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!
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'?
"I hate to say it but $CURRENT_MOBILE_MICROSOFT_OS is great (unlike prior versions)".
Time and again I read this, and time and again people don't ever learn.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
The problem with Android, IMO, is that the entire ecosystem composing it and much of what surrounds it is entirely insular, and to no great benefit.
It shares no common libraries or interfaces with what you find in most Linux distributions. It uses a unique libc that no other distribution uses. It uses a file system layout that is not found anywhere else. Its GUI rendering subsystem is completely unique and incompatible with all others.
The end result is that changes to Android stay within the Android system and do not benefit open source projects outside of it. And projects outside of it require heavy rewrites to work, at all, on Android. Not to mention that Android has no real repository type system, so you're left trading .apk files and latching on to the market, which is only available on the default builds of some devices and not at all on others.
Maemo was developed with that compatibility in mind, and is a large part of the reason I bought it. It was most of what the OpenMoko Freerunner tried to be, and MeeGo only improved the openness aspect of it. MeeGo allowed mobile devices to retain continuity with the rest of the open source ecosystem you find in most desktop Linux systems, thus changes and improvements to both ends benefits everyone. In addition, it removed the non-device-specific closed bits and created a platform independent of any one handset vendor.
Android leaves you a second (or more likely, third) class citizen in this effort, as the AOSP does not, last I checked, flow upstream into the Android core and the AOSP only receives the latest changes to Android after it's been delivered to device manufacturers (see Honeycomb and Motorola.)
So this is very much a Microsoft victory against Open Source, if not Free Software, projects in the mobile space. And Android is not a way forward that is very fair to end users and non-corporate developers.