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In the Face of Android, Why Should Nokia Stick With MeeGo?
GMGruman writes "In September, Symbian 3 was Nokia's latest great hope for becoming relevant in the modern smartphone market. Now comes word that the Symbian Foundation is shutting down, ending the Symbian 3 and Symbian 4 efforts. Nokia is now banking on MeeGo, a collaboration with Intel whose release date — and fit to smartphones — is highly uncertain. InfoWorld's Ted Samson thinks that it's time for Nokia to swallow its pride and stop pretending it will ship MeeGo in time to matter, and instead consider adopting Android — or even Windows Phone 7, which after all might finally support copy and paste by the time Nokia decides to hitch its mobile wagon to a new horse."
I would imagine Nokia feels ditching their own OS would just make them hardware manufacturers, not so different from a large portion of their competition. Add to this that in a certain sense Google has probably partially made Android to ensure that no one manufacturer has a dominating position in the mobile market, and Nokia will suffer from that (Google can ensure products follow standards better when there are a lot of small players vs. one big one).
Maybe they don't like Android.
That's why, in the face of Windows dominating the desktop, I installed Linux.
It's possible for people to dislike software.
... and also it is not costing them very much to develop the MeeGo environment.
If they take up MS Windows Phone 7 that will be putting a vast amount of undeserved trust in what is really a competitor and hoping they will not get hurt. With respect to Ted Samson I think he is either not being serious and expecting to generate a spirited argument or he knows far less about what he is writing about than the youngest commenter here.
Going with android immediately gives them relevance, and a great os. This is crunch time for them, if they make the wrong decision they will become also-rans against ios and android,
Ouch. I didn't think Nokia would ever muster the balls to kill off Symbian (which was clearly the only logical move after the iPhone ate its lunch, even more so after Android started making inroads). I guess the majority of those 1800 redundancies will be Symbian geeks, to be replaced by Linux ninjas working on MeeGo (here's hope).
It's a shame it took so long for them to understand. They should have ditched Symbian right after the N97 disaster, pushing hard on shipping great Maemo products. Instead, Maemo was the unloved stepchild and was basically ditched for Moblin, losing another year of development... They are at least two years behind Android and need to catch up fast, to have a chance to stay relevant in the next decade. That MeeGo phone has to come out in Q12011 and blow Android out of the waters. Anything less than that, and they're toast.
-- Let's go Viridian.
Making themselves yet another Android vendor would give little reason for people to prefer their phones over somebody else's.
Also I find Nokia's approach interesting. Their distribution is a very standard looking one, and porting applications to it is extremely trivial. Anything that compiles on ARM will run outright, and only needs fixes to the UI. Lots of command line tools can be used without changes.
The first that comes to mind is how Android is all about tossing aside everything that is open source as we know it and reinventing the wheel. The catch is that the wheel has not necessarily been improved, and now it's all under the control of Google, who does development behind closed doors and only allows hardware vendors to participate in the process. The rest of the world gets Android code when Google feels like releasing it.
The open source world has TONS of excellent APIs, no sense in not using them. Makes development a lot easier when you don't have to worry about each subsystem yourself. And hey, if your hardware vendor isn't run by bean-counting, control freak assholes, you can participate too.
But the main reason Nokia won't go Android is because that makes them dependent on Google, which even Android vendors like Motorola cite as a risk. Google wants to ride other vendors to get their services out there and make money, and that's a realm Nokia wants for themselves.
Following along with this, I'm amused that people put WP7 in league with Android or MeeGo. It's more like an iOS 2.0 you can license, and well you only need to read my post history as of late to know my opinion on hyper-restrictive OSes like iOS and WP7.
If Nokia was smart, they would see the opportunity in developing MeeGo for what it excels at. Which in my opinion, is a netbook OS. They have plenty of opportunity there, with a netbooks low price and burgeoning popularity in US, European, and Asian markets they could very easily start building a new empire. Emerging consumer nations such as China and India will be having more and more people buying their first time computer and this could be a great foot in the door for building interoperability with future phone products. I also think Android is a great platform and Nokia should drop Symbian like the steaming pile of junk that it is. No one is, or will, be developing for it. They go in too late and now it is just dead in the water. Too bad Nokia, hope you've learned the lesson of tech, early adopters are the ones who survive.
Can't tell you why Nokia thinks MeeGo makes business sense. Or Intel. I can tell you why I'll buy it if/when it comes out (and my current phone is an N900): because it's not Java. I can write stuff in Python (comes pre-installed), I can run stuff not specifically written for the platform (emacs, kobodeluxe), I don't have to put up with anything I don't want to. That, for me, is a sell.
The still sell more phones worldwide than Apple or anybody else and are not going to fold if they take a few more months to ship than expected.
In my case because there is a market for people that don't want to develop for a dumbed down linux and want a real development environment.
Also of note the fact that they recently increased the planned releases for Symbian^3 (four phones now on WP) that Symbian^2 phones keep being released in the Japanese market and Symbian^1 is alone probably domnant in the smartphone market overall.
If they could finally get a Symbian SDK working on linux I would jump on it immediately. Linux needs terribly high specs, Symbian is impressive in this sense and I could easily keep two/three test phones for hobby development.
But I digress: if the choice is a linux distro and Android I will buy the linux distro, so I can install every possible package I already have on my desktop/laptop.
Android is all cool and stuff, it's also FLOSS and great, and whatever.
However, it has its shortcomings which make it less than a desirable phone operating system for me. First of all, MeeGo, Maemo and their cousins allow me to run any vanilla GNU/Linux GUI applications. They are most often inconvenient to use on a phone, but they are sometimes better than what's available on the platform. On Android I'm limited to apps written for Android. Thanks but no thanks.
Also, programming for Android? You need Java or another language that compiles for JVM. Want to program in Python? Good luck. You can't, and you'll never can, because Jython isn't portable to Android. Want to program Ruby? Haha. With non-Android distros I can write an app, run it on my desktop without any additional software installed, and then copy it to the phone as is. And it will run.
The Android phones I've seen are pretty much as locked down as the iPhone. Meego is the only phone OS with some potential for new and interesting things. And Nokia were successful in the first place because they dared to try new things.
They haven't abandoned Symbian. What the hell? Quality of articles is falling...
...and Android has not won it. There is still iOS, webOS, RIM, BREW, WP7, and probably some others that I can't remember. Why not compete in this fragmented market with MeeGo? Eventually we may settle on a single dominant platform, but I don't think Android will become that platform as it is already fragmented within itself due to OEMs "tweaking" the platform to suit their own product differentiation needs, and Google allowing them to do so. MeeGo, like all of these others, has a fighting chance.
I wouldn't run Ruby programs on my phone anyways. I mean, talk about resource hogs...do you have some kind of magic super phone with an i7 chip?
The only thing Nokia needs to ditch is the bureaucracy. It has way too many divisions each wanting to keep features to themselves. They need to combine their E and N series and have a total of no more that 3 smartphones - entry-, mid- and highlevel. They could go up to 6 models if they offer each of the 3 variants with either touch or touch/slide keyboard, but no more than that. They have to many differing visions because of their different devisions. Having one person in charge is essentially the only way to go, since it gets rid of the in-fighting which is currently sinking them. If you want proof, just look to Apple. One gigantic asshole running the show and in 4 years they've turned themselves into the standard the old guard are playing catch-up to.
... and it annoyed me to no end that I couldn't just get something like my old phone, a Nokia 6150. All the phones now either flip or slide, and are chock full of "features" which are really thinly-veiled attempts to get you to cough up more money for a data plan.
I just wanted a regular phone with a 12-key number pad that could send text messages with predictive text input. Nope. Not offered anymore. Hell, I can't even send an email to someone without using a data plan and some email "service". (On the Nokia I could simply set an email address as the recipient of a text message.) And one of the features about it I really liked—the ability to set "profiles", multiple preference sets for ring volume and the like—isn't on the one I have now. But dammit, I can take pictures and... not do a whole lot with them.
And even the 6150 doesn't have something my original cell phone did that I gave up in 2004... I miss Snake. :(
Android is good because it has a Linux background meaning there is a lot of experience with it yet it's ever more fragmenting.
So I find it entirely logic that the largest phone manufacturer bites the bullet and goes with a much more mainstream fork of Linux.
With the success of ARM-bases processors in mind it might be somewhat dangerous to get too cosy with Intel but hey, they already have experience with the other Linux offshoot Maemo on the excellent ARM powered N900.
Porting existing software to Maemo or Meego is going to be a breeze compared to the many versions of Android.
Anything Windows is for obvious reasons not acceptable, a phone manufacturer like Nokia would have to fall on really hard times before selling out to Microsoft
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Seems the news is just that the Foundation might not continue operating in its current legal framework (which depended on few other entities apart from Nokia, and now that they are gone...). But that doesn't lead to S^3 effort ending, as TFS claims (S^4 apparently is, somewhat - only in the sense that, instead of one big future release, its features will be pushed gradually to existing devices; a change for the better IMHO)
Symbian isn't going anywhere - it has greater share of sales than the next two players combined; when taking number 2 player out of the equation, greater share than all what's rest combined. Might very well be the first smartphone platform to break the barrier of 100 million devices shipped annually, this year.
All this ignoring the modus operandi of Nokia. Is S40 dead? (checking...) No, it's the most widespread mobile phone platform in the world. Heck, even S30 sells quite a few units. Symbian will be around for a long time, just in price segments where S40 was for large part of the last decade.
Those segments aren't going away. If anything, the market seems to be getting more diverse than the simplistic "everybody will want either 'true' (for the current definition of 'true') smartphone or something ultra low cost" - but it's probably hard for pundits in few atypical (but highly visible) markets to notice some crucial segments; most of those people have smartphones...
Smartphones which still sit at around 20% of total shipments. Have been sitting close to that for a few years. People are generally happy with slick UI, touch screen, good web browsing (heck, Chinese makers are starting to integrate even full Opera Mobile), few widgets - "smartphone" doesn't need to enter the equation, as fabulously popular "feature phone" touchscreen mobiles from Samsung and LG have shown recently (those phones from Samsung are why they might be level in marketshare with Nokia by the end of the year, not smartphones)
As for Android...heck, who knows. Though probably "MeeGo-fied/Qt-fied", to share at least their custom apps with Symbian, to have the same widget engine available (the W3C one, iirc). But they are profitable, in Q3 their revenue has risen, at #1 marketshare it doesn't make sense to willingly get relegated to the status of PC makers (vs. MS/provider of OS). Why Samsung pushes also bada OS (indeed almost a direct continuation of their wildly successful TouchWiz handsets). BTW, funny how MediaTek was apparently almost blocked for some time from participating in Android, by Qualcomm; funny times ahead, now that MT releases their solution for Android soon.
One that hath name thou can not otter
And some people see real value in open source. It seems many slashdotters (of all the people) don't know the benefits of a completely open system that doesn't rely on a company but a global community that builds on each other's work. No such thing as security through obscurity. Applications and practises from the Unix world can be used, often without any modifications. You can already run a Debian distro concurrently with the current maemo for the N900 (no reboot, a simple chroot is enough) just in case you need apps from the debian repos instead of the offcial and unofficial maemo ones. Some pople just value the freedom to choose over the convience factor. For those there fortunately is maemo/meego.
You might want to look into the NDK on Android. It's perfectly possible to port a runtime written in C/C++ to Android and then use that to run your python code.
a) Symbian foundation "shutting down"? Well, sure a [citation] would help.
b) Even if so - it was of only so-so use for Nokia. They are basically the only Symbian developer worth anything. FLOSS Foundation spin-off shutting down does not mean that Nokia won't continue it.
As for Symbian itself - it's not that bad. It lacks some polish. Well, seriously lacks, including the infra-structure. But it has some nice feature - like ability to run native code which Android badly misses (some poorly-informed guy should post here about NDK, but it's not it at all). And I, for example, won't ever be programming in Java anymore, thank you. Symbians should just drop the certificate bullshit to get developers interested again.
Very badly researched articles and Summary:
Symbian Foundation closing does not imply that Nokia will stop Symbian Development.
Symbian 4 being transformed from an incompatible system into an upgrade path from Symbian 3 does not make it go away except for the name.
And another one:
"Symbian 3 made it onto a couple of phones, but no one really noticed or cared"
The first Symbian 3 device was only just released (N8) and reviewed by the usual websites, and 2 more are announced and prototypes released and shown at the Nokia Fare (C7, E7).
I'm to lazy to actually read the whole articles but there's probably more nonsense.. bad Journalism.
a) News of symbians death are IMHO highly exaggerated. I right now would place a bet that symbian OS will be a significant palyer in the market for the next 5-10 years (maybe more). Why? Go to Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Africa, Russia etc. many people there dont afford iphones, but low-end Nokia devices are pushes out in numbers you cant imagine. And the current mid-class devices (e.g. Nokia e63), which you can already buy there will be the next low-end devices. So - taken into account the fact that Nokia can build successfully push out phones counted in 10s of millions and be profitable on a much smaller margin for revenue, you think they should experiment around?
b) Android: Nokia stayed away from bundling the devices with services from other companies, because then you would invest in developments where somebody else dictates the rules. So should Nokia accept to help advertise and develop a platform, which makes them googles slaves? As a happy Nokia customer i say: No.
c) customer base: If it want something for playing i'll buy and additional android device,iphone,psp or wii. If i want a workhorse, i'll buy the next Nokia phone - if possible a symbian one. I have all the software i need for it, namely dictionaries, pim tools, mail client, podcast downloader, internet radio, youtube client, skype, messaging clients, google maps (and nokia maps), office documents editors. Moreover it runs java programs. This is my definition of "what do i primarily need?". I wont sacrifice running this stably for an unknown gain in other things.
So to say it shortly - the customers interested in having a cool looking web-surfing device Nokia already are lost for Nokia. Their potential customer base are people who want a cheap phone or something which "just works", with a little hooks as possible. For that they should take their time and keep the keys in they own hands.
I can get a bash shell on my nexus one, and from there its possible to install a full standard gnu userland. The only difference with meego is that the standard userland is already there, but nothing stopping you from installing what you need on android.
That said, why would you want to install ruby on a phone? I grudgingly have ruby installed on my relatively highend laptop, and it's an absolute pig, i would hate to have something so inefficient on a far less powerful device with a smaller battery.
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Nokia were the early adopters, symbian predates android and ios by several years. The problem is they let it stagnate and get overtaken.
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Please no android, give me business features .. like an complete and open calendar API as android is completely lacking. Together with the possibility to sync with Caldav. (although you should be able to build it yourself when the calendar api is free.
Real Linux, copyleft license, BSD-style licenses. Not been associated with Google can be a good thing too.
Unix is free, open and a offers a powerful community.
Google only offers open layers down to a 'base' that maybe hardware or software.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Seriously, any posting on Nokia/Symbian/MeeGo will have the inevidable person calling Nokia to adopt Android but this one gets the cake, claiming that "Symbian's dead, and MeeGo won't cure ailing Nokia". Nokia's recent press release (Engadet coverage) claims the exact opposite, e.g. that Symbian and MeeGo are gaining unified development environments via Qt and Symbian is now a consolidated effort, unifying the seperate Symbian ^x releases into a constantly evolving release model (which means that older phone models will get constant feature improvements instead of just bug fixes). Nokia had a good Q3 and last I checked, they still held the majority of the mobile phone market. Talk about missing the point.
Why are we giving these people creedence again? Oh yeah, he writes for InfoWorld, that must mean he's on to something.
Nokia is not closing down Symbian, it looks like it might close down the Symbian Foundation (http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/12215_Nokia_accelerates_Qt_focus_con.php)
The new CEO, mr Elop, has stated that Qt will be the main API for both Symbian and MeeGo, and that the two different Qt-based UI's for Symbian and MeeGo are either scrapped (Orbit on Symbian) or deprecated (DirectUI on MeeGo). Also, evolution of Symbian will proceed more smoothly so the numbering system (^3, ^4) is dropped.
Finally, it looks like people can upgrade their devices to later versions of the OS.
In a couple of weeks is the Symbian Smartphone Show or whatever it is called now (http://www.see2010.org/).
I'm writing this on my MacBook Pro, my other work machines are Windows PC's. I administer a UNIX server at the laboratory. I do most of my work on LabView and AutoCAD. I edit my photos with Photoshop and I drive my Ford to the local supermarket at the mall and buy the biggest brand cereal. And in the evening I sooth myself with a bottle of JD.
I use stuff so I can be productive and happy. I dislike smug people who announce their dislike of stuff so they can feel superior to me. They're not. They are just voicing their own failure at being happy.
Oh, and TFA: Nokia should stick with Meeguu - its the only chance they have in the face of technically superior handsets from HTC and superior user experience/cool-factor from Apple. Otherwise they're just a redundant manufacturer of slightly better quality handsets that cost more and don't look cool. A virtual death sentence in the mobile market. As for /. ... nobody gives a thing what you think - the mobile market is even more brainless-consumer oriented then Apple's if you know what I mean.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
I thought the answer was blatantly obvious: product differentiation. Nokia and their high costs in both location and labour will never be able to compete at a cost-level with companies like HTC who can push out android phones faster and cheaper than European companies. If they lose their only differentiating factor (software), they're reduced to little more than a hardware-assembling company.
I really want to know who messed this up...
They have an alternative to Symbian, it's called Maemo
Someone came up with this MeeGo thing, which is great, but it shouldn't be against Maemo
They have a cell phone with Maemo, the N900
The should begin getting Maemo to run on other platforms (maybe even the X8 one) and instantly fire anyone who starts whining about it
how long until
Porting a python run time would be a pain in the butt. And even if it worked what libraries would it have?
I wrote a python script on my laptop that grabs some data off the network and displays it in a GTK window for the user. I then copied that program to my N900 and it just worked. Try that on your Droid.
Maemo was great. I loved Maemo. Debian based, about to get the love of Nokia's QT team, etc. It had a lot going for it. Just that Nokia should have slapped a capacitive touchscreen on the N900 and whip up a decent Twitter client.
Meego will be a disaster, for the simple reason that Intel is involved. Instead of betting on the QT team that Nokia acquired, which knows it's stuff, they're betting on a company which have never ever come up with a piece of good software. Nokia's management of the last 1--2 years is really brain-dead IMHO.
Swapped my N900 for Nexus One. Smooth phone, but boy do I miss the N900's Skype and integration. Nothing beats a video call with grandma on the other side of the globe over 3G!
Nokia suffers, no more no less, the same trouble of a big Corporate grown up too fast in a country where that business model was previously, simply enough, not present.
What comes out is an organization model that, put in a linear way, does not understand the world around its core business. Think of M$.
There are certainly clever individual minds in the business and clever ideas that changed the world, but that creativity must be so stifled by corporate shit to be unable to come to the surface anymore.
Insisting with such an old style monolith like Symbian; delaying touch screens up to almost stubbornly negating their existence; letting camera and video functions and technology lag behind of the concurrence: it came to a point that both hardware and software on Nokia phones now lag behind every other big on the market, from Apple to Samsung, to Google and so on. There is enough to wonder how does Nokia still survive.
Nokia survives through all the customers around the world, also in less developed not-western countries, who simply need one thing: make phone calls and now and then sending an SMS.
But Nokia ought to be warned, or maybe has already miraculously realized it: that won't last for long. Even POTS operator at one time had to accept they had to differentiate on the Net as platform, that their beloved phone line could not sustain them forever.
Will the new chief go along and get through those troubles? It depends how bureaucratized the thing has become.
Certainly going to this MeeGo, if confirmed, that would mean: jumping off the market completely, leaving Symbian at once, letting bleeding edge Android on a side and thus giving huge advantage to Apple: it looks at first sight as a not-very-clever way to start. Some would call it visionary,instead. Will Nokia recover or bust? We'll see over a few years.
I can get a DOsH Prompt on my phone ... every-time it runs out of credit ...
All your opinions here amount to less than a Camels fart, the Market will decide, and they don't read, this.
If you think Nokia's position, choosing Android or WP7 will lead Nokia to be only hardware manufacturer where price is main competitive issue. That will lead price erosion, dropping profits per device, Exactly opposite than Apple's case. That would mean that Nokia will give up ever make good profits or compete with Apple any more. I am about sure that making standard WP7 or Android, profit per device won't be even 1/10 that Apple gets. That means that even selling 10 times more devices than Apple, Nokia would not make same amount of money and it is difficult sell 10 times more when there is dozens of competitors with similar devices with similar price in market. Based on Gartner Windows Mobile has lost 1Q09 10.2% to 1Q10 6.8% compared Symbian 48.8% to 44.3% . Most stupid choice would be switching loosing standard platform where you are just HW manufacturer of losing platform. Thing that Nokia needs is platform that is clearly best on market and that MeeGo clearly is and it needs platform where Nokia can differentiate from competitors, not be just HW manufacturers. Why I think that MeeGo is best ? It is based on standard Linux environment, not just dalvik and Java top of Linux kernel. For application development Qt and Qt Quick ( Qml and Qml components ) has lot of great innovations and Qt has already large OSS community and a lot of commercial users. Is user view, if you go and look MeeGo UI demo videos, it is one that can compete against Android and iOS.
Financially, I think it's obvious that the best strategy for Nokia would be to ship Android and go to town developing Nokia-specific add-ons for Android. A good Android implementation plus Nokia software would instantly give them back the smartphone market.
For the market as a whole, I'm glad they are taking the risk with MeeGo. I would like to see a native Linux smartphone platform: it's easier to port software to, and Nokia may have enough clout to make it stick. In some sense, MeeGo is much closer to iOS than Android: like iOS, MeeGo uses older programming technologies based on native code.
Android is all cool and stuff, it's also FLOSS and great, and whatever.
However, it has its shortcomings which make it less than a desirable phone operating system for me. First of all, MeeGo, Maemo and their cousins allow me to run any vanilla GNU/Linux GUI applications. They are most often inconvenient to use on a phone, but they are sometimes better than what's available on the platform. On Android I'm limited to apps written for Android. Thanks but no thanks.
Also, programming for Android? You need Java or another language that compiles for JVM.
Just a small (but very important) correction It's not the JVM, but the Dalvik VM. Bytecode is different, architecture is different, and Dalvik by design will not run J2ME things that can run on a JVM.
Want to program in Python? Good luck. You can't, and you'll never can, because Jython isn't portable to Android.
Considering that Google App's engine primary language (for a while) was Python, I doubt that Python (or a subset of it) will never be supported on Android. To run Python on a VM, you. do. not. necessarily. need. Jython. You simply need (a yet to be developed) Jython-like equivalent for the Dalvik.
Obviously you would not get all the amenities you'll have on Python (.ie. ability to call C libraries.), but then again, you do not get all the Java amenities on Dalvik anyways. Now, the status quo is all the result of strategic considerations.
Google App engine supports Python and Ruby (and even Scala IIRC) because the web development bestiary is that much diverse. It caters to the widest possible set of development shops, a good strategic move.
Dalvik on the other hand started (and has remained so) with support to a subset of Java. Why? Because it caters to the masses of J2ME developers already in existence; another strategic move, and a better response to iPhone's reliance on Objective-C.
The Oracle-Google legal wrangling might actually give Google a reason to start supporting a different programming model should it comes to that. Given its historical support for Python, it could come to that as it is not infeasible (given Google's engineering resources), nor foreign (given its history with Python.)
There is nothing technical that prevents a subset of Python from ever running on Dalvik, ergo my objection to your position, which I quote - "You can't, and you'll never can, because Jython isn't portable to Android"
Want to program Ruby? Haha. With non-Android distros I can write an app, run it on my desktop without any additional software installed, and then copy it to the phone as is. And it will run.
Again, nothing prevents this from occurring. More power to you if you can write Ruby apps on non-Android distros, but you seem to be missing the point about the nature of Android and the mobile development marketplace. It locks on a Java variant because it is strategically sound to lock and focus on the masses of J2ME developers (not on virtually non-existing mobile python/ruby masses.)
More importantly And there is nothing on Dalvik that prevents it from EVER and FOREVER running something else should market forces end up driving that need.
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-android-scripting.html
"My first question is; how many people will be running command line tools on their phone?"
Count me in, cowboy! That is one! :)
"Second the code must run on an ARM so must be written for an ARM. Can I easily port my Android or iOS app to MeeGoo? I doubt that very much."
But, we can't count on you?!
What on earth happened to Maemo? It's running on my N900 right now and pretty awesome. Who wouldn't like some debian niceness on their phone?
"ending the Symbian 3 and Symbian 4 efforts"
Source? Two days ago they said they would keep developing Symbian but not talk about Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 but rather one steady process and release the changes to the phones as soon as they was available instead.
Also why wouldn't they release MeeGo?
And sure they could pick Android any day, or Windows Mobile 7, but it's not like either would be better than MeeGo.
Pure bullshit 100%?
I have been contacted by a "confidential" Finnish company requesting QT developers with Meego experience. I have not read the FA, just the title.
I have the Qt experience, but not the Meego, I just though this could be relevant.
The lunatic is in my head
Well, meego is based on VxWorks, and VxWorks in certified to DO-178B level A, and level "A" cert specifies that any failure may result in loss of aircraft or injuries. I see this as a A-OK for cell phone use during flight.
Give me a phone with hardware at least as good as the N900 (including the physical keyboard) and an OS that is as hackable as Maemo on the N900 is (i.e. nothing at all to prevent you replacing any and all parts of the firmware, 100% open kernel etc) and it will be my next phone (assuming Android vendors like HTC and Motorola dont start becoming more open in the meantime and assuming a 3G version of OpenMoko doesn't appear)
Bonus points if it includes Nokia Maps Navigation for Australia like other Nokias have.
Right now, the only "hackable" phone I know of with a physical keyboard is the N900 and the software stack on that phone doesn't seem to have a future (even less so if MeeGo is DOA or never appears)
The OpenMoko Freerunner has no physical keyboard and a cellular radio that's worse than what one finds is most entry-level phones from the big names.
The Nexus One has no physical keyboard and I am not 100% on how open the software stack is.
The HTC DeeZire Z has a physical keyboard but the software stack is locked down tight.
Who is Ted Samson, and what is his problem with MeeGo?
All things are technically possible with software, the question becomes would the reward justify the effort. The parent was referring to the fact that he could run his programs on Maemo with very little effort. You can't say that is the case with Android.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
There are two reasons why Nokia won’t be abandoning Symbian anytime soon.
Firstly, Symbian is tightly integrated with Nokia’s variant management process. Nokia is the only OEM that has mastered variant management, i.e. being able to generate 100s of variants (SKUs) at the press of a button. That’s how Nokia can deliver 100s of customised smartphones to operators and retailers around the world. This variant management process is ‘hardcoded’ to Symbian, which means that replacing Symbian would seriously compromise Nokia’s ability to cater to operator requirements around the world and it would seriously hurt its market share.
Secondly, Nokia’s economies of scale rely on in-house control of core components, and the operating systems is one of them. If Nokia were to license Windows Phone it would reduce its differentiation to industrial design and Ovi alone. In the case of Android, Nokia would have to branch Android (and to sustain the cost of Android development), port Qt on Android which means another 12+ months for a stable implementation. While this remains a long-term possibility, it is still a gamble when Nokia’s priority should be to focus on killer devices and not a killer OS. Qualcomm’s BREW MP is another candidate but only when Qualcomm has a good developer platform story and that means waiting for BREW MP to launch a web-based platform akin to RIM’s WebWorks.
Symbian may no longer be a symbiotic system, but will live within Nokia for many years to come as the workhorse under the hood of Nokia smartphones.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
It seems that Nokia has a bit of a following on /., probably because their hardware is pretty decent, and key handsets like the N900 appeal to the demographic here. But the fact is in terms of an *ecosystem*, Nokia has nothing. They are in the gutter.
Nokia are at the point where they are actively having to pay developers to write apps. And we're not talking small apps here - big, branded apps for global companies, who are being approached by Nokia asking them if they'd like an app for Ovi. I couldn't tell you the number of clients I deal with day in day out during my day job who have already been rung up by Nokia. Even with an app developed at no cost, very few companies will take Nokia up on it.
It is simply not a space that people want to release software into right now. It doesn't get you press, and it doesn't get you sales. At least Blackberry have realised their previous app space strategy wasn't working, and are attempting to engage with mobile developers in a meaningful way. Nokia's left there without a clue.
Well except the restricted memory space and you still need to load a libraries to support the standard userland. The N900 was built with the intention of running Maemo. The Android OS was made to run on resource limited devices such as the nexus one. I'm not saying it's not possible to run a standard GUI on the nexus one, I seen linux GUI run on less (like my ancient Sharp Zaurus). I just have my doubts that the standard userland can run within Android and actually be useful (speed may be a concern).
Of course the phones will get more powerful, and soon the hardware will support running Linux programs alongside Android. This will be feature supplied by the hardware and made possible by the linux kernel that Android runs on top off. Not exactly Android itself.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
You CAN GET a bash prompt on your Nexus 1. While Maemo COMES WITH a CLI out of the box.
"Rooting" the phone was as simple as enabling the extras repo and getting the gainroot application (which I believe comes from Nokia).
Then open the CLI, type sudo gainroot and watch as the prompt changes to a #.
Done. No screwing around with custom kernels, waiting for the "community" to figure it out, etc.
But the reality is that mobile phones aren't built for people who care about such things. If Nokia survives the handset wars, it will be in a role kind of like HP calculators: everyone else uses TI, so when you try to explain how easy it is to do complex math using RPN, they don't get it.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
While android may own the market, the companies with their own OS are making the majority of the profit. Shipping android is the equivalent of yet another beige box computer maker, it is a race to the bottom profit wise.
Asymco Profit Analysis
I just don't understand how people forget where the new CEO is coming from. Microsoft. Stephan Elop lead one the cash cow division of Microsoft. He did a great job overthere even with some unsuccessful project. However those doomed projects like project green build up some of the greatest technology assets that Microsoft is leveraging now. The core of the Windows Phone team is coming from those higly innovative projects. Stephan may become a close ally of Microsoft providing special Nokia content.
And I agree. The lower segments of the phone industry they will still build on theid own platform.
I think the reason it counts is that all those hundreds of millions of people with "dumb" Nokias will look first at Nokia for their first smartphone purchase.
People are creatures of habit, and just as it's tough to get Windows users to switch to Linux, and iPhone users to Android, I think Nokia users are going to stick with what's familiar. I've tried Sony-Ericson, and it was horrible (for me).
The decline in Nokias share is due to other manufacturers coming in the market; otherwise Nokia's sales are up 61%.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
... are you serious? Yes, in a future it could eventually get cut and paste, while keeping iOS 2 style "multitasking". One thing that have Maemo over iOS and even Android is multitasking, you can run a lot of tasks, easily switch between them, and all running (as far the cpu holds, of course). WP7 have a broken design in that area. And betting that your users "won't need multitasking" is pretty close to say that they don't need a smartphone neither.
And because of the way Symbian's been designed from the ground up to work with limited CPU cycles/memory, it runs exceedingly well with a 680 MHz ARM11 and a Broadcom GPU. Angry Birds has been ported to Symbian, Need for Speed Shift looks gorgeous, and HD videos play smoothly on the AMOLED display. Detractors crow over the gigahertz class CPUs on rival Android/iOS devices, but consider that Android practically REQUIRES that sort of CPU power for its eyecandy. A lower specced Android phone just doesn't cut it for speed. And while battery technology doesn't keep up with clock speed, GHz level CPUs are going to guzzle battery as well.
My phone lasts great for 2 days with wifi permanently on and push email running for GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo, with around 2-3 hours of calls a day and moderate web browsing and youtube. It has a power saving mode as well, that reduces display brightness and other settings in one go to consume less power.
For all the bullshit in this article, he never even talks about Nokia's Q3 financial performance. They've sold 26.5 million smartphones, with an operating profit of €529 million, and net sales of €10.3 billion. Today in India, you can buy a Symbian based Nokia C5 for about INR 7000 unsubsidized (about $160). Just a couple of years ago that was unthinkable for a Symbian phone, they typically cost double or more. Nokia's pushing smartphones lower into the mass market with Symbian - they're able to standardize the hardware (600 MHz ARM CPUs as of now) and because of Symbian's scalability it can power these low end handsets. Meego will wind up for the successors to the N900 and probably be a netbook/smartphone hybrid OS, with appropriately beefy hardware and targeted at the high end market. And both Meego and Symbian will be bound by Qt for application development, so that there's no fragmentation going forward for developers. Qt is a proven toolkit, in use by Skype, Google Maps and VLC, and can be used to make desktop apps for Windows/Linux/Mac as well. And naturally everything here is true honest open source, not locked down or restricted like the 2 competing phone OSes(Android the OS being restricted by its device manufacturers even if it itself is open source). I see this as quite good - an incentive for developers to write apps that will reach the entire world, not just the US (there's 10 million downloads a day on Ovi Store as of now, it seems), while using standard development tools that can be used outside of mobile phones as well.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
MeeGo is a Linux. That largely defines MeeGo and sets it apart. Oh sure, Android and countless other consumer electronics systems have Linux, but that distinction is relegated to some machinery under the hood kept far far away from users and often developers. MeeGo, on the other hand, is a Linux distribution, one with an integrated desktop environment that defines the distro, but it is still 'merely' a distro. It runs X. "Linux programs" will run on it.
Android threw out Linux. Nokia hopefully isnt dumb enough to hop on that bandwagon. Isnt dumb enough to turn over the fate of their company to an OS where they'll be able to have only the most meager means of distinguishing themselves, where distinguishing yourself will earn you animosity for fracturing the local ecosystem, where Nokia's existing code base will be useless.
Nokia can leverage huge code bases like GStreamer to get video conferencing, hardware supported media playing, to build DLNA systems on top of. You want that 21st century network functionality on Android? Have run rebuilding it chums. It's the same story, up and down, Android's core platform is tiny whereas the amount of Linux code out there to build off of is colossal.
Last, remember who bought Qt, and consider then that MeeGo is based on Qt.
MeeGo is a consumer Linux. That puts it in an elite realm with only one peer: Maemo. For this to become epic, only one thing is needed, UX. Everything non-technical must be done well. Even at these early stages, the netbook profile certainly is incredibly slick and integrated, hopefully the mobile profile will be similarly cared for.
SL4A for Android from Google gives you Python and Ruby right on your Android phone. Also Perl, Lua, JavaScript, Tcl and shell. In other words, you're about as wrong as it's possible to be.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Because competition is good.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
First of all, MeeGo, Maemo and their cousins allow me to run any vanilla GNU/Linux GUI applications. They are most often inconvenient to use on a phone, but they are sometimes better than what's available on the platform.
That just goes to show that "what's available for the platform" isn't much. Which is an argument against Maemo/MeeGo, if anything.
On Android I'm limited to apps written for Android. Thanks but no thanks.
Yes, but there are plenty of apps written for Android. It's pretty hard to find something for which there isn't an app these days.
In contrast, when we look at e.g. N900 - if I go to Nokia app store, restrict listing to N900 only (by default it also shows stuff for S60), and browse through the list of all apps, there's a grand total of 80. Yeah, I see why you'd need to run those vanilla Gtk apps on that now... with all the pain of dealing with UI not designed for touch...
Actually, the nexus one is considerably more powerful than the earlier maemo based devices like the n700 and n800 tablets.
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"Rooting" the phone was as simple as enabling the extras repo and getting the gainroot application (which I believe comes from Nokia).
Then open the CLI, type sudo gainroot and watch as the prompt changes to a #.
Done. No screwing around with custom kernels, waiting for the "community" to figure it out, etc.
You don't need to screw with custom kernels on Android either, if you get the right phone. The procedure for rooting Nexus One is officially documented, and does not require any side downloads or custom kernels.
I feel they are on the right track and should stay the course. Android is completely hobbled by running a jvm instead of native code. It is the reason you do not see crap for
games on the android since the stack is not efficient enough. MeeGo on the other hand runs native code, porting stuff like iphone games which push the device processing limits
will be a real possibility.
Got Code?
In September, Symbian 3 was Nokia's latest great hope for becoming relevant in the modern smartphone market.
Are we paying attention to the same market? Symbian hasn't been relevant for a long time for smartphone use; they've been feature phones, as far as I'm concerned, and not terribly good ones at that.
As for MeeGo... why? I can understand the motivation behind it, but not why they're essentially throwing out Maemo to do so. Maemo was (is) already a long way to being mature, and Meego looks like a complete start from scratch. (Architecturally, it's also better - being based on deb packages instead of RPMs). I don't know if it's Intel stalling or Nokia, but Meego just isn't going anywhere fast enough for those interested. ("Soon enough to matter" isn't significant; a new market player with well-designed utility and good marketing will always have room to play.)
I'm quite disappointed in Nokia in this regard. They had a lot of potential when the N900 came out - and then they fell flat on their face. Nokia, with all their different execs leaving and various other product turmoil, looks like it's starting to flounder - and will soon be failing unless they pull their ship together from the top.
Windows Phone 7? Don't even go there. It's the same ball of suck that the iPhone is with regards to privacy and control, with none of the benefits. (Android isn't much better due to vendors locking the phones.)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Dalvik on the other hand started (and has remained so) with support to a subset of Java. Why? Because it caters to the masses of J2ME developers already in existence; another strategic move, and a better response to iPhone's reliance on Objective-C.
This confuses me, see if they wanted a strategic language for Android that gained a absolute heap of developers, J2ME wasn't it.
Why not? The number of former J2ME developers is decent, and the transition to developing on a mobile platform is that much more cost-effective for the masses of J2SE/JEE developers out there. Google simply said "here, you know Java? Then you can use your skills almost without changes and be productive almost immediately".
It was C/C++ as used by Symbian.
Why would C/C++ be a better strategic language for Android? Do we have any ratio of C/C++ developers with Symbian experienced over the number of J2ME developers (and the potential J2SE/JEE developers that could be trigger happy and more than ready to do mobile stuff)?
Also, consider that it's not the quasi-Java language that Android programmers use that is the platform. It's the Dalvik VM. It is not beyond the realm of possibilities that the same VM will support subsets of Ruby and Python for mobile development, benefiting from a core of "blessed" libraries, sandboxed on a VM (which is more appropriate for application programming).
Add some symbian->Android conversion tools, libraries or frameworks and you'd have had a massive amount of development loveliness. To point this out, on many Android forums one cry I used to read a lot was "how can I port my existing C++ code to Android, why did they make it all Java".
One could also make the same argument with iPhone and Objective-C. There is a matter of application control that Google is pursuing here, and I have a suspicion that Google is not that kin of C and C++ given they are looking - for better or worse - for system programming language alternatives such as Go.
I think Google went Java because it was their 2nd (or is it 1st) choice language, and the guys doing the phone API happened to want to make it Java, probably no other reason than that.
That's all the reason they needed to be honest.
Now they should start improving the Qt abilities and getting a richer software ecosystem going instead of trying to lock it all down to Dalvik-code only. (ie make it easier and more supported, to write in C/C++ and maybe Python too)
I beg to differ. With a Dalvik VM, it might be a lot easier to create a Jython or JRuby subset to run on a common managed application core than to write it down on C/C++ and having a separate Python environment (the later with code managed independently of Dalvik and the former not being managed at all). With a VM, you can establish a lot of different application policies common to all run-times, enforced at run-time, with the OS unencumbered by them.
It is a model that has worked well on all flavors of Java, and on all things run by a VM (Erlang, Ruby, etc.) Google could have also gone the way you described, but I suspect they decided to go the way they did for the reasons mentioned above.
I'm a happy N900 owner. I can install real Linux apps on my phone and I don't have to root it or wait until the app store is supported in my country. I can run OpenOffice on my phone, and have no problems getting hold of codecs, VPN, VoIP clients, X apps etc. while I see Android owners waiting and waiting, or having to hack and root their machines to get unofficial versions of nagware installed etc.
Won't pretend it's the best choice for everybody, but Nokia has it right. Real Linux on a real smartphone.
Vik :v)
I'm glad to hear that Nokia "gets it", if only now rather than sooner.
I'm rooting for Nokia because I see it as one of the "good guys":
-Nokia historically doesn't tie you in to a particular carrier, a kind of network neutrality. Tie-ins are anathema to the geek ethos.
-Nokia bought Qt, the framework behind KDE, and is a KDE Patron.
-They don't try to lock you out of your own phone like Apple does. They usually have SD ports for exandability, and easily changeable batteries (even the N8 only requires opening 2 screws).
-You can develop on Windows, Mac, Linux for Windows, Mac, Linux, and phones.
What I'd like to see is:
-Good marketing, not the geeky ads for the N8
-Eye-catching UI/graphics. The icons for Meego don't seem to be gradient-filled, drop-shadowed, anti-aliased.
-Besting the iPhone in all aspects. Don't make consumers think about it, even if that means price parity. You can have cheaper phones with 80% of the features, too.
-Stable, catchy names for flagship products. Not "N8", "C7", etc. Have a name that consumers and non-Nokia fans can remember. Everybody knows about the iPhone, even people who can't afford it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
> I wouldn't want to put my money into buying an applications from the Ovi store if I knew that the phone's OS could be dead by the time the next handset came out.
Well, Nokia just announced that they're focusing exclusively on Qt as the preferred app environment going forward, and that Qt apps will run on both Symbian and Meego phones.
So, I think the answer would be to buy/use Qt apps.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I'd have to say, well, no. Android is better than iOS and all, but it still doesn't feel quite like a fully fledged Linux to me. Windows Phone 7 isn't even an option, IMHO. Maemo, OTOH, is basically Debian for MIDs and smartphones. I'm not entirely happy that they basically dropped the Debian part of Maemo in favor of the Redhat part in MeeGo, but I'm also not fond of the idea of only writing apps in Java for Android. Especially when I have a pretty decent language selection out of the box on Maemo. Anyone know what languages, toolkits and frameworks are available on Android? Can I write and run software on Android without another computer? How about Emacs, can I get that for Android?
I probably should start playing around with the Android SDK, and I'm fairly certain that Android will crush, first and foremost, MeeGo. But I have an N900, and Maemo works pretty darn well for me.
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Actually, that's the Qt SDK. And it's good that they're supporting Win/Lin/Mac going forward.
But the Symbian SDK basically seems to be Windows-oriented. The S40 SDK, even though it's for Java, is actually delivered as a Windows expanding .EXE instead of a ZIP.
Although, you'd probably want to target Qt from this point on.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Qt is definitely the ace for Nokia. Increasingly, the MS monopoly is being weakened, both in desktops (the rise of Mac), and alternative computing devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.).
If you want to write a program once, you'd be smart to use Qt.
Even if you had to do another GUI for small screens, Qt will still span between iPhone, Android, and Meego. And you can leverage your existing Qt knowledge.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Nokia will now sign the cert for your app on the Ovi store.
You don't have to be a company anymore; you can just be an individual with an app.
Nokia will even critique your app and UI for you:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Development_process/
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Yeah, multitasking is a strong point of Nokia.
It's amazing how people badmouth Symbian without knowing how the latest Symbian^3 devices work. Hold down the center key (equivalent to the iPhone's single key), and you get a list of running apps with thumbnails and an X to close them. Simple, and powerful.
Listen to music while you're browsing your photos or the web or doing something else.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
. The only difference with meego is that the standard userland is already there, but nothing stopping you from installing what you need on android.
The major difference is that Android does not have Xorg. Every graphical Linux app will run on Meego. Try running a GTK or QT app on Android?
why would you want to install ruby on a phone?
For the same reasons that we used to install BASIC on computers running at only a few MHz. Not all applications require high performance C code.
The article being sited here puts Meego in a negative light without giving any basis for this claim. Nothing more than propaganda. Here's a situation where I would support shooting the messenger.
Are you kidding me? Give up a system apparently named after a Lovecraftian Elder Race in exchange for one named after a badly designed robot? No way!
There are a great many opportunites for a MEEGO then you imagine, from Netbooks to embedded systems with small footprints that are QT and linux based. The Android is but one alternative, and that does not disqualify MEEGO for the purposes it is intended (MS alternative)
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada