Slashdot Mirror
Nokia Preps Linux OS For Low-End Smartphones
itwbennett writes "Nokia is going after the low-end smartphone market with a Linux-based OS code-named 'Meltemi.' The phones are expected to cost under $100 without subsidies. A Nokia spokesman's no-comment comment went like this: 'Of course, we don't comment on future products or technologies. However, I can say that our Mobile Phones team has a number of exciting projects in the works that will help connect the next billion consumers to the Internet.'"
This means the three friends Linux-Nokia-Microsoft will be in bed together. It's not surprising considering Nokia already developed Qt and they were developing MeeGo which is based on Linux. Their Nokia N9 phone is quite awesome, actually.
Now what's great about this is the fact that with Nokia's history they have proven to put out quality hardware. They can also really use this to fight against both iPhone and what's worrisome for some, Android. Android has lots of fragmentation and patent related problems. Just yesterday it was revealed that Microsoft alone gets $400 million a day from Android.
Sony Ericsson is known to put out quality hardware, Nokia is known for just putting out.
Just a slight correction, $400 million an year of course. And so this isn't just self-reply... Nokia has always needed help with their UI and consumer friendly part in their smartphones. I think Windows 7 is a really good choice for that, as it's actually a really user friendly OS and it already as the marketplace and other stuff ready that Nokia never got off alone. But Nokia has also done good low-end phones and they're still selling really great in Asia and in Europe too. Linux is a good choice for those, as it can run on more low-end machine and Nokia already has knowledge about it gained from MeeGo.
Is there any level on which this decision makes sense in light of Nokia's direction?
Any phone smart enough to run Linux us smart enough to run WP7.
And Nokia? Embracing Linux? After jettisoning MeeGo?
And Stephen Elop? Linux?! HUH?!
Consistency? What's that?
Does Nokia have any strategic direction at all?!
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Ridiculous. Nokia makes the best hardware out there. Their problem is being horribly late with software, due to terrible management.
if nokia and M$ already have an agreement, perhaps using linux isn't as costly for them as for others manufacturers. sadly, nokia is becoming the phone manufacturer arm of M$, bringing their logic to the bussines: winPho for the high-en, linux for the low-end. if the're lucky they can keep symbian, in the mid range.
I think this might be a positive development. Show them how your $100 Linux "dumbphone" can actually do twice as much as the $499 Windows "smartphone", twice as fast.
There won't be Web 2.0 on a $100 phone, but I guess you can write quite nice integrated solutions if you know a bit of UNIX and C.
Maybe MS plan on making these phones really shitty to hurt Linux's image (considering Android is helping to boost it).
which is totally what she said
What I don't understand about this plan(assuming it isn't mere rumor) is that the linux-based OS is supposed to be for cheap, low-spec phones that their new MS/Nokia BFF WP7 deal doesn't provide them with an OS suitable for...
Their MeeGo/QT work, now orphaned, was largely aimed at higher end smartphones, the same ones that are now going to be WP7 devices. None of the linux-with-custom-stuff-on-top phone OSes(MeeGo, Android, WebOS) work particularly well on sub-smartphone hardware. They are powerful, have some nice features, and don't suffer from some of the horrid, idiosyncratic development environments of the old dumbphone and featurephone OSes; but they don't actually scale down very far before you are looking at some seriously dire performance, RAM so limited that multitasking is largely a theoretical benefit, and a screen so lousy that your decent browser is nearly useless for anything that isn't a deeply spartan 'mobile' website that a 1997 WAP phone could have rendered....
That's what I don't understand: Linux-based systems definitely have their points on more powerful hardware, and Nokia has access to one of their own(in addition to doing an adroid hostile-fork, as Amazon did); but they aren't so hot on weaker hardware(Exercise: grab a copy of the debian m68k port and replicate the features of, say, a Palm III, in 2MB of ROM, 2MB of RAM, and a 16MHz processor....). Nokia also has a number of eccentric and crufty; but eminently suited to very-low-spec phones OSes available. Why would they possibly be spinning Yet Another Linux WIth Something Weird On Top Of It OS?
