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Nokia Trades Symbian For MeeGo In N-Series Smartphones
An anonymous reader writes "Nokia announced that moving forward, MeeGo would be the default operating system in the N series of smartphones (original Reuters report). Symbian will still be used in low-end devices from Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The move to MeeGo is a demonstration of support for the open source mobile OS, but considering the handset user experience hasn't been rolled out and likely won't be rolled out in time for its vague June deadline outlined at MeeGo.com, could the decision be premature?"
The late June release that is expected will have an "open" and "closed" release. The "open" image will run on the N900 but omit some firmware and OpenGL/BME drivers. The closed image will include those, and will require a valid IMEI for the N900, and should provide 100% hardware functionality.
With luck the BME will be replaced, since it just controls a chip with plenty of publicly available documentation. OpenGL, well... until Imagination stops acting like Nvidia we're SOL.
This is not someone's pet project, it is Nokia and its flagship multimedia phone platform (E(nterprise) series stays on Symbian).
I am sure they will put stability and power usage to first place. After all, this is the company who takes huge beating because they insisted and still insist on "code with discipline" on mobile platform. Most of the parts of Symbian which developers hate is actually a specific way to code for mobile platform to use less power and stay stable. They expect(ed) some company who manages to do "talk" and "smart" on single CPU without problems to let them code like they code for desktop. It doesn't happen of course.
N series on the other hand, is flexible and they can say "lets put 2 CPUs", "lets put 512MB RAM" as they are multimedia/high end phones with high price flexibility. I guess that and massive multimedia support already existing on Linux along with developers is the major reason for this decision.
Don't let their liberal "no app store" fool you. If your app doesn't act fine on Symbian, it is gone. It won't slow down or anything. Flooding memory? "Memory full, please close some applications" and guess what? It closes it before it alerts. I am sure they won't let things like that happen on Linux too.
So, it is not something like desktop linux fitting on phone. Just like iOS isn't some NeXT/BSD compiled for ARM either.
It's being confused with the N8-00, which was (for obvious and sane purposes) renamed the N8. It's the flagship Symbian^3 device.
Don't be too surprised by Symbian breaking this year the "100 million devices sold annually" barrier, and generally maintaining quite well its half of smartphone market. Nokia finally really started pushing it in the mainstream class.
So called "junk" also enables this, allowing very modestly priced devices with greast power management. And Symbian^4 has Qt as its main API.
You might call it apocalypse of the undead if you really wish to, but I would be suprised if Symbian won't remain a major player for a very long time. Plus zombies are cool.
One that hath name thou can not otter
It seems that a volunteer company (some "Nokia" if you've ever heard of them) has already done that (5th post down). No real need to do it again..
I'm hoping that they keep the open nature of Maemo/Meego on these new phones. The N900 is the first phone I've had in ages which doesn't crash all the time. Not as slick as an iphone yet, but definitely much more flexible. Nothing quite as fun as controlling your phone from it's web server via WiFi...
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Nokia knows exactly what they're going to do with Maemo/MeeGo. They're going to make as much community-driven software stack as possible, this will drive down development costs for non-core applications. Meanwhile, they will, for example, roll out Ovi-services on top of that to bring in extra cash. Kind of what Apple is doing with their iTunes and AppStore and other content selling services. And don't think only music, videos or e-prints, it will be much more than that.
It's really a beautiful win-win situation. Nokia delivers a hackable, good product to the hands of millions of nerds and hundreds of millions of other people. They are quite free to do, pardon my French, more or less whatever the fuck they want. Meanwhile Nokia gets all kinds of business benefits.
And anyway, I'm not sure what exactly is your beef with Maemo. Maemo/MeeGo stack is currently emerging tech that's about to break to the market big time. It's not setup.exe-productized for mom and pop developers, yet. What did you expect at the moment? Use the emulator in the absence of hardware, and be sure to contact European side of Nokia for specific support questions to get something done. This might help you.
That's my take. Maybe you agree or maybe not, but consider it food for thought anyway.