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Nokia and Open Source — a Trial By Fire
An anonymous reader writes "The H has a damning piece on Nokia's open source smart phone projects, Maemo and MeeGo, and why they failed. 'They did dumb stuff like re-writing the whole networking stack, duplicating as they went. So instead of re-using NetworkManager and improving it, and getting to market fast – they re-wrote, got something that still doesn't work well, failed to push Linux forward, and failed. Repeat that for every technology pick and you get the idea,' said Andrew Wafaa. 'The N900 was a great product. Immediately [after] it was launched it was announced that it was a dead product, ISV-wise. They announced a Qt re-write/project re-set. Then they merged Maemo into MeeGo, giving another project re-set. Then, when they were coming up to release in September 2010, there was another project reset to switch to a different Qt technology (even the Qt groups in-fight in Nokia). In consequence they have no shipping product.' At the same time, 'both Nokia and Intel were working on separate handset UIs using Qt, the former proprietary, the latter open-source. A better worked example of squandering your leadership role and wrestling yourself to the ground is hard to see. Nokia deserve their trial by fire – and I hope the people who truly screwed up the amazing Linux opportunity that was the N900 get shut down in the process.'"
Anyone who thinks Nokia isn't truly incompetent, and has been for almost a decade, is blinded by stupidity. Let this company die the well-deserved death it needs.
Nokia's former CEO, a lawyer, failed to notice the product groups were in such disarray. How cool must his job have been? He got to fly around the world in his suit spending money, while his product guys are achieving nothing for years, and he didn't even notice!
Now the in-fighting cannot frequently cripple development of other projects.
Makes me feel a lot less bad for the Nokia employees that walked out. Although likely moving at the whims of management, this report makes them sound more like hobbyists that simply want to build their own and tinker, rather than shipping a good product.
It certainly makes a good case for replacing a lot of the management as well. If employees end up leaving as a result, then they probably weren't great employees anyway, or they did not understand the problems that they were causing to their own development cycle by diligently following those managers out the door.
That is Nokia's big problem IMHO. The US has the biggest GNP of any single nation. It is a large unified market and it is just dumb to ignore it. Nokia didn't adapt the the US model by working with carriers to offer subsidized smart phones and didn't offer CDMA smart phones. Way back when Sprint had no really interesting smart phones I would have jumped on a Nokia smart phone. Now we have Android, IOS, WebOS, RIM, and WP7. I just got an EVO 4g but I would have bought the N900 if I could have for the same price and on Sprint.
Nokia believed that it could live marketing to the rest of the world and it did for a good while. Thing is all the new smart phone OSs are coming from North America.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Wafaa's preferred solution was that Elop "should have forked Android, and done it better, made some of it open source, and wrestled the ecosystem away from Google. Can't be that hard. That would have been my strategy."
That doesn't give me a great feeling of confidence in the business/project management experience of that particular developer.
I'd hope that they don't screw it up further by throwing out the QWERTY slider form factor. Failing that, I would only hope that a keyboard can be hacked on to address such a deficiency.
An onscreen keyboard not only takes up screen space, it also is worse off versus an actual keyboard. That, and the hinge is fine enough on the N900 to transfer to the N950.
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Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smart
Yeah, smart in contrast to the disaster that the submission is highlighting. Somehow, I have to think there might have been a third option in there somewhere...
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I don't get it. How can a company that has made some great phones, and made one of the most successful phone OSs around, fail so hard at trying to recreate their success?
Oh, wait, that's right. Management.
How's the hijacking of Nokia, a good manufacturer of phones before you were there, going?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Open source != cheapest
Troll logic failed.
It didn't take seeing all this happening with the N900. I had a N800 and developed for it and saw that stuff then. That's when I bailed to iOS. At least with that you had some OS maturity and a platform that knew where it was going. I liked the N800--an open linux *computer* for my pocket. But the disarray of Nokia...
I'd rather take the Maemo / Meego stacks over the more locked-down Android. But Elop wants to kill a perfectly good phone with a more-open-than-Android stack.
Then replace it with an SD card mangling, homebrew-co-opting WP7 platform.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
By now the 3rd option, of completely reforming your internal structure was too late. They're too far behind in the smartphone wave to internally restructure, then launch a new mobile platform.
One can certainly disagree with their choice of MS as the 3rd party OS, but I think given the circumstances it was pick one of MS or Google, or be facing serious problems in 2 or 3 years. That mountain of cash MS has might help them out for a bit.
> If employees end up leaving as a result, then they probably weren't great employees anyway
Yes, all the rats who are abandoning the ship are clearly unfit.
Open source != cheapest
Exactly. Open source is usually far more expensive than most other options and with usually lousier quality.