Sounds like an episode of Jerry Springer's show.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's definitely positive, if only they will go and make such phones.
Just having top and powertop on my N900 allows me to identify battery-draining apps in minutes, unlike my friend with Android that wasted a week to do this. You don't have to write them in C. I'm sure python will be ported... QT is C++ only.
nokia did not develope Qt but it bought trolltech, what still develops it.
And nokia hardware quality hype is so so. some phones nice and good but most nothing special in real life than in paper as listed.
And Nokia never toke MeeGo. They continued to develope a maemo (father of meego) and renamed maemo 6.0 as harmattan and even officially as MeeGo/Harmattan and only to get away from intel deal to deliver single MeeGo device. Harmattan isn't compatible with MeeGo and it does not matter as Nokia killed MeeGo. Nokia wanted to keep MeeGo development on itself and under control. so it got it under radar and under tight leech so it wouldn't evolve better than others.
Even in Finland the Nokia brand has been bad among repair companies. when comparing nokia to other brands with same amount of phones, nokia phones has got broken more often. Even the E7 phones what over 200 were bought to politicians over 50 has got broken under few months. so about 1/4 were terrible by quality.
Nokia does not get anything good from software part and even Jorma Ollila said few months ago that in finland there aint enough skilled people to code own operating system. thats why symbian sucked balls.
Even that Linux is originally finnish operating system, it survived because it is licensed with GPLv2 and even Linus has said it was best thing he ever made. And I agree. Not even GNU has got their own OS called HURD working after 26 years.
today no one starts new OS as there are no skills or time or money. Corporations use existing ones like Google toke Linux for android and chromeOS, Apple toke XNU from OS X for iOS too and microsoft toke CE to windows phone 7 from windows mobile and windows embedded.
So now MS has CE and NT operating systems to maintain and it knows as well it hass no time, money or skilled people to start new OS for markets. (it has research OS's on what it research multikernel os or pure C# OS)
Linux would have been savior for Nokia but they did not see the power and quality in Open Source community as they can not control the software development as now.
To run Qt on it.
I think you're under assuming recent generation low-end phones. They're perfectly capable of multitasking, surfing the internet, many even have cameras. They might not have so many features, the camera quality isn't really that good, but even the cheap phones now a day can do lots of stuffs. And I actually just looked from Nokia's site. Since hardware is the most cost, I think they can do it with their Linux solution since now they're using Symbian.
That's what probably went though some PHB (or Elop's, or Steve's) head. Either way, I'd say it's playing with fire.
Good strategy for Nokia.....And what happens is a shift away from Android. Guess what they could do it. Bring it on. If the phones are open and not carrier driven lookout it will change the landscape. Which is a good thing. Perhaps they realise that the phone 7 adventure was a bust. They are definitely not selling. It would not be a bad thing to sink the carrier centred model as it is the only reason why and overpriced Androids and Iphones exist! Give the consumer an option that does not cost 500 dollars for something that should not be more than 100 and they will jump.
For less than $100 you can't expect too much, but maybe xterm?
I don't buy it. I suspect that the real story is that Qt is being ported S40. Somebody tried to leak that and somehow messed up the story.
I'd like it to be true, of course, but it would be too weird, even for Nokia. You don't drive away your Linux developers and ecosystem, and then come out with another LInux based device a few months later. At least not until your Windows phones have failed.
(If this story were coming in February 2012, after the catastrophic failure of the Windows phones, then I would believe it.)
So you think Microsoft can dictate what kind of software and hardware Nokia manufacturers in projects unrelated to their WP7 deal?
Remember that Nokia is still an independent company with its own board, shareholders and goals, not a subsidiary of Microsoft.
