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Nokia Fears Carriers May Try To Undermine N900
An anonymous reader writes "Nokia is worried that networks may reject selling the N900 because it won't allow them to mess with the operating system. Nokia has previously showed the N900 running a root shell and it appears to use the same interface for IM and phone functions. Meanwhile, Verizon is claiming that 'exclusivity arrangements promote competition and innovation.' Is it too late to explain to people why $99+$60/month is not better than $600+$20/month?"
I know where my next phone is coming from.
I really hope European carriers will carry the N900, because I'm planning on getting one. It looks really sweet for basic phone + capable mobile computing device with apt-get usage that I'd like to use it for.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
He also said the phone might not sell well because it's only the fourth iteration in their five-step plan, and people might wait for the fifth, which is going to be the real deal. Hasn't this genius heard of the Osborne effect?
Finally a company gets it! We want a phone we can hack LEGALLY, that doesn't have Steve Jobs giant head staring at us 24x7 telling us what we can and cannot do with it. If they can really keep the carriers from imposing idiotic restrictions of their own, this will be the phone to beat.
60*12 + 100 = 820
20*12 + 600 = 840
> Is it too late to explain to people why $99+$60/month is not better than
> $600+$20/month?"
For some it may be. Why do you think you know what is best for everyone?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
except some carriers require a TWO year contract; so, that becomes:
60*24 + 100 = 1540
20*24 + 600 = 1080
Definitely better off buying the phone outright
Yes, its a phone. Several tech journalists in Sweden has tried it out and it DOES make calls.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
This is a very negative statement, and from a Nokia vice president no less. It seems a very strange thing to say at the time of launching a new device.
I hope Nokia is not buttering us up for DRM and lockdown in "Step 5 of 5"...
Meanwhile, the N900 will succeed wildly if Nokia's marketeers allow it to. We tech people like the device because of its specs, but where are the simple statements of the benefits for its other market sectors?
"Open source Linux with a root shell" is good enough for me, but what about "A phone with a real Mozilla-based browser", or "A music player with stereo speakers built-in", or even "N900 - comes with apps".
Paid Q&A/Research
I've been testing a N900 for a while, and let me tell you it is amazing. If this little device is a sign of what's to come, operators should be scared. This is exactly the type of development that will regulate them to the dump data pipes they should be.
Today I received a call from my friend while at home, only later did I realize he was using Skype to call me. Friends PC->Internet->Home wlan->N900 rings, indistinguishable from a normal cellular call, and most importantly my operator didn't make a cent. Same if I call him. Yes, this has of course been possible before in various ways. But now the whole integration is just seamless. There's no Skype app, no Gtalk app, Yahoo app, there's just my contact list. SMS messages, instant messages, it's all one single continuous conversation in the UI. If I was an operator I'd start worrying about my nickel-and-dime business model too.
"exclusivity arrangements promote competition and innovation."
The foul stench creeping through your nose right now is the smell of total bare-faced bullshit.
With GSM phones and SIM cards, there is nothing forcing you to buy a phone that is locked or crippled by your phone carrier.
You can, for example, buy an unlocked Nokia cell phone from any of several places, and then put in, if you are in the US, a T-Mobile or AT&T SIM card. If you're outside of the US, use your local carrier--CDMA cell phones seem to only exist in the US.
And, of course, if you do end up with a locked phone, there are services on the internet that can unlock the cell phone for you, and reflash the OS on the phone to one that doesn't have whatever features your carrier decided to disable.
I think the only people who will have a problem are people who are in an area of the US without GSM towers and have to use Verizon.
MaraDNS is an open-source DNS server.
I'm coming to the conclusion that "competition and innovation" can only mean for "keeps the board in cocaine and blowjobs". From the number of times we see anti-competitive and anti-innovative measures hailed as promoting those same qualities, it seems clear that they can't mean it literally.
By this stage, I think "cocaine and blowjobs" is about the only credible interpretation remaining.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
The foul stench creeping through your nose right now is the smell of total bare-faced bullshit.
What, you don't believe it's "competition and innovation" to blow identical Verizon interface firmware into every model of every brand and castrate Bluetooth transfers so all Verizon customers have to pay network charges to get their own multimedia to and from the phone, no matter what the manufacturer's specs say? (Those of you who didn't know everyone else could transfer pictures and sounds directly between phones without paying for MMS: That's right. You must be a Verizon or Sprint customer.)
I gave up fighting against bundled plans, because (at least in the U.S.) the un-bundled stuff really isn't cheaper. Witness the "Mi-Fi", a device I'd really love to have and would consider using in place of a phone even - but the plan for that is not that much different than a phone plan, in the U.S. So you are really better off going with a two-year plan and a subsidized device, since you are likely to keep a phone for around two years anyway...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Straight from the horse's mouth.