From a relatively free Maemo platform to a walled garden is not an improvement. That, and unlike the iDevices, you can do all the things that Apple decrees that you cannot do and have all the things that Apple decrees that you shall not have.
Some of the things you're missing:
Non-carrier dependent tethering
Out-of-the-box root access
A mature, true-to-form Linux stack
OS upgrades that dont obliterate your personal data
Integrated QWERTY keyboard
Removable / expandable internal batteries
A standard USB connector
Non-proprietary screws
While you're waiting for the next upgrade to be jailbroken, many others are doing things with the phone that would be breakthroughs for the iDevice. With the current release of software.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I think Nokia's Elop now has what is known as buyer's remorse.
Here's the most troubling starememt from Nokia's Inverstors page
"Nokia and Microsoft have entered into a non-binding term sheet. The planned partnership remains subject to negotiations and execution of the definitive agreements by the parties and there can be no assurances that the definitive agreements would be entered into".
(Emphasis mine).
On the whole, Microsoft has a probable benefit. For Nokia on the other hand, I am not so sure given Microsoft's past.
Should Nokia fail to dance to Microsoft's tune, Microsoft will drop it like a plague leaving Nokia holding the bag. At that point, it will be 'over' for Nokia in the smart-phone space. Sad indeed.
Intel would have been better off keeping Moblin by itself. Even the name Meego sounds retarded. Now the whole brand is damaged goods.
It's weird how many engineers fall into the trap of trying too much when settling for good enough would be the right solution. You can always improve stuff in the next version, even if part of the code is ugly. I think the Hurd project has shown how well it works when you insist on getting it "just right".
There are exceptions (Blizzard for example), but often Good Enough is just what you need. Especially with OSS, where the user base doubles as QA and a feedback channel for new ideas.
.: Max Romantschuk
HEADLINE: The two kids that couldn't get dates to the prom decide to dance together. RESET one more time.
Did George Broussard go to work for Nokia or something?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
and I hope the people who truly screwed up the amazing Linux opportunity that was the N900 get shut down in the process.'"
That is not how it works. The people responsible for this mess will blame Linux and tell it's not ready for "prime time" and go with Microsoft's Windows Mobile instead.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
That mountain of cash MS has might help them out for a bit.
Yeah, I'm sure that didn't hurt too many people in upper management's feelings. Only time will tell if it will be worth it in the long run for the shareholders. Windows Phone 7 is extremely speculative at this point. So far, it little more than an also-ran and that doesn't appear to be on any trajectory for change any time soon. Characterizing it as the "third choice" in the grand scheme of mobile OS's as it is in a lot of the media is just pure dishonesty. I'm sure RIM might have something to say about that.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Part of the problem is that the egos are waaaay bigger than the IQs. And they have some smart people. They do however know that they are geniuses and everyone else is an idiot, so there is a huge case of "Not Invented Here"... LOL, now it isn't.
There is also this habit of a 6 monthly reorg. Any project which is longer than 6 months is likely not going to happen, the reorg will change all the priorities as the next batch of geniuses move into position and try to make a name by re-inventing the wheel, this time in a shade of green.
Then there is the "healthy antagonism" (again, LOL) between organisations within the company which generate money and those which are set up as cost sinks. The money generators don't have to pay the costs of their wish lists, so they have very big, and regularly changing wish lists, and the cost sinks are squeezed to reduce their budgets causing bottlenecks, delays and frustration. Semi-open warfare ensues regularly.
The word "DOH", could be applied to Nokia's management structures.
Here's the thing, change was badly needed, but they just jumped into a burning fire with Windows, MS can brick Samsung's Windows phones at will, same now for Nokia.
Fire the Divas (sorry, "Architects") and management who are making dumb decisions and get back to actual engineering. i.e. Make organisations pay for their decisions and costs, and when they fuck up, no more money.
or screw it all. Just install windows on everything.
I think it would have been interesting for them to see what they could do with WebOS and HP. I wonder if that was even discussed?
Four options, all would probably had been better than Windows Phone 7:
1) Keep on developing MeeGo if they think it's better than Android. Throw in Alien Dalvik, get access to the "eco-system" of Android.
2) Probably better in the current market: Switch to Android base, slap QT on it, port whatever MeeGo applications they had already made over to Android. Sell. Would work both with Android applications for everyone who want to and not abandon QT or QT developers.
3) Buy or co-develop a new OS with RIMM. I've read they asked them but RIMM wasn't interested, or something such. QNX-based OS with QT and Alien Dalvik?
4) Buy Palm and use WebOS as base.