It would not be a bad thing to sink the carrier centred model
I agree. But for that to happen in the real world, the carriers would first have to be willing to allow phones designed for a non-carrier-centered model onto their respective networks. Right now, the United States market is split between two cellular technologies: GSM and CDMA2000. There are four nationwide carriers, soon to be three: Verizon Wireless (CDMA2000), Sprint (CDMA2000), AT&T (GSM), and a smaller GSM carrier that AT&T will soon acquire. Of these, only the GSM carriers consistently store the subscriber identity on a separate removable chip (the "SIM card"). CDMA2000 also allows for this (the "CSIM card"), but both CDMA2000 carriers have been seen to shun this in favor of programming the subscriber identity directly into the phones that they sell, and I haven't seen any indication that a carrier will activate a phone that it did not sell. So this leaves AT&T, and I've read stories on various tech forums of AT&T having a noticeably worse customer experience than the CDMA2000 carriers.
it would be quite funny if Microsoft were somehow forced to sue Nokia for patent infringement.
Ridiculous. Nokia makes the best hardware out there. Their problem is being horribly late with software, due to terrible management.
This gives them an excuse to implement my conspiracy theory:
- Nokia will have MS doing the work of "customizing" Linux for the phones. MS will brand it in a way that it both cashes in on the Linux name, and also tries to sound like "It's our own work that makes it good."
- MS will keep building up ways to make money off Linux. They'll spin two ways; they'll claim that their work exploiting^H^H^H^H extending Linux legitimizes their right to claim license fees for the rest of it, and they'll slowly solidify their position of "ownership" due to some bullshit patents they have.
I believe that Microsoft can do whatever they want with Nokia.
The board chose a CEO who did nothing visible, then forced Nokia into dependence on Microsoft. The shareholders reacted by selling madly. I don't know what Nokia's goals are aside from selling phones, but they don't seem to be reacting fast enough (especially with Elop pulling a multi-Osborne at the start of the year.)
So yeah, I expect that if MS tells Nokia to marginalize or kill something off, they'll try as hard as they can to do so. Elop has to stay on good terms with them or he'll ride Nokia into the gutter.
Cheap low end hardware has changed since the Palm III
They are probably thinking about an 600-800MHz ARM9/11 cpu with 128-256MB of RAM, with a GPU that can still draw 30 million triangles per second and play 1080p videos (like say the 25$ raspberry pi coming out this november). Also Nokia is moving upcoming Qt 5 rendering to run almost entirely on OpenGL (ES). This will probably make the UI on such devices (GPU with a cpu tacked on) smoother than on a high end Android 2.x phone.
Then again, they could just as well do this on existing Symbian devices.
Having worked at Microsoft, there's no way I think this will happen in the next few years.
Microsoft has a very strong culture of "not invented here", and is completely paranoid about open source contaminating their products. Any involvement with open source (and in particular, GPL software) requires a monstrous amount of paperwork and negotiation, and will be shot down in nearly all cases. Since Microsoft already has their phone OS, they will not use Linux.
Why fragment further. they could easily make earlier android version work on "low end" smartphones. Hell phones running android from 3 years ago are low end.
further proof that Nokia has jumped the shark.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Though this isn't true:
Any phone smart enough to run Linux us smart enough to run WP7.
You can strip Linux down to sweet fuck all. Windows OTOH isn't Windows unless it has windows.
But yeah... WTF?
Deleted
Lot's of tech fantasy, zero fact. No company could ever legally negotiate the deal you described above. Please, take off your tinfoil hat and get real.
Meanwhile, outside the reality distortion field: Bloomberg Businessweek: Microsoft Is Said to Pay Nokia More Than $1 Billion in Deal (emphasis on which way the money is flowing)
Even here, in Finland (one of the most expensive countries in Europe), you can find decent Android phones for under $100. I don't see how Nokia can compete, after Elop's brand suicide.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
- MS will keep building up ways to make money off Linux. They'll spin two ways; they'll claim that their work exploiting^H^H^H^H extending Linux legitimizes their right to claim license fees for the rest of it, and they'll slowly solidify their position of "ownership" due to some bullshit patents they have.