Look at section "Call features"
Nokia isn't a FOSS firm? The company that bought all third-party code used in the OS that most of their products ran (Symbian) and open sourced it? The company that's been developing the Maemo stack with community assistance for years and has released three Linux/ARM tablets based on it already? The company that owns Trolltech? Are you talking about the same Nokia as the rest of us?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you're considering getting one of these (and I certainly am), why not go to the N900 mini-site and submit your email address to get an alert when the phone goes on general sale. If nothing else it will show Nokia that there is legitimate, widespread interest in this phone and hopefully help them keep their resolve against the evil telcos!
N900 site is here: http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/ (scroll all the way to the bottom for the form that lets you submit your email addy).
Also, to whet your appetite of what's likely to come, check out this forum post over on the maemo boards: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=24272
Nokia bought trolltech, the company that created QT. They continue to make QT available freely, or you can pay for the commercial version. Nokia absolutely is a FOSS company, they just also have proprietary products as well. The two aren't mutually exclusive, even though one would certainly get that impression from the way the two are treated as diametrically opposed opposites around here.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Their business model is based on locked down symbian
No, their business is on hardware. None of the Nokia devices I've owned have been locked down at all; they've all come with SDKs and allowed me to run software. Many of their customers add restrictions, but if you buy your phone from a carrier then you get what you deserve. Symbian and Windows Mobile? A bit disingenuous, given how few Nokia devices run Wince; they've shipped a lot more Linux devices than Wince so far.
I got a 770 (the first tablet in this series) under Nokia's Open Source Developers' Program, for a fraction of the retail price, simply based on existing open source contributions. I probably won't be buying an N900 - the hardware's nice but after trying to develop for Maemo I decided it was more effort than it was worth - but that doesn't mean they don't regard open source as important to their business model (oh, and I forgot to mention their WebKit contributions in my original post).
The fact that open source Symbian is hard to hack on doesn't surprise me in the least. Closed Symbian was also not at all fun for developers, and neither is Maemo. Based on what I've heard from a friend to used to work for Nokia, I'm much more inclined to blame this on the general level of competence of their developers than on any hostility towards Free Software.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Where I live and do my traveling, the GSM providers' networks are marginal at best. They are grossly oversold and there are outright large coverage holes, especially with T-mo. Verizon and Sprint's RF coverage is excellent and the EVDO data with Verizon blows away AT&T's 3G data so badly there's no comparison.
Even if Nokia would offer a CDMA/EDVO version of a smartphone, Verizon would never allow it on their network.
http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/N900
Here it says that it won't support OGG, but it manages to support the completely abandoned Windows Media shit. The only unpatented format it can play is WAV. And it records to AAC (WTF!!!!). It doesn't know about SVG, but manages to support WMF (fortunately WMF is not patented). This phone is a giant step in the right direction, but it's still not the 'dream platform' for open source development.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
From the article:
Which is total BS since Nokia has full control of the software on the device. The only reason for not customizing or locking down the N900 must be that they don't want to. A ballsy move, I really hope Nokia (and other manufacturers as well) will manage to wrestle control away from the networks and their nickel-and-dime walled gardens.
/greger
You need to add a new word to your vocabulary, I think. Here, I'll help you out - it's called "perspective". Nowhere in your linked article does it state that Nokia itself is actively engaging in, nor encouraging, such activities.
Now, to forestall the "They should be more responsible" protests, you should consider something.
Let's assume, for a moment, that Nokia, taking your Slashdot post to heart, decides that it will no longer sell any of its products to the Iranian government. There's nothing to stop the Iranian government from purchasing them from third parties: Would you then call upon every third-party distributor, reseller, etc., everywhere in the world to stop selling Nokia's products to them?
Let's extend this example to the ridiculous and assume that you do, and everyone agrees.
So, they go elsewhere, and let's further assume that nobody, anywhere, will sell them what they want... so, they go to Open Source, perhaps. Certainly, the raw tools are there, no? It'd take time, and money, but they're a government, after all, and they've as much of the latter as needed to accomplish the same task.
Now, learning this, you gnash your teeth in frustration: OMG teh evil Iranian gummint is using Open Source to oppress people! What are you going to do then? Call upon the whole world to stop creating Open Source programs?
Yeah, I see *that* happening.
So, to wrap this up: Don't blame the tools, nor the companies that sell them, blame the people that misuse them in whatever role or capacity.
Finally, to bring this back on-topic somewhat: The N900 appears to be exactly what I've been waiting for in a "convergence device": Sufficient computing power and features, open enough to play with and do neat things with, AND made by a company with enough world-wide presence to actually make it fly, if they do it properly.
While my employer provides me with a Blackberry with unlimited voice and data, it is crippled by Verizon and has no WiFi capabilities, and so I can't use it, for example, as a SIP phone to connect to my Cisco 871W at home and make voice calls leveraging our internal VOIP network to other employees (or outbound calls from it), nor access my corporate voicemail that way, nor can I use the 871W for data/corporate network/email/Internet access while at home: 54 Mbps would be quite a lot faster than EVDO-A and my broadband connection much faster as well, and, since it'd be via the VPN tunnel from my home to the office when I'm home, it'd be far more secure. A smart/converged phone with such capabilities would allow me to stop carrying my Cisco 7921G (one cradle at home, one at the office I go to most), and use just one device for voice, and add things such as remote server access as well either via WiFi/tunneled at home or at our offices, or EVDO-A/VPN when elsewhere, with a much better screen and in as convenient a form factor as my Blackberry, with a better keyboard, to boot. Hell, I might even be able stop lugging my work laptop with its Verizon mobile broadband card around with me everywhere I go, too.
