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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?"
I'm just hoping the Maemo phone doesn't get completely locked out of Meego. Yes, there is a Meego image currently available, but does have some missing functionality(unless you want to operate it as an overpowered N810).
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Yes, it's an OSS mobile dream come true, but also :
(1) Nokia ships more advanced hardware than any other phone maker.
(2) Nokia is the biggest phone maker in the world.
(3) Nokia has maintained user interface loyalty since before Apple even rehired Jobs.
We've been bullshitting about "the year of Linux on the desktop" here since the beginning, but well this might actually be the year of Linux on the mobile. Maemo/MeeGo require special apps for UI purposed, like all mobile devices, but unlike iPhone, Android, and Palm they don't require those apps be owned by Apple or be rewritten in Java or whatever.
N900's are currently fairly raw, but they are fucking bad ass. I'd assume that Meego will bring rotation, after that, the only shit that annoys me is :
(1) the integrated aim and msn suck, although sms, skype, and sip are solid,
(2) few games dispite being the only phone with solid GL, and
(3) no cups/gs printing.
On what other phone would you bitch about the lack of fucking printing?
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It has some things nicely covered - enabling really inexpensive devices, squeezing a lot from what little resources they might have; or power management. And should get more pleasant with the shift to Qt.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Open maemo/meego, Qt, symbian (which is kinda long in the tooth, but still has a place, and sells a ton). Polar opposite of what some phone outfits do. *I* own the fucking phone, not some guy in Cupertino.
Qt's cross platformness is awesome.
Meego is a horribly lame name though, I liked maemo a lot better, name wise. Now if only I could afford a phone with maemo/meego on it. I currently have a couple symbian phones, and an older maemo tablet, which is pretty neat, but hurting for ram and a keyboard.
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What's the article talking about when it says "the last N-series phone to feature Symbian is the N800?" I thought the N800 was a Maemo device.
N8 is nothing all that dramatic. Symbian ^3 is just an evolutionary rather than revolutionary departure from Symbian ^1 (aka S60 v5). Symbian ^4 is due towards the end of the year which is apparently much more advanced. Also bear in mind Nokia isn't the only brand using Symbian. Sony Ericsson and Samsung both use it. So Symbian is in acurrently somewhat transitional phase. I wouldn't bank on it not remaining very popular in the medium to long term. Symbian certainly dropped the ball on interface and GUI innovation but it's code is tried and tested and considered rock solid at the back end. I wouldn't write it off yet nor consider its future based on N8 or some current phones with a few issues. Lets also not forget that despite some bad press the N97 has sold really well.
Yes, to an OS wholly controlled by Google, not developed in anything resembling an open fashion, and forcing a pseudo-Java runtime with kernel extensions, a filesystem that were never meant to be open source in the first place, and a custom framebuffer system that isn't compatible with anything that already exists on Linux.
No thanks, I'd rather go for a system that has more in common with modern, open Linux distributions.
Garbage collection? Code better if you're using C/C++, or use Python. Sandboxing? Can be done without a pseudo-Java VM.
There will be a "DRM" mode, but there will also be an "Open" mode. The goal is to answer the whiny calls of media companies and the like and give them a "secure" platform, but not screw over those who use devices like the N900, which implements zero DRM. I fully plan on ensuring any device I buy can be switched to (and will quickly be switched to) a no-DRM mode.
You can send an SMS from the device right now via dbus. The call stack in Maemo is closed, but they're using oFono in MeeGo. I have no doubt the OS will give the user control but to say that it -must- be locked down in some fashion and they -must- deny the user control is nonsense.
I am thinking 2011. Nokia didnt put a lot of love supporting and expanding the N900 (btw, have one), plus is the only cellphone featuring maemo, not even other from the same company. In a lot of areas still beats badly any competitor, but need more support from app makers (and, btw, as already was pointed, is 256M what have of ram)
With MeeGo, being in netbooks, cellphones and maybe other devices maybe more cellphone makers join the platform, plus all the N models that could release Nokia next year.
And Android is gaining big momentum too (probably more now with the iOS4 debacle) and still have Linux somewhere down there.
how about R'lyeh OS?
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First, S40 is not Symbian (the latter is only 20% of what Nokia makes). Secondly, Nokia almost has a larger part of smartphone market than all the other players combined (where do you see strictly "technology" advances now anyway?)
But most importantly...well, I guess you think it's just horrible that Nokia focuses, for a long time, on as broad spectrum of the market as possible, right? Not only on "premium" people living in "premium" places, segment about which some manufacturers only care about; such a shame. That tends to spread resources.
Nokia contributed greatly to close to 5 billion mobile subscribers that the world has now; for many of those people their first real means of communication, a great shift for humanity, that sort of "crap". Unfortunatelly - feelings and expectations of "investors" overlook such long term societal effects (a thing which will also bring new opportunities for "investments"...) - oh well, as long as they are comfortably profitable it's fine (and we'll see how some dispute ends up regarding possible freeriders on, also, Nokia R&D); BTW, not so breathtaking bottom line might be also because Nokia actually owns over a dozen of their manufacturing facilities, most of them not in China, half in the EU, and one even quite close to Cupertino. But I guess you think not outsourcing to sweatshops is also "fucked"...
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And Symbian is an amazingly well-designed kernel for a mobile device. The Linux kernel is a huge step backwards in comparison to EXA2. The problem with Symbian is that much of the userland sucks, and switching to a new kernel won't help that. I'd love to buy a Symbian smartphone with an updated version of PIPS, a port of the FreeBSD userland, and X11.
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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.
I have a Maemo device, and it has the same brain-dead out-of-memory behaviour as desktop Linux - when you run out of memory (easy due to the way Linux does lazy allocation), it kills a random process. Somehow, the Maemo kernel manages to always pick the one with the most unsaved data.
Just like iOS isn't some NeXT/BSD compiled for ARM either.
Actually, it is at the kernel level, and you get all of the nice mobile features on the desktop too. A couple examples are the new out-of-memory killer and sudden app termination. When the kernel runs out of memory, it suspends programs that try to allocate memory and sends a Mach message to a program that has a little bit of wired memory to handle it. On OS X, this prompts you to kill some apps and then resume the suspended ones. I'm not sure what it does on the iPhone. In both cases, the kernel keeps track of apps that advertise that they have no unsaved state and will kill them itself in low memory conditions.
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What's with this Linux thing and the n900? Sure, it's a linux netbook that fits in a pocket, but it's an AMAZING phone! Why is everyone ignoring this? I have one, and the Skype, google talk, contact list all-in-one is the most useful functionality I can imagine. I use it all the time. The QWERTY keyboard is great for texting and emails, it has a real browser, it DOES have useful regular user type apps, like Foreca Weather, Facebook, and less useful ones, like Latitude and n900 Fly :)
What else? It integrates with my google calendar, it lets me share video live, upload pictures to social networking sites, and even tell me, where I need to go. I also own an Android phone (v1.5), and Maemo kicks Android butt. I'm sure Android 2 is better, but Maemo on N900 is polished. What is boggling my mind is why Nokia doesn't seem to see it. Why did they dilute it with MeeGo? And why aren't they screaming about it from every ad?! It's Linux on mobile, it's ready, for chrissake!! Oh, yea, and give it a bigger battery.