So wait, Red Hat, Canonical, Google and other companies are all warmly welcome to contribute and make improvements, but when it's Microsoft we should go "noo, we don't play with guys like that. go away."
They're all profiting (or as you say, exploiting) Linux just the way you describe.
Indeed, it is best left unspoken lest regulators have evidence later on.
Yet Nokia, a company with some management issues, gets an ex-Microsoft CEO and suddenly burns down everything they had invested in, in exchange for a dependency on a company known to destroy "partners."
A CEO and pocket change compared to what it would cost to actually buy Nokia.
The utter insanity of decisions coming out of that company now just suggest to me that there's a ton of politics, back and forth, and infighting, and that there's no unified leadership in the company. After all, suddenly this when Elop showed slides basically saying "within a few years anything not Microsoft will be gone."
Within a few months, Cortex-A8 based processors are going to be low end.
It is cheaper to utilize components that are getting outside development than ones requiring you do all the work internally. That's why they merged Maemo into MeeGo (long term planning, really) and why they seem to be transitioning the low end to Linux.
Only question is if they'll drag Aegis over to the low end and cripple the systems even more severely than iOS and Android.
Their CEO did nothing visible? Things take time you know. And what's the line about shareholders. Usually in Slashdot people hate companies because they only do something that pleasures their shareholders. Now you're crying that they made a decision that didn't.
I'd like to point out that those are better specs than the N900 has...
1. Miss the smartphone train
2. Keep polluting the product range with many slightly different dumb/smart phones over the years
3. Develop several operating systems without selling them in the form of decent products
4. Purchase Trolltech for $150M [citation needed] so that you can (further) develop OSes/frameworks
5. Trash the OSes developed to in favor of MS
6. Make other OSes
7. Aim at cheap ($100) phones (you know what? cheap phone lovers don't buy apps that often)
8. Bankrupt
This is another proof that no Mainstream company can ever ignore linux in the long run. the beauty of linux is such that it scales to sub $100 smartphone and HPC . I bet any OS this planet can do that. sure there are patent problems sorrounding it but thats not going to stop companies from adopting. Nokia should have a plan B if they dont get hit with windows smartphone otherwise they are doomed forever. they know this . thats the reason they are doing this . Nokia backed of Meego and announced symbain wil wont that long but u should have a alternative for tat plan. and this is that alternative . unless MS mole stephen elop tries to do something nasty with windows smartphone i think Nokia wil be a hit with this model. ALL the best Nokia. lets wait for a great sub $100 phone.
It's probably more than just a rumour, at least that's the impression I got from the Finnish media, which tends to be fairly well informed. Meaning that the OS exist and there are products planned, but of course no guarantees that a product will ship.
As to how the Meltemi-stuff make any sense:
At the level that Nokia makes decisions, the smartphone segment of mobile business isn't about hardware anymore, it's applications and services, or probably more to the point, it's about attracting developers. Nokia ditched their own OSes because they knew that by themselves they could not attract enough developers to build a fourth "ecosystem" (iOS, Android and WP being the there current ones). Nokia said that they chose between Android and WP, and, while we can speculate why they chose WP, one of the stated reasons was the fully-fledged and mature tool-chain that WP has.
Meltemi itself may be about many things: hedging their bets, getting something out of the Linux experience they have, or maybe they just feel that the segment suits a Linux-based OS. The next generation of sub-$100 phones will be much more powerful then previous ones and it would be misleading to think them as having very low specs, but it will still be a distinct segment, separate from the smartphone segment, especially it will not be driven by third-party applications and services. That means that Nokia can still, by themselves, make a competitive phone to that segemnt without having to build an ecosystem.
In summary, Nokia ditched Linux (MeeGo) on smartphones because they had to, and they are using Linux (Meltemi) on feature phones because they can.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Am I the only person who remembers Microsoft Xenix?
