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Intel Committed To MeeGo Despite Nokia Defection
CWmike writes "Intel put on a brave face Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, insisting that there is continued strong support from it and many companies for MeeGo, the open source software platform that Nokia last week said it would abandon in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. 'Intel is disappointed at Nokia but life goes on,' said Intel's Renee James. 'Our decision and resolve on MeeGo is only stronger.' She pointed to a long list of companies participating in MeeGo development, including competitors AMD, TI and ST Ericsson; operators including Orange, Telefonica and Sprint; and software companies including Novell and Wind River. Intel expects to see MeeGo tablets shipping this year based on its Atom chip. Handsets will follow, James said. Despite its enthusiasm, however, Intel is sure to be negatively impacted by Nokia's decision."
I'd like to try it.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Let me be the first to say:
Thank you Intel!!!!!
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I have no doubt that Intel can complete MeeGo alone if need be, and even find a company or two to release handsets (MS did, after all). The question is: how do they convince application developers to target it? There are already two well-established players, iOS and Android, which have the critical mass. WP7 was late to the party, and consequently struggles hard for developer attention, but it at least has the advantage of being easiest to develop for. And still, only 8k apps so far there, with many big players notably missing. When MeeGo comes in, say, in a year (and I'm being optimistic here), why would mobile developers care to divert resources from existing well-entrenched platforms?
Any chance to get a near Maemo-like level of openness in a platform is gone. Intel won't drive that, quite the opposite.
Even if MeeGo lives on, it's soul has died.
So we've got several big contenders or those who want to be in the "smart phone" space (an increasingly meaningless term, as even my dumb Symbian phone can do a fair bit). Android and iOS are the biggest, then you've got Blackberry, Win Mobile 7, WebOS, MeeGo, and in the "dumber" category Symbian.
Three of these are Linux-based to one extent or another: Android, WebOS, and MeeGo. WIth the way apps get developed and sold, it's not clear to me that all three can survive on top of their more-closed counterparts (Blackerry and iOS, primarily). I've heard that various platforms are seeking compatibility with Android apps, but I doubt it'll be perfect.
Given that Nokia seems to be giving up on it, MeeGo seems like the obvious candidate to be the one dropped (its technical merits aside). There's plenty of fragmentation within Android alone now. Personally, I think the biggest potential loss is either the dropping or downplaying of Qt by Nokia. It'd be awesome to see Qt become a cross-mobile-platform toolkit to aid developers (on everything but iOS, of course). While I switched away from KDE during the 4.X debacle, it's clear that Qt was superior in many ways. Its commercial underpinnings seemed to really bolster its quality.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Is there anyone out there that really expected Intel to publicly say "Well, we lost Nokia--so we've decided to fold up MeeGo"?
#DeleteChrome
http://nokiaplanb.com/
Welp...Nokia's loss. If I were to seriously consider another phone other than my iPhone, it would be something running MeeGo. Real Linux ftw.
I'm a Nokia employee working at MeeGo now, after last Friday's announcement almost like before. No, I'm not being fired, and none of the important projects have even been cancelled yet (some obviously untenable gunk is being descoped; good riddance). You'd have to wait a bit longer to see the "defection", I suspect.
Oh nozers! The people might have to choose! How can they possibly!
But the people have always been doing that. Really, do you also wonder just how many fast food joints people can handle? That another McD new burger is just going to fragment the market?
How many car makers are there? TV makers? Cloth makers? Drills makers? Lots! And nobody is confused.
But oh nozers, computers/mobile phones are different hence Apple might as well give up and stop selling OSX because nobody wants to have a choice... meanwhile Jobs is not laughing all the way to the bank, the bank comes to him.
The market can support a lot and does. The N900 was a pure linux phone surely of appeal only to geeks and was sold out. More then a million sold for a test phone.
Meego has a unique advantage, it is the only OPEN phone and this DOES matter. Have you ever opened an app store? Everything people want to charge money for. Totally incapable media players and they want money for it. Well Meego got Linux and therefor easy access to open, free and highly capable media players.
Imagine this "Our phone doesn't come with an app store or market. All the software is free." Could that possibly sell?
And if for nothing else, Meego is Intels attempt to get a share of the mobile market. No other mobile OS runs as far as I know on X86. Meego does run on Atom and Intel wants to sell them rather then see Arm control the entire mobile market with the constant risk that one day it might be put on the desktop.
There are far greater concerns here then "I am so confused by having to choose a phone" that exists in your mind.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The board member who said Nokia using Android was like a finish boy pissing in his pants proved that they have no concept of what is going on in the business considering MeeGo is hard to distinguish from Android from a board level view. Then they find religion, realize they are producing last generation crap, and then proceed to stick their head completely up their own ass by adopting a Windows platform. Following the pee in the pants logic somehow it is better to have Balmer piss in your mouth for a licensing fee, wtf?
