Slashdot Mirror
Nokia and Microsoft Make Smartphone Alliance
pbahra writes "The smart money was right. Nokia has jumped into bed with Microsoft and will produce phones running Windows Phone 7. The cynics would say that, here, we have two lumbering dinosaurs of the technology world clinging to each other hoping that the other gives them a future. Optimists would point to two companies that need each other, both bringing vital components to the alliance. The big winner is Microsoft. Windows Phone 7, while reasonably well received by commentators, has not set the world on fire. An alliance with Nokia gives it access to the world's largest phone maker and its huge mindshare — in many developing nations a mobile phone is known as a Nokia. The biggest loser is MeeGo, the ugly, unloved step-child of operating systems."
Nokia wrote to developers, "Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same."
Enough said.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
This the prevailing mood of the comments from Nokia users worldwide.
Make good of your last breath Nokia, because if you screw this up, you'll be thrown to the sharks. Innovate or die. Lots of competition around to step in now, this ain't 1990.
Stephen Elop must be the best mole since Kim Philby.
After Sendo en Palm yet another mobile vendor commits suicide-by-Microsoft. But this is the biggest yet.
I really liked Nokia devices, but my E71 is probably going to be my last one.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Did Microsoft just buy Nokia for $0?
This is a good read on the whole matter. Writing's a bit crude in some parts but raises some good points.
These charts also illustrate the point. Nokia is alienating both its development community and its customers. Qt is put on the sidelines. Who's going to develop for a dying platform? A lot of people I know buy Symbian because of the generally familiar UI, which is similar to the Series 40 phones. Windows Phone is radically different.
Ugh.
From their letter to developers [nokia.com]:
So they are not ditching Meego and Symbian completely, but it definitely looks like the systems will be sidelined into low-priority projects.
It was nice knowing ya! Too bad you restarted your high-end smartphone market 3(!) times in the past two years,
I am sure being an HTC-like Win7 phone "innovator" is where you want to be n the market,
Regards,
A satisfied n900 customer
Sweet! Does this mean Nokia will start bundling Microsoft's NIBBLES.BAS with handsets instead of their snake game?
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
I believe this makes a patent settlement between Apple and Nokia in the form of a cross-license easier and more likely to happen in the near term. That's the biggest IT patent war I've ever seen. Apple asserted a variety of smartphone-related patents such as touchscreen user interface patents against Nokia in response to Nokia enforcing some standards-related (GSM, UMTS etc.) patents. Now that Nokia has chosen Windows Phone for the high end, I can't imagine that Apple would enforce patents against a Microsoft operating system. Those two companies haven't had a patent fight in a long time. It would make strategic sense for Apple and Nokia to settle and to focus on competitors building Android-based devices. I commented on this in more detail on my blog.
"Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.”
Good luck getting people to buy that living fossil.
Deal makes sense though. Nokia could not have independently challenged Android / iOS / Microsoft, and their entry-level handsets are being undercut in developing economies.
Or wait until Nokia releases one, maybe this year or next. Without a platform (Symbian, MeeGo, OVI) that is owned by Nokia it becomes just another hardware manufacturer with commensurate margins.
Nobody mentions Nokia Siemens Network which is still not profitable after several years. Even the overpaid acquisition of NAVTEQ is still loosing money.
Brezhnev & Honnecker, no?
My first (dumb)phone was a Nokia 6110 in 1997 and my last a Nokia 6820 in 2005. My first PDA was a Palm Pilot 1000 in 1996 and my last, a Palm Tungsten T3 in 2005.
I guess smartphones killed them both. Nokia didn't know how to make a proper PDA and Palm didn't know how to make a proper phone. Too bad they didn't cooperate back then.
Palm and Nokia: you will be remembered.
Nokia bought Qt not so long ago, presumably because they were aiming for embedded Linux based devices and Qt is one of the best toolkits for that. Now that they are in bed with Microsoft, getting a great Linux/crossplatform GUI toolkit hardly can be a priority any more, so it makes a lot less sense to spend money on developing Qt. Particularly as unlike Trolltech, they were focussing on making it as popular as possible even at the expense of the commercial version (GPL->LGPL license change).
So now Qt just became an irrelevant, money losing division, didn't it?
Or do they plan to keep Qt but just use Windows as the underlying OS? I can't believe MS will be entirely happy with that, having .NET as competition and all...
all the editors must be asleep this has been everywhere else for hours....
Slashdot submissions are not about beating the news/blog sources to a story, its about creating a decent discussion with some like and not so like peers. There is no reason to rush to be the first to post like some kind of lame FIRST POST FTW! Furthermore if you had looked at the submission you would see some research went into it with no less than 5 different resource pointers. Research isnt instant you know?!
you sir are a douche.
AC
"Two's company, three's a crowd." Supporting three platforms requires a lot of resource. So one of the old ones will be facing cutbacks, if not being kicked entirely. Now, let's see "MeGoo" -> "Me Go". Oh, what a giveaway.
It's really too bad. I have a Nokia N800, which I love, and was really looking forward to buying a N900. I decided to wait and see how the reviews were. Then came the Maemo -> MeGoo announcement and the departure of Ari Jaaksi, and that really unsettled me. I really liked Maemo. Getting Intel on board was bound to lead to conflicts in direction, which would slow down development.