The N900 has a 600MHz Cortex-A8 based processor and 256MB of RAM. The GPU in the processor on the Raspberry Pi is an ARM11 (ARMv6) core, which while decent (same as the early Android devices and first two iPhones) it's behind the N900.
Speaking as a shareholder, I hate it when companies do something stupid shortsighted to please traders who are come-today-gone-tomorrow. To have a drop as severe as they did earlier this year, long term investors had to have been annoyed and dumped their stock.
Maybe it will use the Cortex-A5, more efficient and faster than Arm11, but supposedly lower cost than Cortex-A8. There were rumors that it would finally show the light of day in 2011/2012. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380443,00.asp
My nokia is 7+ years old. It's still going, with the only problem being it has a memory leak that hurts it once every 3-4 weeks.
Correction to the last comment: meego, maemo and osso. In product names n770, n800,n810, n900 and last n9.. While all of them are not phones, all of them run linux
The Android Market has a Terminal Emulator app which will give you a command prompt that will let you run (a bare-bones version of) top, which is already part of the Android OS. Or you get PowerTutor from the Market for a more fancy graphical user interface. Or you go to Settings/About Phone/Battery/Battery Use.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Exactly. Fuck Microsoft!
You must be joking. What would you call the patent shakedown of Android vendors then? Ya know, the scam that looks to net MS more than their own mobile platform will next year? Oh yeah MS has really changed... tactics- and that's about it.
Microsoft doesn't have a good history of playing nice with partners. They tend to die painful deaths and their history in the mobile space is that of spectacular failure.
Scaling Linux from Meltemi up from a low spec to a high spec smartphone would be relatively easy. If the MS "partnership" goes the way all the previous ones have gone, Nokia would be dead, full stop. This way they may have an escape route.
Oh and "feature phone" these days is 100MHz with 32Mb RAM, 2Gb storage. That sounds like a 30 user system to me.
Deleted
Sony Ericsson quality hardware? You've got to be kidding me. Nokia's hardware at its best puts every manufacturer to shame.
Mentioning Nokias linux strategy and the words "long term planning" in the same sentence does not make much sense. These people are unable to keep to the same strategy for 6 months at a time... and that has been going on for about 4-5 years now.
Very true about others "exploiting" Linux, except for a major difference: They all play by the Open Source License rules. You make a change to FOSS code, AND RE-RELEASE THE PROGRAM, you must provide the source code when requested. That requirement totally negates MS's number one, and historically proven, business strategy: embrace, extend, extinguish. If they embrace and extend, they have to let it out into the wild. They can't extinguish it. That's why they have always treated FOSS like the Gods Damned Plague. Their normal method of operations is totally disarmed.
Maybe their CEO and board have remembered that the number one purpose of a company is to make money. Period. Google, Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Oracle, and Canonical, either have or are currently making money off Linux. If MS wants some of that market, they'll have to spin off a division that ONLY does FOSS. They can't afford to contaminate any of their other projects^H^H^H^Hducts with FOSS code. There have been rumors that they have used FOSS code, but since they only give out binaries, it's hard to prove.
I would love to have MS come play with Linux. As long as they follow the rules and play in good faith. (Historically, not a chance in Hell. Even their own head Open Source Evangelist quit in disgust after a year.) MS has some extreme skills in UI design, developer tool building, and marketing.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
So wait, Red Hat, Canonical, Google and other companies are all warmly welcome to contribute and make improvements, but when it's Microsoft we should go "noo, we don't play with guys like that. go away."
I didn't say any of that, but yes... that's a good idea you have. We should tell MS to go away.
There are companies that are good for FOSS and for users, and companies that are bad. Google and Red Hat have been beneficial for Linux. At the very least, I've never read any stories about either of them charging licensing fees to use other variations of Linux, the way MS is doing with Android.
I think that anyone who doesn't think MS is bad must have assholes so stretched out that they don't feel it anymore.
With QtScript and QML and WebKit and PySide, Qt is far from C++ only.