My adopting a device such as the N900 would represent a loss of income to Verizon: I'd drop one unlimited data plan from them, and would probably be able to switch from an unlimited cellular voice plan to something less expensive as well. and THAT is why the cellular carriers in the US don't want fully open, powerful, "converged" devices, I think: The potential loss of income from business subscribers is enormous. Our corporate phone system is already VOIP over our WAN: Being able to extend that to mobile devices, seamlessly, represents a huge potential loss of income to them.
Regards,
dj
All right, let us defer our match to how easy it will be to customize the Maemo platform. From what I have read (Wikipedia), Maemo is a Debian distro with a number of proprietary bits. If I can customise it without asking Nokia's permission, then you're right. If you need a certificate or fingerprint or Lord know what to change some options, then I am vindicated and they will be using Linux exclusively as a politically correct marketing weapon. Re-match in 2-3 months, once I buy the N900 here in Belgium.
The Force actually is with me.
Wasted space ? I doubt it since most people want one. Averse to change ? No, the shape thing has been used before (Palm) and it's much less efficient than a keyboard. Plus having shapes for words makes learning Kanji seem easy. Seriously, the keyboard is one of the best input device for text. And last I checked, SMS, MMS, the frickin root shell, entering contact information is all text based input.
And seriously, it's not because people don't agree with you that you are somehow special and everyone else is averse to change. I personnally just don't like change just for the sake of change. Until someone comes up with something better than the keyboard, and not a virtual one that takes up half the screen space, they can keep their change.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I'm coming to the conclusion that "competition and innovation" can only mean for "keeps the board in cocaine and blowjobs". From the number of times we see anti-competitive and anti-innovative measures hailed as promoting those same qualities, it seems clear that they can't mean it literally.
By this stage, I think "cocaine and blowjobs" is about the only credible interpretation remaining.
Dear sir,
Please find hereby enclosed my resume...
Dear sir,
Our human resources department has looked over your resume and found you list of qualifications, references, and prior experience quite impressive. At present we have no job openings. However we will keep your resume on file, and should we have an opening for a blow-and-blowjob provider, we will consider inviting you to our offices for an interview and test.
Bow-ties are cool.
It gets worse. They dropped support for the 770 too quick. Hacker Editions aren't even a good faith effort unless they either release the source to EVERYTHING or continue to provide support for the parts they keep closed. The 770 won't associate with a WiFi access point if an 802.11n unit is within range. Note I said in range, not just that it won't associate with an N access point and the N770 has very good WiFi range. The bug was closed anyway as WONTFIX.
Then we get the N8x0 series. They just put the N810 to pasture, new units are still popping up, and you can forget any support on it as all their resources have moved on to newer things. Now they are offering this new device while already announcing it is toast because they are changing out the entire GUI toolkit. Just how many times do they plan to rewrite everything? Who do they think they are, RedHat? :)
They want 3rd party developers but look at the hell they put them through. Apps have had to undergo major changes between every OS revision. There was apparently a big bar between OS 2007 (the last one that ran well on the N770, it is very RAM constrained at 64MB) and OS 2008. This means no PIM app was ever completed to a usable point for the N770 for example. Then OS 2008 was a big change but most 3rd paty apps do appear to have made the jump. But this new version is very different and has already been announced as an end of life branch of development. So of course thousands of apps will get ported, enough to compete with Palm and the iPhone! Step right up and drop $600 bux..... Even though no previous version had a thousand apps even in a 0.1 state.
Somebody needs to take a cluestick to Nokia's executives.
Democrat delenda est
Just looking at it is, in fact, quite enough to conclusively settle the question. It's most definitely a phone.
not only does it make calls, one can select between cellular, skype or sip (among others) inside the main call interface.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Go and travel around the world. Heck, go and browse the web sites of mobile phone carriers outside the US, there are plenty $20/month plan.
I'm posting from outside Prague, Mr. Smug Asshole.
Did you read your own link? Because I see $15 for 15MB plans, with additional fees thereafter (for a phone). That's hardly realistic for a real phone plan if you use data much at all.
Or, a $50 data only price plans (gee, isn't that what we were talking about originally) that also cap at 50MB/month with additional fees beyond THAT. That's usab;e but pretty tight - and I might note, way more than $20...
So again, show me the money, since you are so smug, with a real data only plan less than $20 for real-world use in a month. I've been traveling in Europe plenty thanks and the datascape here is not that vastly superior, though it is nice things are more SIM friendly (or course, I could have bought an iPhone unlocked in the states too but as I said given the fact I knew I'd use the phone for more than two years it simply made more sense to use the subsidized plan).
Perhaps you should try visiting the U.S. someday and realize we do have some things you think we lack...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley