 3560 -6%
smart: 3613 +16%
profit: 750 -5%

2010 Q4
revenue: 8501 +4%
other: 4092 -5%
smart: 4407 +13%
profit: 961 -24%

http://www.nokia.com/global/ab...

Please just take a look at the numbers for the smartphone unit. Smartphone unit net sales (revenues) declined steeply immediately after declaring Symbian dead (2011 Q1) and never recovered. The numbers clearly indicate that Nokia's smartphone business was killed by abandoning Symbian and switching to Windows Phone.

http://www.nokia.com/global/ab...

Huh? The problem is, he killed Symbian at a time when is was still highly profitable and had increasing sales (but not market share). Don't spread the myth that Nokia was already failing when he took over. This is not true and the numbers speak a clear language. And yes, the had a replacement for Symbian already working: Meego. Switching to windows phone - a system already failing on the market - was the least sensible thing to do. And guys, please don't rate things insightful just because it sounds sensible. Actual numbers cleary disagree. Nokia smartohone sales:
http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/18/lumia-is-the-light-visible/

Quartely earnings reports:
http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/investors/financials/reports/results---reports/

Also, ask these guys why they sold out.

http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/governance/board/board-of-directors/

It seems to me there is information there. A tiny particle blurs to 2 um. Hence it clear that you can't meaningfully distinguish between to particles less then roughly 1 um. http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm. However, if the particles are 4 um apart I can definitely distinguish them. I am sure I can do this because if I look at the image present, the dot is blurred, meaning there are multiple pixel for the single spot. Sure it is possible the that the image is super zoomed up and what we are seeing is software smoothing of a single pixel or some kind of compression algorithm creating a false sense of resolution. To my eye this does not seem to be the case [yes, very subjective/speculative statement here]. Phone cameras are now boasting 41 MPixel chips http://www.nokia.com/us-en/phones/phone/lumia1020/specifications/ This is a lot higher spacial resolution than most scientific cameras used with fluorescent microscopes so it is not far fetched to expect camera resolution is not the limiting factor. So yes, there is a little bit of assumption that the people who built this thing knew a little bit about what they are doing and are purely "faking" it. With that in mind the basis for my claims is there in the article.

Of course the other post has plenty of hand waving. The only point of that is that there are reasons why the particular implementation may not be stupid, not that I know all the details of what was done.

Man, even now Nokia makes awesome distinctive hardware. I've often glanced with jealousy at some of the WP phones by Nokia (and HTC, for that matter), only to feel regret that similar hardware wasn't available with Android.

Considering their brand image is still rock solid - a source of popular (positive) memes even - I seriously think that Nokia would make a killing if they released similarly awesome Android devices.

Actually, it's quite easy to tell. On the N9, you can open a terminal and use "ps" to verify that yes, they are still running. Another easy way, for apps that redraw often enough, is to look at the open apps view - you can see them redraw (in miniature).

If an app is poorly written and is put in the background, it will definitely eat your battery on an N9 without you seeing it.

Microsoft is buying the nav/maps too.

Not according to the press release:

Following the transaction, Nokia plans to focus on its three established businesses, each of which is a leader in enabling mobility in its respective market segment: NSN, a leader in network infrastructure and services; HERE, a leader in mapping and location services; and Advanced Technologies, a leader in technology development and licensing.

You can watch the Nokia press conference here in two hours from right now.

I remember Nokia launching a bit of software like this for Symbian back in its dying days; you could use it to make a mobile-friendly, self-contained version of any RSS feed you felt like pointing it at. That was in the days when mobile-optimised sites were just starting to become A Thing and few of the optimised sites were intended for 2.6-inch QVGA displays. Probably came out of them.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/03/nokia-launches-ovi-app-wizard-will-probably-lead-to-ovi-populat/

It looks like it has since been replaced by something with a bit more flexibility:

http://xpresswebapps.nokia.com/

Get yourself a Nokia N808 while you still can: http://www.nokia.com/global/products/phone/808pureview/
Same technology, no Windows, and I got a 128 GB chip in mine.
No danger from losing privacy to Apple or Google either - it runs the legacy "Symbian Belle" O/S.
It got awesome reviews from DPReview.

Yes, this kind of camera has been available for almost two years now...The Nokia 808, which runs Symbian, and supports Qt-based apps, is still the best existing camera phone. Apparently, the Lumia 1020 has some improvements.

http://www.nokia.com/in-en/phones/phone/nokia-808/ (And yes, with all the updates Symbian is not too bad as an OS. People mostly bash it because others do.)

oops i read that wrong about the zoom, which is a quite a pitty. Still it seems to do a pretty damn good job to me http://press.nokia.com/wp-content/uploads/mediaplugin/photo/nokia-lumia-1020-pro-highres-4.jpg i don't see much blur at all on the part of the photo in focus.

Spoken like someone who think all camera tech is the same. It's not. Read the whitepaper http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/2723846/data/1/-/Lumia1020-whitepaper.pdf

Which phone camera has 6 lenses and physical image stabilization?

What makes you think the lenses are not good?

Its not enough to just include a high
megapixel sensor – the lenses conveying the image to
the sensor have to be of equally high quality.
Together with our partner Carl Zeiss, we yet again
pushed the limits of optical design to match the resolution
of the 41 megapixel camera sensor. To provide
the best optical resolution we increased the number of
lenses used from the five in the award-winning Nokia
808 PureView, to six. The first lens element is made of
high precision glass, and five of the lenses are moulded
high-performance plastic, taking lens manufacturing
precision to the next level.
The lenses are physically very big for a smartphone, and
the optical assembly alone is unique. But that is not all.
We put the whole system inside a completely new kind
of optical image stabilisation system, which uses an
extremely high accuracy sensing system linked to very
small motors which actively move the lens.
The extremely sharp image projected by the six-element
lens system is recorded by the second generation 41MP
BSI sensor, capturing even the smallest of details in the
scene, including detail not visible to the naked eye.

Whitepaper from Nokia on the tech http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/2723846/data/1/-/Lumia1020-whitepaper.pdf

http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3964341&cid=44257603

If you're comparing a phone camera with a DSLR then it means it has already won. Anyway, here's more technical details.

Sample photos from the phone http://www.flickr.com/photos/87544844%40N00/sets/72157634597356196/
Review of the photo tech http://pureviewclub.com/2013/15270
Whitepaper from Nokia on the tech http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/2723846/data/1/-/Lumia1020-whitepaper.pdf
Sample photos from the predecessor http://www.flickr.com/groups/nokia808/
Nokia presentation showcasing the phone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_Q3bxo7vJI&hd=1

Yeah, it's not like 7% of the electricity produced is lost before it even reaches your home right? :) http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=105&t=3
Then you know when your charge cord heats up that is electricity lost. The fan kicks on to keep the battery cooler while charging (heat is electricity lost, fan is not used for the purpose of travel)

I wouldn't be surprised if the number comes out to be around 10-15% loss just to get it to the battery.

Then you have the conversion rate of the battery which is probably around 50% of the electricity in making the car move. http://evbatterymonitoring.com/WebHelp/Section_3.htm

I think I saw something that had graphene cables able to conduct electricity with a better loss rate.
http://conversations.nokia.com/2013/02/07/hero-material-10-fascinating-facts-about-graphene/

Then with those super capcitors, I bet they get a better conversion rate.
In the end, that number for conversion will get better by leaps and bounds, as there's lots of room for improvement.
I don't think there's that much room for improvement with gasoline cars.

I think we just need more batteries on the road to help drive that innovation.

Somebody buy the poor girl a Nokia phone, the newer ones run for a month between charges.

First, if the numbers were any good, Google would be bragging about them instead of hiding them. That shows how badly they're selling. Because of this, we have to use the numbers we can get. If you have any better metric, let me know.

Second, if you hadn't failed reading comprehension, it says right there in the summary that the 5000 figure is from 2011 from the first six months of selling them.

Also, the Nokia Windows Phones were bestsellers on Amazon, so you're arguing that they sold really well?

