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."
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Symbian is a nice OS with outdated GUI which shoots it down; MeeGo should be our response to UI; for that we hired WebOS UI designers to help us get there.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.