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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.
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.
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.