(All of them would also let you code in native code (well, Android I have no idea, but probably doable) or JAVA/Dalvik, POSIX compliance, use QT, use OpenGL ES, ...
Be somewhat compatible with the rest of the platforms.. Now it will be .NET/Silverlight and Direct X .. Work for new applications but maybe not the most popular for people who want to spread their shit^H^H^H^Happs on all platforms with the least amount of work.
Also I wonder what is really the best for gaming? Since that could possibly had been the thing which would had made people buy a Windows Phone.
Moving to a third-party OS you have no control over is never smart. If history should teach us anything it's that those who give up control of their platform end up dead by the side of the road somewhere. The only right option is to man up and whip the company into shape.
USA is a small disunited market. 4% of the planet's population with "home grown" (leaving aside they don't give a rats ass about USA) giants MS and Apple playing hardball (cf Xbox doing "OK" in the USA but tanking everywhere else), with a millitantly (and proudly) technophobic idiocracy, a foreign company trying to get a novel product with a "hippie product" (Linux) would get nowhere fast.
I gave up on Nokia back in the mid 1990's. Their phones always seemed like they would be awesome on paper, and then when you actually tried to use them you realized what a giant piece of shit they are. It wasn't because the phone was a piece of shit, though, like you usually find with products that look good on paper - the phones hardware is solid. It's the UI. Nokia has never been able to develop a usable UI. This was true in the 90's and several years ago when the N95 was the rage, I figured they'd had time to fix their mistakes. I bought an N95. Again, the hardware was awesome, but guess what? The UI was total garbage.
Nokia simply can't develop a UI that people want to use. In the 90's, long before smart phones, the UI was simply too slow. I literally had the problem of dialing too fast on Nokia phones. The UI couldn't even keep up with dialing a phone number. In the late 2000's, again the UI couldn't keep up with input, but add in the quasi-featurephone/smartphone hybrid that is Symbian and you have a graphically intensive, slow UI that is cumbersome to use. Another recipe for disaster.
I wish Nokia would pull their head out of their asses and take a step back to assess the fact that they have nothing to offer in terms of quality when it comes to the software end of things. Everything they have been doing up to know is complete fail; they need to realize this and look at successful software applications. Android, iOS and yes, possibly even WP7. Their new alliance with Microsoft is a step in the right direction, but it probably wasn't the best choice. Nokia could have dug themselves out of the giant hole they are in by going with Android (since I doubt even they could license iOS), simply, easily and quickly. Then again, they may feel the need to modify Android so much and re-write whatever they can that they'd make a mess of that, too. So perhaps the stern hand of Microsoft might let them put out a phone that's actually usable. Time will tell.
Pretty much constantly.
Their phones are already subsidised everywhere, and the US market isn't unified. It's owned by the carriers who have carved it up into fiefdoms, you can't be exclusive with them all.
They also totally missed the boat with touch screens. Even now, the touch screen phones don't quite match up with the iPhone. That may be a cultural thing, Europeans are less "consumers" than Americans, so keyboards matter.
Deleted
So I got a N900 a year ago. My first Nokia phone (I was a Sony man before). It was and is almost exactly what I am looking for. I was even impressed by the way Nokia did the whole repository thing. I am basically a PM. And as I looked into the processes that Nokia employeed, I slowly became disappointed.
They had initiatives for :
- code refactoring for better UI/responsiveness
- Meemo to Meego migration
- Ovi Suite
- Better front camera software stack
- Qt in the works
- voice recognization
- Android compatibility
- etc.
What I see are a lot of "initiatives" but no project plans or defined deliverables. It just seemed to me that there was no direction or focus. The second something became almost, it's direction changed. I don't mean to be rude, but this is what in-experienced programmers do. I am not talking about good/bad programmers, but about immature/mature programmers. Mature programmers are the guys who also write the good help docs & APIs along with the code. In-experienced programmers reinvent wheels, lose focus on the big picture, and get too much into their super optimized code. And I am not placing the blame on them, but rather the PMs. It is their duty to notice this, put them back on the correct path, and keep the big picture in mind. It is the PM's duty to define and focus on the deliverables. They need to make sure they aren't wasting time on useless optimizations that give you 50% gain a module, but a meer 1% in the overall process.
Going with Microsoft may give Nokia the ability to quickly draw a common big picture, but it does really nothing to address the issues underneath. Even within that big picture, the issues will just resurface and you will end up like you did with the N900. I really like the N900, but it can be so much better. Before this whole Microsoft thing, I was going to buy another N900 and was recommending it to 2 others in my office as PDAs. But after almost convincing my wife to buy my phone, I dropped it at the last minute. Along with my recommendations in the office environment. A good product is more than just hardware or even software, and I don't think Nokia gets it.
