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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).
... 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.
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.
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
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.
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.