Nokia makes great hardware, I love my e70, e71, & e61. The n97 is a crapfest of biblical proportions, no one at Nokia used it ever before it shipped. It takes me 6 taps to call a person back if I use the touch screen. 6 fucking taps. In addition it doesn't automatically call back the number that called you. They have an alphanumeric keypad for SMS (on a qwerty phone) but don't for the dialer; want to call 1-800-Nokiablablabla? Too fucking bad, like it would help anyway they have one fucking service center for the entire US. Btw the hardware division has carte blanch over software... needs 22.6 MB for a app? Too bad you are only getting what hardware thinks you need. See n97 again.
Drink the Android coolaid you stupid prats, next stop is I short your god damn stock.
Can three turkeys make and eagle?
I will not be surprised that in few months from now a triumvirate of Microsoft, Intel and Nokia emerge as a consortium to push Nokia made mobile devices with Intel mobile chips running MS software. Entirely possible...
"Define dumb". Consumers seem to be enjoying the shiny restrictions on choice lately in mobile op systems.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
[the original article wonders why intel hasn't broken into the mobile space, successfully]
Intel's flagship CPU design consumes far too much power, and that really is the end of the matter. I really don't understand why people don't understand this.
The entire x86 architecture is optimised for speed and low latency, whereas ARM processors are optimised for low power, trading that low power for higher latency.
The interesting thing is that the latency trade-offs made in ARM (and MIPS) processor designs becomes... very much less relevant as the CPU geometries go down. 28nm means that ARM CPUs can easily run at 2.5ghz, and MIPS CPUs at somewhere around 2ghz. Combine these CPUs with modern 1066 DDR3 RAM i find it difficult to see how Intel and AMD, with their highly speed-optimised - and bloated - CISC architectures can beat the price-performance and performance-per-watt metrics in the all-important "good enough for most people" bracket.
Sure Intel and AMD's offerings will always be "fastest", but do you really need a Six or Eight Core 4ghz CPU costing $1000 to do a few emails, when a $7 750mhz Dual-Core MIPS will do the exact same job?
So right now, we're witnessing a series of "ship-jumping" moves - the blind leading the blind - in desperate bids to stay afloat, where the sensible companies are sticking with Free Software OSes, based around the Linux Kernel, because it's Free Software and the Linux Kernel that can run on absolutely any platform, and Windows simply can't.
Microsoft cut off the DEC Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS platforms, over 15 years ago in order for Windows NT to compete internally with Windows 95; now they're paying the price and they're going to take down with them anyone else who clings to their coat-tails.
There may be restrictions, but the smartness of them is the draw.
But when you take that model that iOS and Android make attractive, and you come out with Win 7 Mobile, you're throwing a big pile of dumb at the smart. The market seems to see it, too.
If MeeGo is Fisher-Price to Android's Gund, it's going to fail no matter who develops it.
Several operating systems, plus a few additional API which seek to be cross platform. At a minimum, Adobe Flash, Oracle/Sun JavaFX, and presumably Microsoft Silverlight have aspirations of that sort, adding 3 additional API to the mix.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Well, Nokia abandoned MeeGo yesterday, when they WHOLESALE ADOPTED MICROSOFT WINDOWS PHONE 7 AS THEIR SINGLE OS STRATEGY, PHASING OUT EVEN SYMBIAN WHICH CURRENTLY GENERATES MOST OF THEIR REVENUE. Can we please get some Slashdot users how are not complete morons?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The news is sad. I was stunned at what an amazingly powerful-yet-friendly platform Maemo is, and had high hopes for new Nokia N900-like devices running MeeGo in 2011-12. Instead, it looks like Nokia will be shoveling out devices running some zune-based drm-laden insecure crapware from Redmond. They're not getting my money to be sure, but the big picture is sad.
Let's see the sequence:
- Nokia picks up some executive deadweight cast off from Microsoft.
- He steers Nokia to buying shiny-but-slow crap from his former employer.
- He also dumps Nokia's Linux-based collaboration projects. (Maybe Elop's just a mole, and this was his main task?)
- Nokia commits to releasing the massively-processor-heavy WinMo7 OS on cheaper hardware for developing markets. (**HTC snickers and says "Good luck with that, sucker!!! **)
- Nokia investors recoil. The stock price drops... and keeps dropping.
- Customers shrug.
- Nokia employees assume this is a tacit admission that the company is going bankrupt.
- The employees' Union asks about severance packages.
- Nokia runs more ads for Symbian*3 on the N9... as if the higher-end N900 and its OS never existed.
- Nokia can't easily retreat, having crossed/burned/blown up it's Linux/Maemo/MeeGo/Android-related bridges.
Summary: Burned bridges, impossible commitments, angry employees, a doofus CEO, declining revenues, bewildered customers, a weak economy, and it just got in bed with a company that eats its partners after mating.
This isn't just a bad decision, it's an implosion.
-x
I think not...(*poof*)
Now I just hope I can find a phone I can run it on. I'm not sure I like how Android works all that much.
look no further than Windows Mobile.
Are you kidding me? Windows mobile was a joke. Why do you think Apple stole so easily MIcrosoft's market share in the mobile market? Because windows mobile was really bad, people just used it because they didn't really have any alternatives.
MS is also trying to buy market share here. (Which they also tried in the game controller market)
Their mobile OS tanked on launch, so this is how they plan to pick it up.
Alas, Nokia shone in the low end of the market - which is going to get eaten by the features from high end phones trickling down and that end of the phone market is unlikely to stand the bloat and margins MS's OS will demand.
So Nokia is still trying to move into the high end of the market where they were unsuccessful - now with the added deadweight of an "already losing" OS.
Best guess, Nokia dead in 3, MS burns billions trying to buy share, maybe they'll be as successful as in the games market - where AFAIK they still burn money every year - but I suspect we'll see the same pattern of the good developers heading for the horizon every time MS buys more "share" - followed by the acquired company rapidly shrinking and MS "share" barely keeping up.
That was precisely my point - WinMo was designed with the same mentality as a desktop OS, trivially scaled down to mobile devices. That's why it was bad.
really informative keep up the great blog
Wow... you planning on starting a garden, or do you really just love tossing manure around?
Zune is one of many parts of WP7, but "zune-based" is completely inaccurate.
WP7 can play streaming music, which for legal reasons MS can only provide DRMed (though you can also download DRM-free MP3s, and play them / copy them between PCs). I suppose you think any system that has any form of DRM at all is "drm-laden" though... I hope you never buy commercial DVDs.
Anything you can point to that justifies calling the man a "deadweight" executive? A good exec can do a lot for a company. If nothing else, he's frank and articulate, and doesn't try to conceal problems.
Of all the accusations you could level at WP7, you chose "slow" for some reason. That pretty much cripples your credibility. Why not complain about how it launched without HTML5 support, or some actually valid complaint? Running on identical hardware, WP7 performs better than Android (http://wmpoweruser.com/windows-phone-7-vs-android-gingerbread-on-the-htc-hd2/).
The N900 had some good things going on its software for a Linux handheld (bear in mind that the vast majority of the world has no interest in Linux, and neither Android nor WebOS make a big deal out of their choice of kernel in advertising). Its hardware was out of date two years ago, though. Slowish processor, low RAM, and for $DEITY's sake a resistive touchscreen... it was obsolete at release (late 2009).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Consumers buying desktops have brand loyalty to Windows because they know how to operate it. But they don't like it.
Those same consumers buying phones aren't going to jump in because the phone runs some version of Windows. So it's just a cost.
What MS might do well, though, is integrate the phone with their game platform, Xbox. But that's a marketing gamble. The biggest selling apps for smartphones are music/entertainment, and games. There's no platform loyalty there, and only a little game loyalty. No lock-in for developers or consumers. It will never be the cash cow that Office and Windows have been. Likewise with maps and directions based on GPS.
There's a high-price market for a PDA+phone that helps the busy people schedule, manage contacts, and shop, but outside that market, it's all very cost sensitive.
The way ears and fingers are constructed, there isn't much of a market for a phone with a full keyboard, splitting the market. And voice input is still not capable of bridging the gap.
I think in the long run, hardware costs will dominate, software features will converge thru imitation, and it's the wristwatch business all over again.
I18N == Intergalacticization
Sorry, got your point now. But parent was right, most of native Linux applications actually fit quite nicely in the n900 without modifications.
How did Apple do it?
After all, Nokia had been producing smartphones for a long time before the iPhone. Surely they had the market sewn up before Apple came along?
FTFY.
Breakfast served all day!
Um, you forgot two lines:
- Nokia can't easily retreat, having crossed/burned/blown up it's Linux/Maemo/MeeGo/Android-related bridges.
- ?????
- Profit!!!
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
meego is just linux with a nice ui. and ubuntu is entering the tablet market and it will pretty mutch crush meego no matter who is backing it. not to metion android aruldy dommanting it will be very hard for another os to enter the fry.
Going whole hog for W7 is a disaster for Nokia.
And Nokia's stock continues to drop.
