Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
yeah but their margins are thin and getting thinner by the day. They currently rely on third-world consumers not being able to afford Android or Apple phones, but cheap 'droids are less than a year away...
-- Let's go Viridian.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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/).
Tweak the UI a bit?
Understatement of the thread.
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
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.
Eh?
The N900 does actually connect to the tv. Sure, with wires, but still. It also connects just fine to Mac, Windows and Linux machines I have, allowing them all net access and/or file transfer. It also picks up DLNA servers in the house and can use them as media sources.
Nokia do a lot of things right. They've lost direction a bit over the last few years and the number of models they have now is just ridiculous, but if someone tightens the reigns and sorts out the business side, they've proven time and again how capable they are of producing solid, working devices with great user experience.
Depends on the target device. Current Maemo / MeeGo devices ship with a screen that does 800x480. It's 225dpi, so you do need to make some things bigger, but most apps that worked on smallish-screened desktops or laptops will be more or less usable on something like the N900. To make it really usable, you need some tweaking, but not a huge amount. If you want to scale it down to a smaller phone, then you probably need to completely redo the UI.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
It's on the map, in another region: QNX.
Acquired by RIM recently, so expect the BlackBerries to run it in the future.
(Unfortunately closed-source again after acquisition)
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.
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."
1) You lose easy access to the largest repository on Earth (Debian's). And Debian has a dedicated ARMel distribution. This is _massive_
2) When I still used RPM-based distros, I could make the package DB go boom by just installing/uninstalling stuff
3) I know how to package DEBs. Not true for RPM.
4) The decission was made behind closed doors.
5) I use Debian for laptops, desktops, servers, I would prefer to use Debian-esque on my mobile.
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."
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