Every other story in TFA basically goes like this: "Our platform started on X, and then we changed it to Y, using Z UI library but the developers from Y used some of their own." As far as MeeGo and Moblin go, there didn't seem to be any attention to creating the minimum specification and just choosing what they were going to support and refine.
Nokia seemed to have completely outsourced their technology strategy to their open-source community process, and things stagnated over the sort of squabbles people in OSS know and love. Unlike Apple or Google, which took off-the-shelf OSS software that the community had written, made it their own and now act as BDFLs for their own brands and make their money off supporting and extending the OSS core; Nokia did the exact opposite, putting a ton of effort into reduplicating OS work, and then leaving support and extension to the community. It seems like their community process was completely dysfunctional and nobody working on MeeGo ever knew where the platform was going next. Nokia and Intel were very tight-lipped, so the people in the community would do their own thing and the platform would drift and work would be done on all kinds of stuff that didn't benefit Nokia. And then Nokia would come in one day and drop Gtk. You don't see the sort of high-level coordination that Google nominally does through the OHA, and you don't see the sort of commitment Apple makes to promoting their platform to end-users and keeping the platform as consistent as possible.
Open Source is good for a lot of things. People can write your software for you! But Nokia seemed to have the idea that if they just kickstarted an OSS phone OS, they could just sell handsets and the software platform would take care of itself with magic bazaar pixie dust, while assuming that at any time they could completely drop or add whatever technology they chose and the community would go along for the ride.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
4) Buy Palm and use WebOS as base.
Make that three options, HP purchased Palm almost a year ago
Maemo and Meego did not fail. Its just that Android succeeded better.
Android is not locked down. It is completely open source.
You might as well say "linux is locked down, just look at the tivo"
Nothing is stopping Nokia from making an Android phone that is as open as the Maemo/MeeGo phones they have been making.
Motorola can lock their phones all they want, what does that have to do with Nokia or Android in general?
HTC, Motorola and Samsung are doing terribly these days.
Fujitsu has released a MeeGo netbook and I'm sure more will follow. MeeGo isn't just Nokia.
Read to the end of the sentence next time.
People are clearly free to disagree with the course that the company is taking, and then find a different job. But, if they are doing so because they are following the managers--who will inevitably be let go--making these bad decisions, then they are just as bad for it.
Then see how far you get versus the Maemo/Meego platforms on Android. That Dalvik baggage kind of gets in the way when doing things that are a given on Nokia's Linux platform.
Maemo and Meego are what Android really should have been - a phone with a very accessible and usable Linux stack.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
N/T
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Make that two options. They clearly pursued and then dropped option three because it was a no-go. You're going to have trouble using the OS when the other company won't let you.
The rewrite of Firefox as told by Spoksly - features never solidifying and nothing ever shipping. To show it's not an open source thing, the whole MacOSX post System7 Taligent/Pink/Copeland fiasco.
Isn't Microsloft famous for infighting killing their good projects and their partners?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
But it _was_ an option.
Is HP Licensing WebOS? I go the impression they wanted it internally so they could make iPhonesqe, "we control the software and the hardware" devices. At the very least I'd expect HP to charge licensing fees for WebOS; as opposed to MS who were willing to go the other way and pay Nokia, or Android which would have been free.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I've owned from the 770 up and have always been a bit dissapointed with each device (software) but always with a sense of goodwill to Nokia for the concept. As a stockholder (thankfully not a lot) and a avid linux developer the N900 was exactly what I wanted. I bought it about a year ago after I retired the G1. The N900 still rocks and is one of the better hardware platforms available. Problem is, development is halted, flash is no supported fully, and I got tired of waiting for 20 minutes to list out applications, and Nokia has spat in my face one too many times with this phone. I had planned to grab up a N8, but I am over Nokia for a few years. Now I am back to Android (T Mobile MyTouch G4) but I keep my N900 as my skype/grandcentral/sip/music/travel/calendar/stereo. Mostly because I came to realize the (maemo) project was drying up and I'd be better off doing some Android development anyways. I hope Nokia can get their heads out of their assets and get us MeeGo or something great with the MS partnership. Until then, its Android.
Make that one option becasue option one was clearly not working. That's what put them in this position to begin with.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I see it every single day. Mr Dev I am happy that you are the master of object oriented programming. I do however wonder why you thought it was a great idea to use 25 inherited php classes to print hello to the screen. No don't be busting my chops I am a programmer also.
Looking at their netbook, a fine fanless piece and pretty much the MiniMacBook that never was, from http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Mini-Laptops/bd-p/minilaptops it seems they ruined that by (besides a debatable display) shipping with Windows 7 Starter (of all OSes) on a mere Gig of non-upgradable RAM - neither their own nor any other Linux (all of which, and even MacOS someone made work), nor even XP.
