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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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
For less than $100 you can't expect too much, but maybe xterm?
I believe that Microsoft can do whatever they want with Nokia.
The board chose a CEO who did nothing visible, then forced Nokia into dependence on Microsoft. The shareholders reacted by selling madly. I don't know what Nokia's goals are aside from selling phones, but they don't seem to be reacting fast enough (especially with Elop pulling a multi-Osborne at the start of the year.)
So yeah, I expect that if MS tells Nokia to marginalize or kill something off, they'll try as hard as they can to do so. Elop has to stay on good terms with them or he'll ride Nokia into the gutter.
Cheap low end hardware has changed since the Palm III
They are probably thinking about an 600-800MHz ARM9/11 cpu with 128-256MB of RAM, with a GPU that can still draw 30 million triangles per second and play 1080p videos (like say the 25$ 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.
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
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.
What, and create yet another external dependency on the efforts of some other corporation? No, it's much more sane to contribute to existing open source development efforts that exist largely independently of the goals of some other company.
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
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.
USA is hardly the 8% of the total mobile phone market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use
And thats data from the CIA WFB 2007, guess numbers are even higher nowadays. My bet is that mobile manufacturers create products for the sane-mobile-rest-of-the-world-market first, and then they devote some time to pamper the American mobile industry.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
they could easily make earlier android version work on "low end" smartphones.
That's a fine technical solution. I think this is more seller's remorse (their soul to Microsoft).
Nokia: we'd like to pay $5 per phone for a Windows license.
Microsoft: no, $15.
Nokia: fine, we'll just go build Android phones then
Microsoft: no, we own patents on Android. See our list of licensees.
Nokia: OK, we'll use Meltemi
Microsoft: WTF?
Nokia: our in-house lightweight linux
Microsoft: oh, um, we have a basket of patents against linux
Nokia: let's see them
Microsoft: OK, how about $5.05 per phone?
In my imagination anyway.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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
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).
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!