I downloaded the netbook version of Meego, and ran it on my Dell Mini 10v - Stated as supported by Meego on the download page.
Wifi wasn't detected, GUI widgets were not correctly sized (spin boxes stood out rather obviously), and everything felt pretty clunky.
Why do companies like Nokia and Intel seem to think that consumers are actually willing to accept this kind of unpolished garbage? If you aren't prepared to go through the whole OS and every shipped application, menu by menu, widget by widget, and exhaustively test that everything looks perfect, and everything works perfectly, then just don't bother. Bugs will slip through, but if you try hard to find and fix them, they shouldn't be obvious within 2 minutes of booting the product. If it seems like too much work, and/or your hands are tied because you can't control what sort of shit upstream shovels at you, then you're wasting your time. The product will never be suitable for consumer use.
Intel's latest notebook GPUs (GMA500,GMA600) won't work with Meego. Biggest goddamn hardware company in the world and the GPUs you put in your chipsets don't work on your own OS. It's pathetic. You're committed to the platform, but not committed enough to produce hardware that will run it, despite this supposedly being Intels core business and supposedly competency? And the GPU hardware you produce that does support Meego turns out a lousy framerate compared to the same thing running a competitors (Apple, Microsoft) OS. You actually produce drivers for Windows that make your own OS platform look like a slug. Thats not committment to the platform, thats a bad joke.
Really, what does Intel's committment to Meego mean to real world users? So far, it seems to mean crap hardware support, crap software and a crap UI. Having so much of your work done by the Linux kernel, Xorg, GNU and Qt developers (and the rest of the Linux community) is supposed to make it easier for you to focus on these things and produce something of quality, it's not an excuse to just shrug and ship an awful product.
Consumers enjoy having one handy place to buy almost any application they can imagine, on a device with an extremely responsive and nice user interface, running by far the best mobile browser ever made.
Consumers also enjoy the fact that their applications have been vetted for quality even though the process might be a bit flawed from a geek's perspective.
They can fuck all care if there is Unix underneath and can't root the bastard.
With that out of the way, despite the fact that Meego is a Linux based OS, do you really think that the various device manufacturers won't take steps to limit your ability to do what you want with it? Many Android phones and tablets are just as well locked down as any iOS device. That goes double for Windowns Syndrome phones.
If you strike it down it will become more powerful than you can imagine.
I first thought Intel was just feeling too sad after Nokia dumped them for MS, and that's why they're going with MeeGo eventhough they knew Nokia's abandonment of the OS will affect how the OS and its tablet sell in a big way. You know what I think of it now: It just doesn't matter, everybody is in there are many many tablets that were introduced lately for this market. Heck companies you didn't even know cared about such a thing are releasing tablets (ViewSonic?). we already have so many OS's (HP's WebOS, Android, iOS, MeeGo ...... i don't even recall the rest)
I don't think the market can take up this many choices, somebody gotta fall real soon
Canonical had started porting Dalvik to Ubuntu, but it seems they stopped...
If Intel ports Dalvik to MeeGo, they would instantly get access to all the Android apps. In fact, a MeeGo device could potentially launch different versions of the Android OS depending on what the user wants to run, making it the most compatible Android device!
PS. I had made a longer (and better) post about the above, previewed it, then saw it submitted, but now it has just vanished. Is this one of the new layout kinks?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Even though the new CEO is showing his Microsoft roots more than clearly Nokia didn't declare end of MeeGo. They said separately that they are continuing with MeeGo as an another mobile operating system.
I want to also inform you about a "rebellion" inside Nokia. A group of Nokia share holders are going to request dropping of Microsoft contract, kicking out Elop and concentrating on both MeeGo and developing markets.
Elop has already shown that he doesn't know his own business by incorrectly stating "Android is larger than Symbian" (false), being worried about yearly market of Arab Emirates (while China alone makes a larger growth in a MONTH for Nokia, not to mention India and other Asian countries), stating that Apple is the largest on mobile phones (which is Nokia itself with customers and products Apple is not competing with, yet), forgetting Samsung completely (while Apple has the front page, Samsung is the true Nokia level competitor that should NOT be bypassed), etc. etc. Making mistakes on such BASIC things, that's more than worrying – even when seen through US share holders' hype-filled eyes.
Nobody produces "Complex Instruction Set Computers", or "Reduced Instruction Set Computers" anymore. Instead, all the other CISC architectures died, while the x86 turned into an "Absurdely Complex Instruction Set Computer", that require an entire computer (RISC) as a fetcher. Also, the old RISC architectures turned into some "Simple and Large Instruction Set Computers", that exchange some more bits on the instructions for being as powerfull as the old CISC. Yet being simple they don't need as many transistors, what is good news for price and power consuption.
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