So now, I will wait still longer to see how things with MeGoo move along. And I am not buying a Nokia with Windows 7. So it's probably time to start looking at Andriod. Way to blow it, Nokia.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I've always been a big Nokia fan. I'm currently using my 6th or 7th one since 1999. Stirdy, trustworthy devices (well, except for one clam type phone, but could be blamed on my abuse of it). The one I have now (E51) is the 'smartest' phone I have, but it will also be my final Nokia. Would have loved to see them jump to Android, but they chose this. No, I can't put this down with facts or figures, it's just a feeling: it will not help Nokia remain the biggest phone manufacturer and I believe their market share will decline more and more. Too little, too late, this move. Such a shame, as the N8 (Symbian) is such a gorgeous device (but seriously, no Ogg support?) and I really love many of their phone designs. From fun to casual to business. Thanks for 12 years of fun, Nokia, but this is one customer less. :(
Here's the secret to immortality:
As stock exchange players negatively reacted to this news, I won't be surprised if Microsoft had a hidden agenda of buying out all Nokia assets shortly afterwards.
Any shares you have in Nokia.
They put an ex-Microsoftie in charge of a consumer electronics company. I'd laugh if it wasn't such a tragedy.
QT will be taken out and shot as soon as possible. Here's how it will happen: Microsoft will offer Nokia a Business Development Agreement which lets Nokia get discounts off the price they pay for operating system licences. The discounts will be related to Nokia doing one of a number of 'entirely voluntary' (hence not illegally coerced) things. Things like enhancing QT in some way to make it compatible with some pointless and unused feature of Windows PhoneOS. After a few of these it will be cheaper to just kill QT.
Then KDE will be screwed.
Any guesses how long Symbian will last?
Welcome to Slashdot. You must be new here. Sometimes they'll miss a big story and won't even bother posting it for discussion because it's relevance has diminished by the time they can get to it. Embarrassing, frustrating BUT hand selected submissions does yield some level of quality. Or as they say in Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster of selection-by-hand-foiling-slashdot story submission bots submits YOU.
PROTIP: Wait for the inevitable dupe of this story to show up, then go troll the people who post similar things like what you just posted. It's fun!
Nokia has seen Apple and Google jump in on the high-end, taking almost all of the high-profit margin of the market. On the low-end they're going to be increasingly attacked by Chinese firms pumping out phones that are good enough to use, and cheaper than Nokia can make them. They can only try and regain some market share from Google/Apple and there is no way Symbian was ever going to do that. It's a dead OS in terms of mindshare. I think the hardware looks great (The new E9 is stunning) but they need to change OS.
Maemo has been fun but never got any focus from Nokia, and it looks like Meego is being aborted. It was either teaming up with MS or turning to Android.
This fucking sucks though, I have been waiting for a decent maemo phone for ages, ignoring the N900 because of the USB port issues. The hand-me-down E51 I am using is starting to show its age though, so I guess it's a second hand N900 for me now. I can't see this ending well for Nokia. Did they learn nothing from the MS behaviour during the "plays for sure" debacle?
I really liked the N900, but from the looks of it that may not be going anywhere anymore.
So, what's a good Android phone? I'd like one as open as possible, with good hardware specs and a hardware keyboard.
An alliance with Nokia gives it access to the world's largest phone maker and its huge mindshare — in many developing nations a mobile phone is known as a Nokia.
I was a little confused by this quote as the minimum requirements for Windows Phone 7 far exceed the vast majority of those developing nation cellphones. I believe those are mostly the candy bar cell phones or "dumbphones." I was under the impression that developing nations had a vast population of users who weren't in the market for smartphones. That might be changing but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the current models Nokia enjoys widespread distribution hinge on a trim microkernel operating system with little to no system requirements and I'm unaware of a version of Windows Phone 7 that satisfies these hardware constraints. Simply put, it's going to be a long time before Microsoft's WP7 dominates the developing nations as the de facto operating system. And good luck piling those licensing rights of WP7 on top of the cost of the phone to people who struggle to find potable water!
My work here is dung.
This is the last gasp from a dying company. Now nobody will touch a Symbian Phone with a ten inch pole if it costs more than 10 bucks.
On the upside Nokia gets to compete with tons of Asian and Indian manufacturers making exactly similar WP7 phones with no other way of differienting them than another background or another widget. Release the breakes and drive off the cliff keeping the gas pedal to the floor all the way down, what a way to go out of history!
HTTP/1.1 400
I was planning on buying the first MeeGo device when it eventually came to market, but now that WP7 is the "primary OS" for smartphones, it doesn't feel as if they're going to invest the resources they needs to pull it off properly, if at all...
Even worse, they're essentially abandoning Qt. They've announced that there will be no Qt support on their WP7 devices. They had a great plan to use Qt for both MeeGo and Symbian devices, allowing cross-platform application development. It really was a great strategy.
What is going to happen to Qt now? Symbian will eventually be phased out, MeeGo on Nokia appears to be essentially dead.. Nokia will have no use for it anymore.
Bye bye Nokia...
Having uses Nokia phone for at least the last 15 years my N95 will be the LAST Nokia
I cant believe people can be so stupid!
Connecting people.
This seems a lot like the Wintel relationship between MS and Intel. But whats the best name for this "cooperation"?
/. don't FP
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
While they make awesome hardware Nokia has got to get their act together wrt getting R & D to deliver: they spend almost 3 times as its peers
With the IOS concentration camp, Android bootloader lockdown, and Windows Phone 7 copying everything that we hated about IOS it looks like a bleak future for anyone who wants to do cool stuff with their phone beyond the simple apps you get on the common platforms. If Nokia abandons MeeGo with this deal then any hope we have of being able to get new phones with the same freedom as the N900 will be fed to the meat grinder.
Looks like I will have to take great care of my N900. It's the first and last of it's kind.
Unicode in Slashdot
"Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices"
Yes, but they also say this:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/02/nokiawebcast-4.pdf-page-30-of-38.jpg
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/02/nokiawebcast-4.pdf-page-32-of-38.jpg
You can produce the same effect by making a last-minute switch to a new OS after carefully stabilizing and making an OS pefectly matched to your needs and hardware for several years. It will not be faster to use the new OS and if you main positive reputation is "It just works" then you can only loose more.
Palm crawled back to their original idea after getting distracted on the windows path and nearly died. The just wasted energy, confused the community and lost more time
I am really sad to see that history repeats itself. I liked every Nokia phone (6310,6310i,E71,E63) i used, because i could 100% rely on it.
A lot of people wonder why Nokia didn't choose Android over all other software platforms. Here's what I think:
However with this kind of alliance there's one question that bugs me a lot: WF7 platform has quite steep hardware requirements and so far Nokia hasn't been able to produce a lot of beefy devices - what will happen to the wide range of devices Nokia is currently selling?
"15 years of rivalry ends with Losers Alliance"
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
This seems like an move to counter Apple by cornering the other end of the market.
Instead of terrible hardware with solid software Nokrosoft present solid hardware with terrible software.
I guess that the N900 is the last Nokia that I will ever own.
Out of the choices of operating systems to go for, why on earth did they choose Windows over Android? What were they thinking? They would have hammered the iPhone in a year or two if they had chosen Android.
They really need their heads examining.
Glad I don't have shares in Nokia.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flamebait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
... for the non-NOKIA shareholders!
What if they focus on those people who have their mobile lying next to their computer on their desk 8 hours a day?
+single password for phone and pc
+unlocking the phone unlocks the pc and vice versa
+your sms-es are just another folder in outlook
+your mobile works as a little sidekick screen, flashing incoming emails and upcoming appointments
+mobile works as Powerpoint remote during your presentations, including multimedia buttons
+when docked, all incomming calls automatically forwarded to your desktop phone
Yeah yeah, I know, keep on dreaming. MS will find a way to fuck it up...
I've know many die hard Nokia loyalists that've tuck with Symbian phones as iOS and Android surpassed them, as well as many Maemo fans, both Nokia loyalists and new blood. I've never know anyone who actually liked Windows Mobile however. And all these high -end Nokia users are among the least likely WM7 converts. All will now migrate to Android.
You might ask how many new smartphone users Microsoft will bring, well some no doubt. Microsoft has payolaed some good reviews for WM7, but users are not pleased overall. Worse yet, WM7 is little more than a clone of Android/iOS.
Maemo/MeeGo behaves more like a computer than Android, iOS, etc. giving users some advantages over those operating systems. Yes, Maemo/MeeGo were lacking in the development environment and entertainment apps, i.e. games, but Nokia could've easily solved the games issue by creating an Android emulation layer.
For tablets, Maemo is truely the superior when compared with iOS and Android, or the joke on the cloud Chrome OS. I'd imagine that Intels efforts will ensure that MeeGo lives on in the netbook and tablet markets. I cannot however imagine Intel doing the necessary work to bring a good development environment and developers to MeeGo.
Btw, the mefi thread offers more relevant links than slashdot.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
What will happen to it? It doesn't run, nor it can be easily ported to WF7. It seems like Elop has simply overlooked Qt's existence.
Qt's main strength was easy C++ code portability between a lot of platforms (Win/Lin/MacOS/even QNX) and even if Nokia implements C# bindings to Qt, you will still have to rewrite all software specifically for WF7.
Meanwhile KDE developers are already very unhappy and concerned about Nokia's decision.
I like my android phone, my linux servers and my windows desktop. If this means that a lot of microsoft developers feel a bit safer knowing that the risk of their platform withering away in some mobile future is a bit lower then I'm in favour. For the same price and hardware I would take a windows phone over a symbian phone so where is the harm to Nokia?
Nokia's Maemo & MeeGo seemed to be the only real open source OS for smartphones. Nokia's decision to buy Trolltech (and so Qt) was great. :( (Yeah, I know, n900... but hey, it's just dead)
Seems like I'll buy an Android phone instead of a MeeGo one
I loved Nokia, they worked hard to make good quality phones with advanced features. I'd reluctantly switched to iPhone about 3 years ago as Nokia fell behind on the Smartphone race, but I never loved Apple and was ready to make the move when a good competitor arrived. Microsoft are not ready for the new era, they are the Mubaraks of the IT world. Nokia is finished, it might sell a few million phones but will never again excite consumers or enthuse developers - I feel really really sad & sorry for enthusiastic Nokia employees.
Elop will certainly go down as a Hero for Microsoft, he managed to give Microsoft everything it would want from a Nokia Purchase, but without spending a dime.
No small coincidence that he is a former Microsoftie.
This will be the death knell of QT and KDE, unless those projects move quickly to find a more hospitable environment. One would hope the developers know their software industry history, and that they are making plans for their departure. Certainly some will simply go with the flow and collect a paycheck. Anyone with a vested interest in a Free alternative to Microsoft/Apple/Google hegemony in the mobile market must understand, however, that Nokia's alliance with Microsoft means their efforts to remain viable will be in vain. This is a truly sad day in the history of computing. The mobile market will soon become a completely closed ecosystem unless this project succeeds.
QT was a profitable company with a large number of employees BEFORE Nokia bought it.
Not everyone realizes - QT is licensed by companies not just to develop applications that run on both Windows and UNIX, but also Windows and Mac OS. This is where they make a lot of money.
QT is not going anywhere, it has a huge install base. If anything it would be sold by Nokia or spun-off into it's own company again.
Elop made it easy for him - fire people, dump responsibility of innovating on their own and sell out to Microsoft. Very sad day for Fins - they must have been hoping that this guy will be a SJ - but they got, well Elop.
Why did they have to pay him for playing to Microsoft's tunes is beyond me - I thought the whole idea was for him to clean up the mess, organize the better parts and focus on creating something new which has the best chance of differentiation - now sadly they just make hardware and ship Windows on it - at a time when HP, for example, is trying to break away from the age old crippling Microsoft reliance.
You failed, Nokia.
I bought the N900 at full retail price, and even switched carriers to support you because I believed you were headed in the right direction.
I was dismayed when I got the news that Debian-based Maemo was being dumped, but I talked myself in to believing Nokia+IBM might be able to turn out something good with MeeGo and assumed someone would backport it for the N900 eventually. I certainly understood you needed a strong partner, as you were getting creamed in the smartphone market.
Despite strong product placement in Tron: Legacy (the one right thing you've done lately), I think you're finished. Sure, you'll linger on for years, milking your patents, but, like Microsoft, you have no mindshare when it comes to smartphones these days; at least not among the crowd I run with -- technical New Yorkers who have money to burn on such devices.
All this waffling on your direction with Maemo and MeeGo, and then commiting to neither. It's clear there is no one at the helm who has a clue. We develop apps with Qt at work, so I was ready to get involved once I got a sense of commitment from you on something. Sadly, that never happened.
Who knows, next week you could be announcing you'll be running PalmOS. It won't help though. You had the chance to a be a leader, but you blew it.
There is no way they can compete against Chinese OEM manufacturers - they will eat their lunch.
Throw away current decent dev tools for new ones never makes sense
This seems like an all out gamble that they can take on RIM in the corporate market with MS's backing
They can't completely dump Symbian and Meego will continue without them.
Because if you rush, you can probably stock up on N900s. If you get, oh say, 5 they should last you for a while until the smart company makes a true power phone again that puts the OS in the hands of the user.
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
The very First Nokia problem was trying to "reinvent" an open source already created proyect ON TIME called MAEMO, and try to put a "copyright" brand to it with the so badly Intel merging . MeeGo was the Dead of MAEMO years before, now they're making the same mistake this time not with intel, but Microsoft... MAEMO just needed a transitional scheme to QT from GTK, nothing else, nothing more...and it would have a faster evolution in market than the Android hippe has... So bad Nokia...
The Register's take on this is appropriately foreboding. How many hands have Microsoft CEOs shaken with great optimism, only to have the other company dead-end it's business a few years later? The picture is the handshake of doom.
It reminds me of this picture.
Elop sent out a frank memo highlighting the challenges Nokia faces earlier this week:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops-in-brutally-honest-burnin
"Nokia wrote to developers, "Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same.""
Meanwhile... http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/02/nokiawebcast-4.pdf-page-32-of-38.jpg
Symbian, QT, are dead to Nokia.
I wonder what will happen to KDE too. I mean, they rely on Nokia to spit out QT releases, I doubt they can handle both KDE and QT.
Likewise for other companies relying on QT.
In TFA it is stated QT will still be the development platform for symbian. As i understand it WP7 is a .NET platform only (for apps), and QT has stated it will not adapt QT for .net. QT will still keep to exists for symbian. And as the other statements here state: qt can stand on it's own feet as a cross platform tool.
Besides that, it is still possible that in a couple of years symbian is mature enough to be the high end user friendly platform. Currently it does not manage to keep up with iPhone/Android. To keep a finger in the high end market they try to buy that part of the market with WP7.
But now nokia has the strange situation that a intern developed platform (symbian) is competing with an external developer phone OS (winphone7)
What is nokia going to run on it's tablets? is nokia creating tablets?
Oh, wait a minute, that's right -- his golden parachute is made out of Microsoft stock ... no wonder he's smiling in that picture with Slippery Steve.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
If MeeGo is totally gone, why has Nokia been posting dozens of MeeGo dev jobs over the last few weeks?
Go here and search for 'meego:'
Is MS a stopgap? Was Nokia helping Intel replace devs by gathering CVs in their name prior this announcement?
I'm confused.
This will be the death knell of QT and KDE, unless those projects move quickly to find a more hospitable environment.
Luckily, GTK+ 3.0 was just released!
(runs away *very* quickly...)
Rest in pieces, Nokia
Complete post is here.
Haaa ... nice one ................
Anyone here read the financial press, what exactly caused Nokia financial returns to be so bad?
It's going to be fun demolishing Microsoft's ill-gotten phone business. Nokia might even survive in a diminished form, there's always that.
(After all, SGI is still around after trying to sell NT workstations then partnering with Microsoft on Fahrenheit. Oh wait, they aren't.)
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
This is all about enterprise mobility. With exchange and sharepoint 2010 microsoft have a strong hold on the enterprise personal productivity and comms markets. They have been trying to leverage this for ages but until WM7 were behind with the software to do it, now they are frustrated by the lack of handsets and partnering with Nokia fixes this.
Expect RIM to run to Oracle, or possibly IBM.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
If Nokia leaves MeeGo, I think that leaves The Linux Foundation, Novell, Intel, & AMD. If Novell bought QT and LG joined to build the hardware, we could have Smeegol phones & tablets with nifty green logos.
What happens to Qt? I'm not so concerned about phones but for writing useful little GUI apps for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Qt is fantastic. Qt makes C++ worthwhile. It adds to and reworks the parts of C++ that are annoying - safe pointers, signals-slots, MUCH better standard data containers and iterators, class/object metadata .. and that just wasn't enough. Then they wrote an amazing collection of extremely useful and well-built collection of modular libraries - web, opengl contexts, networking, sound, video, file management, vector drawing, animations, .. Don't make me go back to wxWidgets pleeeease! :(
This article gives a very good overview of Microsoft's previous strategic partners and how well each one of them ended.
(it's currently missing Sendo and Ericsson although the author has indicated that he'll update it to include them soon)
Personally I think it would be a good thing to have iOS, Android, WebOS and Windows Phone thriving in the marketplace as it means that each one will be forced to innovate to stay relevant - which can only be a good thing for the consumer.
However on the basis of Microsoft's past performance, I wish Nokia the very best of luck as they are going to need a lot of it.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
What was that phrase we used to hear from Commodore employees? Ah, yes: "Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."
MeeGo still exists and can be freely used by anyone who wants it, no? That is the big difference between this situation and the Commodore situation, where the tech simply had to rot and die with the company. This time it doesn't have to, if any other manufacturer(s) decide to step up and use the free money-making asset that Nokia has so thoughtfully spent so much to develop.
Yeah, we all used to think of that development as a selfish investment, so that Nokia could take back the marketshare they had lost to Apple and the Android-using rivals, but now just as the time to cash in has arrived, we see it was an altruistic gift to the world at the expense of their stockholders, and that they don't want to collect the rewards themselves. How noble. But there are surely still some greedy profit-oriented phone manufacturers out there somewhere, even if not in Finland?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Enough said.
Issue isn't MS OS (which is a joke, at least now). The issue is, Nokia boss did a quick patch which really failed to impress anyone.
If that IDIOT (ask all Symbian users) who still asks for access point while there is a perfectly working wi-fi in range is still there. Or, the other idiot who doesn't embed Birdstep Smart Connect (which is globally licensed) to device menu/ROM to fix issue is still there, what has been fixed? Now they will code the same junk in Windows language, that is all.
Only Apple could figure the real problem and proudly erased their own, decades old OS and switched to OS X. If you think it was smooth, ask any Mac user who had bad luck to install the first incarnations of it. It sucked, 3rd parties were clueless and community were flaming at them. What did they do? They basically did "so don't touch there", ignored.
As a Symbian user, I wished death of Symbian was because of MeeGo, e.g. "Now we have made up our mind, we are allocating all resources (they are gigantic) to MeeGo and Qt development. Qt will soon officially run on anything having a CPU, equally".
Instead of fixing anything other than kernel (it had no problem), they went with someone else 1.0 kernel. EKA2 kernel is the only victim here. Here we rewind progress again, 10 years this time.
Funny is, RIM, who is always being blamed to be old fashioned did take the radical decision. They have chosen QNX, no matter whoever says anything, just remember the 1.44 MB floppy having a web browser and imagine their head start.
Remember one thing, people buying Symbian phone have made their choice for battery life, stability and some degree of freedom.
Anyone thinking they will all line up for iOS is wrong. Android? Perhaps. The real winner here is Blackberry once their QNX based devices start to ship (or handsets upgraded). Now the rumor is BB/QNX has also Android compatibility (that micro kernel can do anything), things will get real interesting.
"Nokia wrote to developers, "Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same.""
Meanwhile... http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/02/nokiawebcast-4.pdf-page-32-of-38.jpg
Symbian, QT, are dead to Nokia.
I wonder what will happen to KDE too. I mean, they rely on Nokia to spit out QT releases, I doubt they can handle both KDE and QT.
Likewise for other companies relying on QT.
It is not like trolltech was some gigantic company to begin with. Qt will live on, perhaps way better as Nokia gave up the stupid idea of pushing Qt framework to host OS which -itself- needs radical changes to begin with.
Ask a N97 user what he/she feels about Qt when the device C: (yes it exists!) has only 20 MB of free disk space. If Nokia gets the hell out of the way, trolltech has pretty much guaranteed the future readiness of qt with the radical 4.x changes. Same for KDE too.
NOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!
[this line is just to go through /. filters ]
"15 years of rivalry ends with Losers Alliance"
If Nokia management/developers spared couple of minutes to read The Register and its mobile section for almost a decade and actually understood it, this wouldn't have happened at first place.
You know, their tradition is "tabloid" so idiot suits may have missed free alarm bells for almost a decade.
I wrote my opinion about this in my blog -> http://kurt555gs.blogspot.com/2011/02/it-looks-like-my-n8-will-be-my-last.html -
This saddens me as a long time Nokia customer.
The whole thing smells.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
This is a good read on the whole matter. Writing's a bit crude in some parts but raises some good points.
These charts also illustrate the point. Nokia is alienating both its development community and its customers. Qt is put on the sidelines. Who's going to develop for a dying platform? A lot of people I know buy Symbian because of the generally familiar UI, which is similar to the Series 40 phones. Windows Phone is radically different.
Ugh.
If you write a mobile application and sell it, Symbian users and the OS itself isn't really forgiving when it comes to quality of code. They aren't really used to crashes, restarting phone, low battery life and sluggishness.
So how do you sell these guys (and girls) some 1.0 OS with a real bad reputation of 3rd party app quality which even lacks copy/paste? I mean for some idiots behind agreement, it is like N8 owner who has been abandoned by Nokia will run to market and buy Windows 1.01 Nokia handset when it ships. Trust me, they actually believe that.
Funny is, even markets didn't buy it.
Is the other N900 sitting in a nice, dry box with the battery out. Unless webOS comes good, I have to eat humble pie over everything I've said about HP in the last 5 years, and HP returns to making engineering products for engineers, please.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
http://www.google.com/finance?q=AMS:NOKA
Nokia and the Symbian OS has always sold well outside the United States, because everywhere but the United States GSM is the standard, and that is Nokia's specialty. Nokia still sells relatively well outside the US, but it still losing to the Android (BIG TIME). I like my Nokia E71x, but I want an Android, however, I'm on the ATT network and switching is more of a hassle, unless GSM becomes the standard. I have messed around with both an Android and a Windows Phone 7, I give the upper hand to the Android platform, although Windows Phone 7 is great in its own right, I would buy a Nokia Windows Phone 7 phone, because of my brand loyalty (to Nokia and Windows).
This is awful news for both Nokia and Maemo/MeeGo. That's bad because that OS would be the best of all if it received a little bit more polish. Neither WinMo, Android nor iOS come close to the multitasking capability of Maemo. It's also completely unrestricted in what it allows the user to do. You have root-access available without cracking or unlocking. It's pretty much as capable as a standard desktop Debian install! How can they throw away that?
I am very happy with my N900 and that won't change with this news but it also will probably be the last Nokia I own. It's really strange to see this piece of news because Maemo is better then WinMo in every single way AND it's free! Why pay for something worse?!
They have following platform based on it:
http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/portfolio/solutions/ubiquity-multiscreen-tv-platform
But I would believe it targets the same marked like MS based one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_TV
The war on market is hard.
There is always the backup option to flip to Android in 2 years if things don't work out with WP7.
You have no inkling of how powerful this makes the combined companies. It basically takes Microsoft's WM7 which is pretty polished, and pairs it with a dedicated hardware maker that has a built in global reach and relationships with a ton of carriers.
Furthermore, those relationships mean WM7 can get carrier billing for apps ad in-app purchases, world wide, almost instantly due to agreements in place - Apple can get by without them because so many people have iTunes account, but any other application provider pretty much has to work with carrier billing.
This makes Microsoft and Nokia a very strong horse indeed in the mobile space. I can even possibly see Microsoft dropping all other carriers for WM7 just to focus on this specific pairing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I liked every Nokia phone (6310,6310i,E71,E63) i used, because i could 100% rely on it.
Why do you think that will change just because they get a better OS for the phone? From a user perspective, WP7 is heads and shoulders above anything Nokia has ever delivered, and arguably better than any of the current competition from Apple and Google. Got a WP7 phone for various reasons, and it beats the living daylights out of my iOS 4.x iPhone 3GS. I dropped Apple completely and do not look back. My Galaxy Tab, though somewhat fun, is not even close, neither in user experience nor in development experience for business/cloud apps. Not even in the same ballpark.
I'm a former Nokia employee, and I talked to a colleague this morning. The Symbian devs see the writing on the wall, and are already updating their resumes.
I've worked on almost every phone OS out there at one time or another, and Symbian was handsdown easily the nastiest to develop for, based on a half-baked version of C++ from before the language was finalized. It deserved to die, but a lot of very smart people are going to be looking for work.
Nokia had to do something drastic - IOS and Android were eating its lunch. But this surprised me - I thought they'd go to a QT only model, where the underlying OS didn't matter to the devs.
I wonder if this is only for smartphones, and the lower level OS used in not-so-smart phones will be retained.
If Nokia went with Android they'd just be one of many Android companies.
Read the press release again. This isn't just Nokia getting WP7, this is Microsoft getting a design party for WP7. If Nokia chose Android how much power would they have over platform direction? None. Now they help call the shots with WP7. It's an incredibly powerful alliance if they can really listen to each other.
The people walking out of Nokia's MeeGo division worried about jobs, don't realize they ALL just because WP7 developers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've never know anyone who actually liked Windows Mobile however. And all these high -end Nokia users are among the least likely WM7 converts. All will now migrate to Android.
Now you've met one. I'm an iPhone owner but WP7 is better than Android.
As for the high-end users - they do not matter, obviously there were not enough to help Nokia so they aren't enough of a loss to hurt them either. You are totally missing where all the Nokia/WP7 smartphone owners are going to come from - the hundreds of MILLIONS of people on the low end who own Nokia phones currently. That's where all the growth in the space is, not from cannibalizing the people who already have a smartphone.
Apple realizes this, and so did Microsoft but MS could do nothing about it... or so many thought. It turns out they can and they did.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
nokia is a loser?
When I read about the new man I was badly impressed by his background (and the fact he doesn't look soooo smart). Maybe the alliance was planned at other levels before the CEO change. They were losing market share cause the lack of a trendy OS, and instead of keep themselves cool and continue to follow the open-source Meego way they chose to suicide. RIP
Well, we will see - i consider WP7 a little practically unttested, but that would be the same for meego. I agree on the Galaxy tab and the Iphone. I also have a Galaxy tab and while is works 'quite well' it is has more quirks than symbian-based phones; since my girlfriend owns an iphone and i can observe there are enough reasons not to buy one...
Way to suck ass, Nokia. Long live the n900!
It's kind of like jumping from the Titanic to the Lusitania.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
FYI, you missed Blackberry, which currently has more marketshare than either WebOS or Windows Phone.
Other than that I agree with your other points. History will show this as the point where Nokia went from sliding down a slope, to falling off the edge of the cliff.
People at PlanetKDE are recommending to let the dust settle. I happen to agree with them, nobody knows what will really happen with QT, it is too early to fork it.
Rethinking email
All phones running Android, iOS, Blackberry, WebOS, WP7, Maemo, etc. are by-definition high-end. It'll take years before any low-end hardware can run those OSs.
WP7 phones are running like $200--$400 unsubsidized. Android and iOS are similarly priced. Symbian is less resource intensive with the cheapest unsubsidized phones costing around $100.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I have two Nokia phones currently (E51 and 5800 XM). It looks like these will be my last Nokias :(
Nokia and Microsoft join mobile forces? Two great FAILs, that taste better together!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
A jackass.
cf Belluzo, Silicon Graphics Inc.
From Bloomberg:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-02/nokia-microsoft-must-join-forces-to-fight-iphone-berenberg-analyst-says.html
and one quote in particular:
Nokia Oyj and Microsoft Corp. need to join forces to avoid the dinosaur fate of mainframe makers,
Berenberg Bank analyst Adnaan Ahmad wrote in an open letter to the chief executive officers of the two companies.
What does a bank analyst know about technology? Nokia and Microsoft aren't going to save each other. The upper management at both companies appear to be inept. Steve Jobs once did a deal with Microsoft to keep Apple alive. Now, do you think Steve Jobs would have made the same decision as Stephen Elop? Nokia is no where near in bad a shape as Apple was when Steve took over. Apple's share price was $12. But Steve got to working on a very long range plan and brought in people to execute it. That seemed to work out for them.
Nokia started to muck with QT badly with Meego. I have a long history of developing with QT. I started to look into it and found that they were "branding" the code. The new slogan was going to be "QT everywhere except Meego." I think the embedded Linux base that Trolltech did for their GreenPhone would have been a good place to start. People complained that performance was lacking. The newer ARM processors would work very well now. Nokia has/had a large contingent of developers in the KDE/QT communities that could develop for their platform. Now all they are going to offer is developing in a MS sandbox using Silverlight and no native code. That means nothing interesting would be developed.
So Elop will probably become a Harvard Business study in how to take the largest mobile cell company down.
This decision is a disaster. Apparently, the market agrees with me. NOK is down %15 as I write this.
A gentle comment to the mod that listed this as "Troll"
Reboot your brain.
Go back and read the Moderator Guidelines.
Rinse and repeat carefully.
Have a nice day.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Not even close to the same thing. At least a Nexus has a reasonable open OS that can do real multitasking.
Actually even the stock iPhone does real multitasking, for a limited subset of tasks.
But realizing the snobbish Nokia user would not do without full multitasking and other configurable things even if they never use them, I added in the Jailbreak part which lets you do anything you like. And No, it Does Not Void the Warranty. Just restore to original state if you need to bring it in for service.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh, and
Burma Shave
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Now that Nokia has chosen Windows Phone for the high end, I can't imagine that Apple would enforce patents against a Microsoft operating system.
I can, or at least try to (and I wish everybody the worst in their patent enforcement attempts). I can also imagine Microsoft trying to enforce against Apple through its zombie proxy Nokia and thereby attempting to avoid antitrust pushback.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
You went from a burning platform to another burning platform.
The big lie in the burning platform memo is that they guy might have saved his skin but he lost his oil. The world is full of guys with nice skin and no oil.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I'm so amazed at Slashdot, and the tech community in general. Microsoft is still the big evil megacorp, doomed in everything they do, always sauntering toward destruction and taking all of us with it. Oh, woe is me, for we are all DOOMED! Oh, by the way, Windows Phone 7 is really neat it has a ton of great features including Xbox and Zune integration that could be absolutely crucial to Microsoft solidifying its overall entertainment plans and pairing with Nokia is an incredibly smart move after how Microsoft got hosed with the Kin series so this is about the most genius deal Microsoft could possibly broken at this juncture to get their platform running in fact when you look at it this is an unprecedented opportunity as Nokia will also be getting in on Xbox branding which opens up all sorts of ridiculously cool options for the future... but other than that, I'm currently pouring a circle of salt around myself to keep the menace of T3H B1LL G4T35 away from me. DAMN HIM AND H- oh, he's not even really running the company anymore. Hm.
I'm sure that this move will be the first step for the END of Nokia.
I'm Nokia user for now, but I'll never use their phones again if they have Windows installed.
Oh! my dear Nokia, what a bad move!!! You signed your dead. My next cellphone will be and iPhone, and better yet an iPhone nano "unlocked" if the rumors are right.
Goodbye Nokia!
"Nokia Jumps from a 'Burning Platform' onto a Sinking Ship"
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
If they ditched the projects completely, then the projects would move to more fertile soil where they could possibly become a competitive threat. So what they will do is this: maintain these projects on life support, holding out the tantalizing promise of somehow remaining relevant, meanwhile maintaining the control necessary to ensure these projects fade into obscurity. Nokia is a spider, QT/KDE is a bug, and Nokia's continued support is poison.
This needs to be recited every day at business school: Synergy never happens! Synergy never happens! Synergy never happens!
For those who don't know, GeeksPhone produces 100% open phones (Android with open-source drivers) rooted from factory.
This will be my next phone.
should read
I wonder what is going to become of Nokia's battle with Apple. Will Nokia and MS enter into patent cross-licensing agreements? Presumably they would if Nokia was to make and sell WInPhone7 devices. Not only would this potentially void some of Apple's patent claims against Nokia, but even if Apple won in the ITC, the devices it is seeking an injunction against will not be around much longer.
MS want to go after Android, and with an MS man at the helm of Nokia, it is a pretty big win for WinPhone7. This may hurt Android market share for a little bit, but I'll wager it won't be for very long.
However, MS is playing catch-up with iOS and Android and is losing badly. Wasn't Elop complaining the other day that Nokia was stuck playing catch-up? How can throwing their lot in with MS help them? Unless Elop is playing this deal with MS, so he has a magic bullet against Apple, I can't see their market position getting any better.
Maybe this deal won't be around much longer if there is a shareholder revolt against this decision.
If Nokia was a ship. Then Microsoft was the friendly iceberg.
Then Nokia has renamed itself, the Titanic.
I read comments from them all the time but I never see them.
seems like they love their phones, or something.
Like anyone can even know that
The idea was funded with pizza for Symbian Foundation employees in their spare time. I have grave doubts they'll produce anything now
(a) Symbian is dead (or at least confined to a dungeon within Nokia)
(b) The free pizza ran out
Something about the deaf leading the blind comes to mind.
The blogosphere is pretty happy about the move. Engadget and Gizmodo viewers are eager to see the new device(s), and some are ready to buy them.
I know there's a lot of MS hatred here, but sticking with Symbian, which is losing developers at an alarming rate, or going to WP7 which is gaining them at a reasonable rate seems to have some logic behind it. That said, having been through an iPhone, Android (Galaxy S), and now a WP7 phone, I do think that WP7 is quite good. There's stuff missing, but it's not a deal breaker.
Time will tell how this partnership works out, but if they continued on the current course, they'd just be dead in the water. At least this is an attempt to change course from the iceberg.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
A Nokia follower for years... Was looking so much forward to Meego.
Nokia, WTF? you F*** up, good by and good night.
They got a ex-Microsoft guy, they got Microsoft. How appears to have close ties with Microsoft with bringing them the money Nokia has because of there low specs phones. But that is still a big market for Nokia.
This Microsoft step that Nokia is taking is no surprise given how is now in charge of Nokia. The question is how much damage this man is going to do before they fire him at Nokia. But my guess that the damage from his partnership is going to cost Nokia billions in the long run.
Also remember what Apple got out of the deal.
Where Apple was brilliant was the whole MS deal was only a stop gap. Apple did not rely on it for their entire future. Apple paid back MS the money very quickly. Apple also knew that dangers of relying on others for key pieces of software. Within a few years, Apple launched their own browser and their own office suite. Now Apple Works is not as full featured as Office but for most people it works well enough. Many here would agree that Safari is a far better browser than IE and only within the past few years has MS bothered to update IE (but not for Mac). With a former MS exec at the helm, I don't know if Nokia's long-term best interests will be served.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
After all no one will be making a Windows Phone 7 anytime soon.
At this stage there are not many, and this deal guarantees dominance over all other WP7 vendors.
But the real question is, will there be other WP7 phone makers going forward. From the handset maker side, why would you go with WP7 now knowing the Microsoft is helping Nokia compete against you?
From Microsoft's side, they just gone THE LARGEST handset maker to commit to a full blown no-holds-barred perfect-at-any-cost WP7 phone. Why would you even WANT any other partners when you have Nokia? The combination of Nokia and Microsoft could essentially become Apple, but with an ever broader ranges of handsets because that is what Nokia does.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Finland's Nokia is lost. It is now turned into a patent troll. Goodbye to technologies like Webkit, Qt, MeeGo, welcome to Win7 mobile. Surrender, surrender.
Unfortunately their patents spell trouble for Google. Apple will probably make peace with MS and Nokia combined by cross licensing certain intellectual property. Google by contrast has little of value and lots of money to give up. Android may become too expensive for them to continue with.
It is interesting to read the reasons Nokia as the worlds biggest phone manufacturer rejected both Google and Android and picked Microsoft. Competing manufacturers may be reconsidering their options now for the same reasons.
Android was a big loser today. For some that hasn't sunk in yet. Think!
MSFT stock actually dropped today after the announcement (not as much as NOK, but noticeably).
MeeGo not only exists but Intel continues to develop it for various uses... If a manjor mobile manufacturer wants to take the chance and try a Medfield (or a successor) based phone, Intel would gladly do even more of the work for them...
Issue isn't MS OS (which is a joke, at least now).
Curious as to how you define "a joke" here. I had the iPhone 3G for a year, upgraded to the 3GS when my contract ran out, had that for a year. Got a Windows Phone 7 that I needed for some work related development, and after about a week I stopped using the iPhone completely. What specifically do you feel is a joke with WP7. Just curious.
As a person who uses smart phones since Nokia 7650, I know what is required to have a decent smart connected device experience. It is basically everything which MS wouldn't care about. It is in their culture, they are desktop/server OS vendors.
A zero day on a Desktop OS could be easily prevented with a decent antivirus, security policy. On a mobile, connected device, it is out of the question. Windows Update service can easily use more than 220MB of RAM and block an entire CPU core, on mobile it means your device is completely unusable.
...was that despite their large market share in mobile phones, everyone was running different versions of Symbian OS and thus couldn't run the same applications. Had Nokia let its users upgrade their OS this problem would have been solved, because by 'forcing' people to buy a new phone to get a newer version of an OS there is always the danger that the users will buy from a different company. Of course Nokia could have also taken more steps to keep its current users pleased, like developing more software (e.g. an .ePub viewer).
Nokia is one of the largest companies in Finland, and they had the chance too choose linux based android. They did choose Microsoft technology instead, and annonced big layoffs. Windows Phone has absolutely no relationship to finland, whereas linux has. Linux can be seen as some kind of invention from finland (because linus torvalds was born in finland). The decision for Windows Phone can be questioned for other reasons: The CEO is a former microsoft employee, and thereby naturally tends to favor microsoft. Nokias choice will piss off the employees of Nokia, the government, the people in finland. Powerful groups. Having a state against you that depends much on your success is not a good thing. They will set the CEO under pressure and question his objectivity. IMO: As soon as the contracts with microsoft allow it they will abandon Windows together with the CEO, and switch to android, because it is open (thus, they can always have it if they want), based on linux. Their position will no longer be that of a marked leader at this time, but their brand will still be known all over the world. Combining their brand with the power of android might give them a second chance.
The problem with Android is that Nokia will need to compete with other manufacturers that sell Android phones. However, none of the major manufacturers are selling Gnu/Linux phones (discounting the N900), so Nokia could have chosen it instead of Windows Phone 7.
All the execs that have been leaving MS lately are probably courting other companies to become their new CEO. Once they are the CEO (like Elop), they will suddenly decide to "partner" with MS.
1. Execs leave MS
2. Become CEOs of other companies
3. Those companies decide to partner with MS
4. Bypass any monopoly investigation
5. Profit
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
I've owned 3 Nokia phones. My current unit is an N900, which is wonderful for a software engineer. Apparently this will be my last Nokia device. All the work on their Linux infrastructure... discarded. Good bye Nokia.