They all play by the Open Source License rules. You make a change to FOSS code, AND RE-RELEASE THE PROGRAM, you must provide the source code when requested.
Like Google with Android?
So I take it people are also granted freedom of speech as long as they say what you agree with? Likewise, people should be free to use and share software and code as long as they don't share it to someone you disagree with.
Microsoft has full right to charge licensing fees for the technology they did R&D for and invested in, especially when other companies are profiting from said investment.
Android is not FOSS. Android is a proprietary project that Google selectively makes open source.
Only the kernel is FOSS in Android, and I'll be the first to suggest that Google basically mooches off the efforts of the kernel community. But they DO act according to the statement you highlighted for the kernel, even if unhelpfully.
You honestly believe that the patents they leverage to extort fees out of companies were the result of intensive, high cost R&D? I'd be surprised if they weren't scratched out in short order by lawyers told to pour through concepts and turn anything they could into a patent, regardless of merit.
When I showed news of this to my boss. He just replied "yeah my old buddy who's still at Nokia works on this". My boss used to work at Nokia himself.
Anyway, the rumour began to sound more plausible after hearing his comment.
I've got an old motorola a780 somewhere that ran linux fine with only a 200MHz cpu in it.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Usually in Slashdot
This coming from the guy who has had an account for 3 days. Did the zget and cgeys accounts finally just fall over from bad karma?
An HTC device running a preliminary version of Meltemi was shown to a few developers at the Berlin Desktop Summit last summer.
Dear Nokia, I wish that you succeed with Meltemi. But can you remember to produce some models of Meltemi feature phones that have 3G + non-camera + WiFi, and preferably qwerty keyboards? As you may know, there are some of us who cannot use camera phones in some organisations. Your E51 was a killer phone among us, but it is extremely outdated now. Your South East Asia fan.
Corporations use existing ones like Google toke Linux
So when Google say they get a buzz off Linux, it's not just vapid marketing hype?!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"We regret going with Windows Mobile."
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Amen, brother! I mean it ain't like one of the four companies has been very conspicuously threatening others with claims that Linux violates unspecified patents. No sir! They are all exactly the same!
I'm Erwin Schrodinger and I approve of this message, and I do not approve of this message!
Obviously you can get an Android with your contract. But these are Nokia phones that just plain don't cost $100.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Looks like an M$ tactics.
M$ will collect patent /legal mafia monies from Nokia for selling Linux phones.
There by authenticating patent /legal mafia much more in their favour.
This is a ploy, a trap.
Uhh....hate to break the news to you friend but MSFT spent 9.5 billion in 2010 alone on R&D, hell they probably have the highest R&D budget of any company out there. So yes MSFT deserves to make money off of that which they spent billions researching.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
They all play by the Open Source License rules. You make a change to FOSS code, AND RE-RELEASE THE PROGRAM, you must provide the source code when requested.
When have Microsoft not adhered to the license terms for releasing the source code?
That's why they have always treated FOSS like the Gods Damned Plague.
Yes, there is no doubt that they have done scare tactics against FOSS, but then they have also done things like create http://www.codeplex.com/ to host open source projects (which they contribute a great many themselves).
I would love to have MS come play with Linux. As long as they follow the rules and play in good faith.
And yet Microsoft do contribute to Linux. I imagine a lot of those changes were to fix interoperability with their products, but it still does show that they do contribute and play by the rules.
Anyway is Symbian dead ?
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
so they still have to use Linux because Windows Phone X, Y, or Z can't scale to the phone hardware Nokia wants to sell? Nice job Elop. I'm sure that's going to work out fantastic for you in your quest to destroy Nokia and hand the remains to Microsoft. No doubt the Linux base you have them building is going to be a constantly changing bastard of some sort so nobody has a chance to like it and the users all get driven to other phones/vendors.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I checked the local prices a few days ago. SEKUSD is now at 6.8756. Huawei U8180 Ideos X1, no plan, 599 SEK, that works out to $87. Samsung GT-S5570 Galaxy Mini, no plan, 990 SEK, $144. The Android competitors are on a race to the bottom. You get them for free now if you sign up for a plan. It is too late for Nokia. They ruled the "damn cheap" price range the last decade. That price range is now seeing competition from cheap Android phones and I would rather have one those if I were to spend less than $100 on a mobile phone.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Ditch a Linux-based project, and Slashdot weenies will cry foul, no matter how badly mismanaged the project had in fact been.
Have another Linux project started, and Slashdot conspiracy theorists will accuse you of trying to undermine it with your other hand, before anything is even publicly confirmed about it.
Stephen Elop, you can't win.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Your argument, as far as I can see it, is that great effort deserves reward. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work that way.
When MS actually publicizes the patents involved (which they haven't), I will stop relating to their behavior as extortion, and gladly review the patents to see if I believe they are actually valid (and in parallel, whether they are worthwhile --- one judgement being a legal one, and the second a moral one).
You can run uClinux on a Nintendo DS or even lower specced hardware. The OS (let's go by the textbook on this guys and not the beige box=hard drive trendy marketing definition) is powerful enough it's the applications they need to be slimmed down - and that includes display managers. There's plenty of ways to do a GUI without going full Maemo/Meego. It's worth doing if you intend to port other stuff to it, it's not about doing completely new stuff in isolation with nothing to do with other projects as you seem to be hinting (and yes that would be stupid but it's not really what they are doing).
Nokia has something in common with your mother.
It's already worked on what is now low end hardware, there were Qt interface phones even before Nokia bought Trolltech. The proof of concept has been there for years. What it hasn't done is made it into the mainstream.
It's half of a really smart strategy.
The other half involves inventing a time machine and doing it in 2007.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So what? Can you prove that one cent went on the stuff they claim is in Android, Linux or anything else? No, and neither can they.
P.S. Referring to companies by their stock tickers makes you sound like a pretentious jerkwad.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They've made a really good choice of a partner, then.
I'd love to see the ribbon interface of a phone. I guess they could market it to old folks, as it's be able to double as a walking stick.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The Nokia Linux phones I saw so far (N900, N9 and N950) where quite accessible. You can either boot in secure mode or switch to development mode; the user is free to decide, he doesn't even need to hack the device or anything - just use the well documented setting. In secure mode each app has its own secure data area, cryptographically protected; something I wouldn't want to miss for some sensitive information. In development mode you can access anything you like - even the encrypted secure storage of the apps.
Only you wont be able to decrypt them, of course. And I wouldn't want to suggest e.g. my dad to buy phone for online banking or any other sensitive operations without such a good security concept in place.
The other drawback is that operators might sell customized phones with development mode disabled. But this is hardly Nokias fault if you agree on such terms in return for the operator to subsidize your device.
Trolling is a art!
Wow! So MS is getting $146 Billion a year from Android. Neat, that's more than their entire yearly revenue. How do they do it?
I think, they may have success if the platform is sufficiently open and hackable. Android wants to be linux, but it is really not - too closed. However, better than symbian. I wonder, why it took Nokia so much time to start use linux.
Personally I think the patent system needs to be overhauled, SW patents should be invalidated. There are several enthusiasts trying to fight for this in Europe, but guess what: Neither Samsung, nor HTC, Google or whatever company supports them! They all want SW patents to stay valid the way they are. Therefore it is extremely simpleminded to call it extortion when they are paying due to the laws they appreciate that much themselves.
Trolling is a art!
I presume that's Nokia's own powertop, rather than the upstream one? That's been significantly tweaked and improved by Nokia's kernel team and is the actual app which we use internally to identify misbehaving tasks. (Of course, once we see the wakeups in powertop we'll throw ftrace/strace and if need be FTC at the problem to identify what it's doing that it should be.) One of the things I was happiest about in Nokia was their willingness to share anything and everything useful and their general developer-friendly attitude. (Disclosure: They are my $DAYJOB)
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
You are of course free to believe whatever you want, but what if you would for once try to consider the possibility that Elop was *not* an MS trojan. Symbian was no viable option for the long future. Android neither. If you read e.g. http://thisismynext.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/ you can conclude that opting for Android would have meant to abandon the whole location based services, navigation software and ultimately Navteq. Meego was a good idea, but for the mass market it would have needed a better ecosystem (developers, better online profile management, community features, etc.)
Trolling is a art!
Explain the N97 then.
I don't what your experience might be to say such a thing but in my case, I've found that Nokia phones extremely reliable in terms of durability. Enduring all kinds of hardships without much more than a scratch. I'm talking about falling on the pavement at 30 Km/h and uncountable 1/1.5 mts falls in different surfaces.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Not when the US carriers charge what they do. A cheaper iphone isn't going to help boost verizon subscriptions up to corporate expectations... cheaper rates will. Im as tired of hearing "cheaper phones will make..." as I was of hearing "ipod killer" 5 years ago and "ipad killer" today. When the carriers lower the rates - and not until then - I'll buy one.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
It makes a perfect sense because Elop can't fire all linux developers at once. It's just impossible under the law. So he has to find them a useless work for an year or two.
Consistency? What's that?
Everything is consistent. They are going to kill linux devlopment, just can't do it in one month.
Does Nokia have any strategic direction at all?!
Yes. Microsoft.
What you are possibly missing is that Linux doesn't use much hardware in todays terms. OpenWrt will happily run Linux plus a user space in 16M. That 16M gives you real time multitasking, IPv4, IPv6 and CIFS network stack, firewall, QOS, flash, HDD and fat, file systems, ACL's, 80211 stack, bluetooth stack, USB drivers, memory management, a mature development environment with every language known to man.
On today's hardware 16M is nothing, even Nokia's current S40 phones have 16M. In fact they (eg a Nokia C3) have 128M. Of that, Linux + the basic user space stuff uses less than 10%. In view of all that, the question isn't why do the use Linux for new development, the question is how on earth could you justify not using it?
Sony Ericsson is known to put out quality hardware, Nokia is known for just putting out.
SE makes good hardware? Since when? I've had 3 SE phones and they all sucked on the hardware level (software as well -- eg. worst T9 ever).
I'd go so far saying that any hardware related to post-1990 Sony sucks.
Mine, a basic Nokia 3100, is only 6 years old, but still working fine with the original battery.
And it is well supported by free software such as Gammu.
I agree with the last remark. If Microsoft gave Nokia a large amount of money ( a billion?) to use Windows X and the new CEO is Elop, it does not seem likely that Meltami will scale up to Windows X capability. If so, Nokia could become another arm of Microsoft. Europe would be very angry if Microsoft bought Nokia like Google bought Motorola Mobile. Maybe that will happen and Nokia-Microsoft will sell off Qt, etc. Did Microsoft buy a large amount of Nokia stock, or did Microsoft just give Nokia a large amount of money for Windows X and. therefore, avoid legal constraints?
I was rooting for Nokia and Finland is the number one in math achievement. Meego, with strong support for Python, the easiest language, is dead? Will Intel, an American company and Samsung now force developers into C++ (which they rescued from Jurassic Park) for Tizen?
dj
Low-end phones are used by people who don't buy from app-stores anyway, so Linux is perfect, since it already has free mature software repos.
Maemo failed to be ready in time because they tried to reimplement everything and the kitchen sink, along with serious over-engineering issues.
I bet people will be a lot more productive when resources are limited, and maybe dump some dev dead weight.
Linux is meeting very hard resistance from the whole apps/iphone/me-too/android crowd, because well, they just want a flashy phone with toys, not something that works.
So, not focusing on this market (the market for morons) may be the best bet for getting a good working Linux phone, and a successor to Symbian when it comes to energy efficiency.
In the end, Linux will take over the whole mobile market, since nothing else has the same performance.