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/532392/
http://conversations.nokia.com/2012/04/12/nokia-lumia-900-dominates-amazons-best-seller-chart/
http://wmpoweruser.com/nokia-lumia-920-tops-amazon-best-seller-chart-for-all-carriers-takes-top-3-spots-on-att/
http://wmpoweruser.com/nokia-lumia-920-swarms-amazons-best-seller-charts/

Yes. Qt will let you style the GUI with what is effectively CSS.

Nokia's maps

In this http://conversations.nokia.com/2013/01/18/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-lumia-820-and-3d-printing/ article are 3 links for Lumia 820 case only. Need to register first at developer.nokia.com for download.

Then you would have looked somewhat better. Now you're worse than Dropbox.

Well, see, they did tell you. It says, on Wikipedia and Nokia's developer page, that the browser in question uses a proxy. Their developer page and the Wikipedia page.

So how can I get me the kind of phone you have? For some reason I can't find USA or Canada on Nokia's page for N9 availability.

Asha phones are intended for developing countries where bandwidth can be limited and expensive They talk about it here http://www.developer.nokia.com/Develop/Series_40/Nokia_Browser_for_Series_40/

Exactly!
From http://www.opera.com/mobile/specs/

"Opera Mini always uses Opera’s advanced server compression technology to compress web content before it gets to a device. The rendering engine is on Opera’s server."

On the Nokia website it states outright that "Compressed pages mean lower data charges" http://www.nokia.com/gb-en/products/phone/302/

Q1 2009 converged mobile device units: 13.7 million
Q2 2009 converged mobile device units: 16.9 million
Q3 2009 converged mobile device units: 16.4 million
Q4 2009 converged mobile device units: 20.8 million
Q1 2010 converged mobile device units: 21.5 million
Q2 2010 converged mobile device units: 24.0 million
Q3 2010 converged mobile device units: 26.5 million
Q4 2010 converged mobile device units: 28.3 million

If we do this by semesters like the chart:
H1 2009: 30.6 million H2 2009: 37.2 million H1 2010: 45.5 million H2 2010: 54.8 million

The chart seems perfectly accurate to me.

Copying other people's ideas is not necessarily a bad thing. Claiming the ideas as your own, without crediting the sources is So, how about crediting the ideas to the right people?

The only link I could find (3.00 pm UK) was back to this on /. There is no mention of it on Nokias web site or any press releases

http://press.nokia.com/category/press-release/?tpage=100

I find this to be highly unlikely since the majority of Ericsson products are using Linux as a platform today

Absolute unadulterated bullshit. The only Ericsson products with Linux at their core are Telecom Server Platform, Integrated Site concept, APZ, Connectivity Packet Platform, Enterprise Media Gateway, and MX-ONE Telephony System. Mere tokens compared to the once vast but now shrinking array of networking equipment they manufacture and deploy with their Global Services unit. Furthermore, most of these are in full "Tivo-ised" mode so you can forget running your custom unsigned kernel on unhacked hardware that you supposedly own.

Face it, Ericsson is a has-been company when it comes to hardware. Out-competed and out-financed whre they formerly led, their hapless, thoroughly uninspired, management have no choice but to follow the common business-sense trope of pushing the company into the "support and service" bankruptcy anteroom. By their own statements, they are making most of their money and seeing the most "growth" in the "Global Services" and "Support Solutions" branches of the company (nevermind that they nosedived negative 42 percent in net income the latest quarter vs. last year's figures).

Guess what, skippy? Intellectual Property is now the name of the game for Ericsson. A tiny company throwing their lot with the likes of MS, Apple, et al, doesn't come free. Believe that bag of freshly minted 30 shekels of silver came with a very thorough reeducation on the finer points of patents and competitive realities vis a vis all things Linux and free/open source software. The plans were already in place long before they came knocking on the devils' door. Like the dogs they have been reduced to, the Ericcson hound will come hunting for whatever crumbs it can scavenge and trophies it can hold up for its master. Already, the wait to see who the first target they had picked for them has come to an end. Hopefully, world courts will see this latest farce for what it is, e.g., the crackle of the first grasped for branch by a once great company now hurtling over the cliff doomed by an obsolete business model, over-paid workers, a cost of production that the Asian companies laugh at between canine sharpenings, and a pathetic zombie existence seen all too often before. Goodbye Ericsson.