.NET compilation enables very real, near-native code speeds. The same can be said for the better JVMs that exist these days, such as Google's implementation that exists on Android 2.2+.
However, the shifting development could be a hurdle to developers hoping to make their app multiplatform will little-to-no work.
I wasn't aware they had their own platforms that they rely on for their current market share like Nokia do.
have they moved to Android then? 'cos you cannot mean Microsoft - the company famous for infighting between teams. The Kin was shut down because it was in competition with Windows Phone team, and really - if you want a good laugh, read this blog piece about putting the shutdown menu into Vista.
Now, when you consider that one of the options available to Nokia in taking Windows Phone 7 was that their teams get to work on the WP7 code and customise or improve it you begin to understand just what a total, epic, unmitigated, colossal fail WP7 is soon to be (not that its been a roaring success so far!)
The entire problem was in management and a complete lack of leadership. The employees do not get to pick what to work on, in-fighting is completely absurd in this context. Decide on a platform and a language, use your employee input to make that decision, get it all out in the open. Then make the decision and tell the developers to get to work. The ones who supported the losing side may grumble, that's expected, but if they try to undermine the decision after it's been made, get rid of them. The complete lack of decision making ability ended up with them developing 3 different platforms knowing they only would use one and then finally deciding to use a fourth developed completely outside the company.
The CEO is bitching about a problem that begins and ends with himself. He did not run the company, he stood by and did nothing while it destroyed itself due to his waffling, then latched on to the first thing that could shift the OS mess blame from him.
This sentence no verb.
Elop came into to an already sinking ship. You can dislike his solution, but blaming him for the problem is just dumb. At this point I think the solutions boiled down to:
1)Use Android
2) Use WP7
And Microsoft offered to pay them to use option 2. Had management buttoned down and organized things years ago Meego might still be a valid option, but at some point it just became throwing good money after bad.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I believe there is a fee to use certain Google apps, such as navigation.
-]Phreak Out[-
Nokia sat on their backsides for far too long thinking that it was good enough just to be mobile phone company, rather than looking at the wider picture with smartphones and preparing to compete with Apple and Android. They did nothing with Symbian to give it a similar interface to iOS and Android.
Obviously, they couldn't use iOS on their smartphones, had they picked Android then the Nokia name would have been lost amongst the myriad of other companies making Android phones.
So there was Microsoft looking for a mobile phone manufacturer for Windows Mobile, and Nokia needing a mobile OS that didn't lump them in with the masses - it's been reported that 1500 Nokia employees walked out of their offices in Oulu and Tampere when the Windows Mobile announcement was made.
It will be interesting to see if they manage to capture market share in the next few years or not - personally, the pair of them are still are far lesser evil than Apple's proprietary lock-in mentality so let's hope they take a big chunk from the iPhone market.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I was wondering that too. I think Nokia and HP should have made a deal to put WebOS on Nokia's phones. This would be good for both companies. It would have instantly created a huge market for WebOS apps and created a real viable alternative to iOS and Android. I highly doubt HP on their own will be able to make much of a dent in the current market.
[OT: What's with the double/triple spacing of the comment text?]
Depends on the goal. I think the goal of going with Microsoft now is to become a tempting acquisition target. Nokia's market cap is only about 15% of Microsofts, and I suspect that management wants a take-over bid. If Nokia demonstrates the ability to produce good Windows Phone 7 phones, Microsoft will end up buying them (or, at least, their phone division - they also do some other stuff) and making them into the hardware arm for phones.
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And option two clearly takes longer than what they did. It would require to port Qt to Android first, and then port the whole thing to their upcoming phones. The one step strategy of using Windows phone is obviously better. The only alternative would be to ship Android 2.3 as it is, and that is hardly a unique selling point any more.
So as much as I hate the decision, I think it was management-logical. It may well be wrong, certainly if the history of Microsoft on the mobile market is any indication. But Nokia has not been great for years, so I am sure we can do without them. I read that ZTE wants to move into the premium market now... :-)
Yes, except it isn't because of Windows Phone.
Android does give control... infact it gives a bit too much control. There's a lot of rubbish components in phones by HTC, Motorola and Samsung.
.NET compilation enables very real, near-native code speeds.
This is only true on:
1) artificial benchmarks written to give such results, or
2) "unsafe" code (e.g. using raw pointers to circumvent bound checking etc).
and #2 is not an option on Windows Phone as it requires verifiable assemblies.
