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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."
They could also do what Google did and create their own Linux based operating system and maintaining compatibility in applications
That's what MeeGo is. Unlike Android, it uses a fairly standard stack (e.g. includes X11), so porting apps from the desktop is trivial - recompile, tweak the UI a bit for the small screen, ship.
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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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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).
What? Symbian has a beautifully designed kernel, with power management at every level of the stack, able to run isolated personalities so that it can run the hard-realtime stuff for controlling the radio on the same CPU as the apps. It has a microkernel design with support for capabilities (for running semi-trusted code), and concurrency at every layer from the nanokernel up so it will scale happily on the next generation of phones with multiple cores.
Linux, in contrast, is a pig on mobile devices. Power management is accomplished by hacks on top of hacks. Hard realtime is a joke. It's there purely for buzzword compliance.
Unfortunately, the userland stuff for Symbian is a pain. It used to use a version of C++ for userspace development that exposed some of the very low-level memory management stuff. This was important for phones with no MMU, but is a waste of time now. It's not required (in fact, you can just use Qt), but a lot of people tend to judge Symbian by either that or by the crappy UIs that a lot of manufacturers (including Nokia) have built on top of it in the past.
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You don't quite know the reality of privacy, Nokia, and asking. These days they don't ask. They make it compulsory. While they may not openly use the data they collect in ways that are immediately obvious, they absolutely do collect data that most would consider even more private than the stuff they hand over to google.
One Word (okay technically two) "MyNokia" - on Symbian and Maemo handsets the OS forces you to send a text message back to Nokia the first time you turn it on - the payload - IMEI and a bunch of other handset specific information. The Maemo community reacted quite badly to this - The response from Nokia was to suck it up because everyone loves to sell their soul in return for daily text spam.
Android already runs on the N900, a few rough edges, but it's almost good enough to use as a replacement OS.
MeeGo - everyone forgets about Maemo - it exists right now, it is good. MeeGo is an arse about face rewrite to fit somewhere between Android and iOS. Obviously Nokia was a little bit smug and now has to play catchup for a few years. It's not like the writing wasn't on the wall though.
This is wrong. I have an N900 and it's entirely voluntary to register with MyNokia. There is even an application available for N900 to disable/block the entire MyNokia feature. I know because I have it installed :)
I work for NOKIA and Google is our primary competitor; not Motorola, HTC, Samsung etc.
We are moving towards becoming an Internet services provider with smartphones playing an important role in this transition. MeeGo plays vital role in this strategy. Qt should allow seamless integration of applications in both Symbian and MeeGo; Symbian is still useful for middle-end devices, MeeGo aims to be the top dog. Qt should allow you to get the same UI experience on both platforms later.
At this moment we are deploying distributed architecture comparable to Google's so that we can compete in latency and scalability of all our services once the initial pains are over. MeeGo should be fully integrated with this framework.
Symbian is a nice OS with outdated GUI which shoots it down; MeeGo should be our response to UI; for that we hired WebOS UI designers to help us get there.
If you ever tried N900 you can imagine what kind of phone would be the first MeeGo phone - you'd be able to run xterm, gcc or most Linux applications on your phone directly - I am not aware of any other phone on the market capable of doing this. Couple this with a capacitive touchscreen, multitouch, UI similar to WebOS yet with NOKIA style, fully offline 3D navigation, microSD, HDMI, hi-res cameras and many more - you can perhaps ditch your netbook and camera and carry only this phone.