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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."
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.
"15 years of rivalry ends with Losers Alliance"
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The Android bootloader lockdown? What? Just stop buying Motorola devices and all will be fine... you've still got HTC and Samsung building decent phones with completely open bootloaders.
Where did my link go? What the hell?
Attn Nokia: Was nice knowing you
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Don't kid yourself about developing nations. I live in one. We have one of the most sophisticated cell phone networks in the world. Almost everyone here has a cell phone because landlines are unfordable for the majority of our citizens. Most phones here can at least run Java. The social network of choice here is called Mxit has been developed using Java for mobiles. Its cheap to communicate via Mxit (much cheaper than SMS) so a large portion of our nation does. Symbian will probably end up dominating this market segment for Nokia, while their smartphone segment runs Windows 7 for the meantime until they find a better strategy.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
According to the German Spiegel, Alberto Torres (responsible board member for MeeGo) just left the board. So yeah, MeeGo is basically left for dead.
Apart from Google selling root friendly Android phones, as well as some small independent handset makers selling root friendly Android phones, HTC selling phones that can be rooted with a mouse click and the only actual handset maker to back up your claim of locking down the bootloader that I know of is Motorolla. Also Microsoft is embracing the hacker community over Windows 7 phone thus far. So yeah, other than all those phones.
Then KDE will be screwed.
Nope.
Not even close to the same thing. At least a Nexus has a reasonable open OS that can do real multitasking.
You seem to assume that the only point of sharing code and APIs is to run desktop applications. This is not the case. If you look at Maemo, Meego, and webOS, you'll find they share many things in common with the Linux desktop - Pulseaudio, d-bus (maemo), libpurple (webOS), SDL (webOS), bluez, WebKit, and many more drivers, services, daemons, and libraries that can be used for both desktop systems and phones. The point of these APIs isn't so that you, as the end user, can run applications written for the API. It's so that developers already familiar with one API can easily write for both platforms. In addition, the many pieces of software used by webOS, etc are sent upstream.