Don't get me wrong, JIT gives decent output - definitely much better than you'd get with any dynamically typed "scripting" language. But it's peanuts compared to optimizations that modern C++ compilers do.
Well, when they changed the name to Meego and partnered with Nokia, they also found lots of other possible partnerships. computer manufacturers, automotive companies, even AMD threw in their support. All the while giving nerds a raging hard-on about mobile device possibilities.
What was Moblin before that? I had heard of it, but I would have to try really fucking hard to find someone else to talk about it with. I had read about it, but never booted it.
Say what you will about Meego's name, but all that bitching you do just gives it more publicity. Maybe that was the point ;)
I work at Intel. Despite what PO tells you in press releases, everyone here hates MeeGo and wonders when it will go away. Not that the ideal isn't a good one, but the reality is far from it. Even at Intel, MeeGo is an "eyeroller".
Yes, and Dell's been a miserable failure under this model in the PC space as well.
I bought an N800 a few years back because it was most portable and semi-capable Linux-based computer at the time. It did many things very well, but it did the important things (web browser, video, email) poorly.
My biggest gripe was that, after the device was sold and the necessary source code released, there was really nothing in the way of community help from Nokia. The firmware and applications were developed in secret and released infrequently. There was an official website, but community-hosted forums were where the real action was happening. And aside from a kludgy SDK, there was little help for third-party developers.
Nope. Google Maps and Navigation are free.
I haven't seen any pay apps from Google either. 3rd party apps using Google online services, yes.
I just did a search in the market for "pub:"Google Inc."". They are ALL free.
Agree with above. Got my N900 almost a year ago. It's a love-hate relationship.
The N900 is unique; there's nothing else like it. I have to have it. [1]
Having said that, the UI is just crap. To be more specific, there are so many ways in which a little effort would have enhanced the user experience so significantly, but this effort was not made. It gives the whole feeling of the software having been rushed to market.
In short, I hate my N900 that I need. The moment someone else comes out with a Linux phone/computer that gives me vim and bash, I'm dumping the N900.
Here are some examples of how the N900 is a failure:
- There is a physical slide-out keyboard; this is good, and many people prefer this. If you object to it, technically you could choose to use the on-screen keyboard (OSK). But the OSK is crap, has a non-standard layout, and takes up all of the screen. Not just 50% or 80%, but ALL of it. You can't use it anywhere where you'd have to edit more than one line of text.[2]
- the Phone app (yes, the one app you must have on the N900 if you want to make a phone call) does not have a digital keypad on the main screen. You have to tap on the "I want to display a keypad" button to bring it up, in which case the "hang up" and "mute" buttons disappear. Whoever thought of putting the keypad on a separate window? It's not like there's no real estate on the main phone screen, which is 50% empty (it just shows the number you're dialing, and four buttons: "hang up", "answer call", "mute", and "switch to the display with the keypad").
- scrollbars. You see the scrollbar; you just can't manipulate it. If you're scrolling through a long list, you can't just slide the scrollbar control to near the end of the bar. You have to flick your finger up the middle of the screen to visibly scroll down the list, watching all the entries fly by at the speed of your fingerflick. It's lots of fun when I have to scroll down to near the bottom of my list of 2500+ contacts. (And, before anyone asks whether I brought this on myself by having a whole bunch of spurious contacts, yes, I know every one of those contacts personally.)
- You have to hold the phone sideways (landscape orientation). Ah, I can already hear indignant N900 owners saying, "But there is a landscape mode, triggered by the accelerometer sensing that you've turned the phone vertically." Well, the landscape mode is crippled. For starters, many of the apps don't recognize landscape mode; of the ones that do, most just try to shoehorn everything into a narrower screen.
For example, the Ovi Maps navigation software always orients the display so that your location is near the centre of the map, while your route is shown as being in front of you. Unfortunately, in standard landscape mode this means that there is only about 2cm between your location and the top edge of the screen to display the next portion of the route you'd have to take, while there's about a 8cm width on the horizontal screen displaying useless information about what's to the left or right. (Why would I want to know about that? I want to know where I need to go, not what's on either side of me.)
The ingenious Slashdotter would think, "I know! I'll just rotate the screen so that it is oriented vertically!" Sadly for you, the geniuses at Nokia have perfected a way to foil your ingenuity. When you rotate the screen, the display reorganizes itself to use only the uppermost 60% of the screen, leaving the lower 40% of the screen completely black. By the way, because the screen is now narrower, there is not enough room to fit in all the menu/screen controls/etc.
- For those of you who would like to blame the app developers for not properly coding for a re-orientable screen configuration (yeah, right, Ovi Maps was coded by this fly-by-night mom's basement developer called, ummmm, *NOKIA*), what about this: the status bar is broken in portrait mode. Th
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I believe the Qt port to Android was finished just a few days ago.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
For me personally as a customer, nokia failed because of the hardware they pushed their linux offerings on, not because of any (unknown to me) rewrite of the network stack or similar.
The N800 was awesome, except that it wasn't even a fucking phone. It was a last-generation "PDA" -- hello Palm.
The N900 was missing the key selling feature of other smartphones at the time: it sported a "last generation" resistive touchscreen. tell me, would you have bought an android phone with the same? not me.
If they gave me the option of top of the line hardware with whatever crappy open-source code they decided to dump on it, I would have purchased two of them in a second, and then promptly installed whatever community supported linux project that was doing something sensible on the software side.
The problem, for me anyway, was always the lack of good hardware with open-source drivers. Software can be changed, hardware is the key seller.
Here's the choice at Nokia:
Throw a ton of time and money at the team that has been unable or unwilling to develop a competitive phone OS. Going to Android is the same old story, lets try yet another Linux spinoff and pray we can catch up to Google and its OEMS.
--- or -------
Hoard your cash by outsourcing your OS to Microsoft and see if they succeed
I, for one think they made the right decision.
The US has the biggest GNP of any single nation.
True, the European Union currently is a confederation, much like the United States was until it became a federal republic in the late 1780s. But that can easily change at the next round of treaty negotiations after Lisbon.
Nokia didn't adapt the the US model by working with carriers to offer subsidized smart phones
Carriers didn't adapt to the sensible model by working with Nokia to offer smart subsidized phones. Carriers wanted to dumb them down so that they could nickel-and-dime subscribers.
Does Nokia rely on their platform for their market share, though? Do people really buy Nokia phones because of Symbian or, even more so, because of whatever Nokia's feature-phone platform is called? Nokia's market share, I think, is largely due to their reputation for well-designed phones (a reputation they've been squandering for years), not because of their platform.
It's as if MS is trying to gain the same position they had with IBM PC compatibles. They think the same strategy will work for them again. And if there is anything to be learned from that, the hardware manufacturers were marginalized with Windows.
I hope that's not the case. I would like to see a competitive environment with good interoperability between competing systems instead of the monopoly and vendor lock-in based strategies of the last 20 years. Which, BTW, I'm convinced has severely hindered progress in general computing.
The QWERTY keyboard is a ridiculous item - a good touchscreen keyboard is way better than tiny-chiclet-key physical keyboards after a month or two of practice.
Physical buttons are better for gaming, for one. At least with the chiclets, you can tell which keys your thumbs are over.
You can run a company catering to that 1% but not a company the size of Nokia.
But can you run a company catering to twelve different groups of 1%?
They could call this novel business strategy the "Opossum Behaviour" business plan... but why is it good for the Nokia shareholders again??
I think grandparent meant that there is a fee for manufacturers to bundle any of the Google properties - including marketplace - on their Android handsets. I have heard this too. The apps may be free in the marketplace, but if your users don't have access to marketplace, they have no access to any apps at all, free or otherwise.
Basically, Android is not as free (as in beer and speech) as people believe. You either have to pay Google to bundle their services (including marketplace) and have access to the pre-release codebase, or do without their branding, properties and app store, and be stuck with the stock Android code that is months behind the pre-release version. Guess which offer manufacturers are not going to refuse.
There is also a certain sensitivity within Norway and within Nokia about how the company has operated in the past. At one time Nokia was a computer manufacturer ... closed that division. At one time Nokia was a big CRT monitor manufacturer ... closed that division. The company itself was formed in 1967 in a 3-way merger as a Tire and Rubber firm. They later spun off that into Nokian Tyres in 1998 and sold their remaining stake in 2003. There has been a certain history of failure some employees attribute to mismanagement.
It seems Nokia tried to buy Palm ... it was a persistent rumour and the ebb and flow of the speculation and various reports introduced swings in Nokia stock, one time rising 8% in one day), probably for the same reasons HP wanted it (software) but somehow failed there too.
Huge organisation. If they kill that, the bottom line will look *great* for about 2 years.
Deleted
Wafaa's preferred solution was that Elop "should have forked Android, and done it better, made some of it open source, and wrestled the ecosystem away from Google. Can't be that hard. That would have been my strategy." ... (*pant pant*)
eew really? wrestle an ecosystem away. Does this guy not get Open source? Everybody who contributes well enough wins. Especially when their goals are orthogonal. Nokia was to gain from the widgit frosting , and google has to gain from the Restaurant model. This is the others are doing, but this would be sub optimal in Nokia's position. what they were going to do (push maemo or meego which was a combination of the 2 models listed) but actually focus on it. Really, what happened? What happened to the % jailbreak command!? Even the Nexus one has a jailbreak button because google wanted it. Nokia could have been the cool company with the sweet phones. They even released a netbook but put WINDOWS on it. Windows? Really!? they had KDE that they could have made in house, they had Maemo but no, they put WINBLOWS ON IT!!
Install apps other than the tens of thousands on the App Store: This has yet to be a problem for me.
I am atypical. I program on my Dell netbook while riding the city bus for half an hour at a time. Apple wants people who program to buy a MacBook instead of an iPhone or iPad. In fact, Apple took an emulated Commodore 64 game off its App Store precisely because the user could reset the emulated C64 intothe REPL of the ROM BASIC. See previous Slashdot story.
SSH, VNC
I could in theory program in one of those environments. But doing so on the bus would require an upgrade from an iPod touch or iPad with Wi-Fi to an iPhone or iPad with 3G, plus service at $70 per month for a voice and data plan. I make so few calls that my current prepaid phone plan through Virgin Mobile USA costs me that much per year.
They did dumb stuff like re-writing the whole networking stack
Isn't that what Cisco also just did with their new Nexus switch gear? Would you say Cisco was being stupid too? Or if it works, it's smart, and if it doesn't work, it's stupid? So what are we to learn from this? Don't even try? Only try something if you know you will succeed?
"Me: 1) Degree in Biotechnology and Computer Science. (Did your troll factory offer dual majors, or just the standard "how to be an obnoxious twat on the internet" syllabus?)" - by Americano (920576) on Friday February 18, @02:27PM (#35247076)
First of all, Kevin B. Pease = AMERICANO from Merrimack New Hampshire - kbpease@hotmail.com - YOU DID NOT GET A DOUBLE MAJOR!
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kbpease
PERTINENT EXCERPT:
Kevin Pease's Education
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
B.S., Biotechnology
1993 Ã" 1998
Minor: Computer Science
---
LMAO - it took you 6 YEARS to get a CSC MINOR? Rotflmao... and yet, you also LIED about it above, saying you had a "DOUBLE MAJOR"? Bullshit - there is a big difference in coursework and credit hours involved, between a MINOR and a MAJOR!
I was thinking of buying an N900 device. But later on, when Android comes up, I went along with that. I thought that MeeGo would lose its importance in the war against Google's Android and Android community, and that happened sadly! :(
Deepak
http://www.rsdcbabu.com
It's good for Nokia shareholders because Nokia management doesn't have a long-term strategy for survival as an independent entity. Nokia shareholders get to either sell their shares now, without taking too much of a loss, or hang on to them and end up as Microsoft shareholders.
There are several good strategies for Nokia that would work and allow them to continue trading as a completely independent entity, however all of the ones that I can think of rely on starting 5-10 years ago.
Nokia's in a similar position to Sun a few years ago. They have some good technology, but management has missed a lot of opportunities. They can either go the SGI route, and end up either as a tiny company clinging to a shrinking market segment, or they can aim for a buyout. For shareholders, option 2 is better. For people interested in a thriving technology market, neither is particularly good.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Release early, release often.
Nokia forgot that and got stuck in a waterfall, cathedral model they kept razing/resetting when they had no time. As disruptive and time-wasting Agile is, Nokia could've used some of that.
This is only true on:
1) artificial benchmarks written to give such results, or
2) "unsafe" code (e.g. using raw pointers to circumvent bound checking etc).
That's quite a blanket statement, what is the basis for it? Also what is your percentage definition of 'near-native' speed?
That's quite a blanket statement, what is the basis for it?
Real world experience. I've debugged output of JIT compiler for .NET programs (on assembly level, naturally). It's okay - better than I expected - but its inlining capabilities are not all that impressive, for example.
Also what is your percentage definition of 'near-native' speed?
For the sake of precision, let's say, within 10% of code compiled with VC++ with "optimize for speed" and "whole program optimization" enabled.
That's quite a blanket statement, what is the basis for it?
Real world experience. I've debugged output of JIT compiler for .NET programs (on assembly level, naturally). It's okay - better than I expected - but its inlining capabilities are not all that impressive, for example.
Well I've certainly seen managed DirectX code perform within 5% of native code, the compilers are actually quite good, I wouldn't say there's a general rule either way but I'd definitely say synthetic benchmarks and unsafe code aren't the *only* places you'll see 'near-native' speed.
Moving to a third-party OS you have no control over is never smart. If history should teach us anything it's that those who give up control of their platform end up dead by the side of the road somewhere.
What history are you remembering? Last i saw HP and Dell are doing just fine on that model.