Ex-Nokia Staff To Build MeeGo-based Smartphones

Snirt writes "A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for 'dinghy'), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of directors and core professionals from Nokia's MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities."

Comments

Good luck

[Tancred]

I think it's too late due to the developer network effect (same goes for Firefox OS and even Windows Phone). But I'd like to be wrong about that.

Re:Good luck

[fatphil]

Your worries are valid. My hope is that they decide that absolute openness of the platform (so basically like the true-Maemo n900 was, rather than the fake-MeeGo-broken-Maemo n9) will lower the entry bar to a level where people feel it might be a fun thing to play with, as the time investment on trying to work around restrictions is minimal. I.e. something every linux hacker would want. Once (and if, of course) there's a critical mass, hopefully it will take off in a bigger way.

Re:Good luck

[marcosdumay]

If it is open, count on me to buy a device. Even if the only things running on this device are a text editor and a mail client. Hell, even if I need to write the mail client myself.

Re:Good luck

[hairyfeet]

But are there enough "Linux hackers" that would bother to buy the thing? After all we've seen that Linux hackers would rather have the Windows Tax break than buy from places like System76 as the Newegg article from a few weeks back showed, and Open Moko didn't sell enough to make it worth doing, so I'm seriously doubtful there are enough hackers that give a shit about their phone OS to actually make this worthwhile.

After all if Linux hackers only bought from Linux vendors and bought open hardware we'd already have a market with such devices, but the fact that we don't leads me to believe there just isn't enough that care what runs on their phones. Hell without economy of scale on their side these things will probably be higher than a decent Android phone, not to mention I seriously doubt ANY carrier is gonna offer a hacker friendly phone on contract so it'll be full price city which averages $400-$600, at least around here. How many people are gonna pay that just to have a fully hackable phone? Raise of hands, how many here will be pre-ordering if they offer it?

Sorry to be a downer but without a major OEM like Samsung or Nokia behind it I just don't see any of these niche phones going anywhere, and that goes for WebOS, MozOS, and WinPhone as well.

Re:Good luck

[GameboyRMH]

+1 will buy any new open phone with a keyboard to succeed my N900. There's always so much suspense between buying new phones for me, and it gets more severe every time.

Re:Good luck

[Microlith]

They don't need to make a device targeted at Linux hackers. They can add those capabilities on whatever device they make. What they need to do is take the territory that Nokia lost when they abandoned Symbian, and deliver on support in ways that Android vendors fail utterly at. If they can do that, catering to us nerds is something they'll do anyway because they'll want that capability themselves.

Re:Good luck

[fatphil]

Estonians (not know for being the richest country in the world) paid ~$800 for an N900. That's way more than a month's average wage here.

Finns pre-ordered at that same price by the thousand. I know _dozens_ of people with the N900, more than of any other phone I know. And I'm not just thinking of my colleagues who used the prototypes as our daily device while working on the project (that would be hundreds, not dozens), I'm thinking of non-Nokians who paid cold hard cash for the thing.

However, you're right, this would be a niche thing. The market is going through a catastrophic collapse towards a duoculture or even monoculture, the chance of anything new (or old but recycled) making it big now are absolutely minimal. They've got to fight over the scraps now. Achieving critical mass is not for domination - it's for staying alive.

Downer? Hah! You're barely making a dent compared with what Elop did to me! (By joining the company 2 years back...)

Re:Good luck

[ColdWetDog]

And with the rest of the Slashdot posters who chime in they could sell several dozen. Probably even enough to give Windows Phone a run for it's money.

Re:Good luck

[fatphil]

When I pulled out my N950 proto in a pub in Helsinki a year or so back, 5 out of the other 6 people at the table (none of whom were Nokians) were N900 owners and every single one said that they don't care one jot about the N9, they want the keyboard - and would pay money for it.

I have no idea which particular manager was behind the 'developer device only' decision for the N950, but I hope his crack is cut with something nasty.

Re:Good luck

[fatphil]

I know people who ported mutt and alpine to the N900.

Then again, most people I knew who wanted to have old-school mail just ran SSH in a terminal to a remote 'screen' session on their home machines, where they were running mutt locally.

We (in the kernel development team) often used to[*] joke about booting to a shell. There could be a binary called 'call', and if that was too much to type, set up a bleedin' alias for it! Want to hang up? Simple - that's Control-C! And what could be simpler than:
$ sms anna 'coming home soon, do I need to go to the shops?'

[* one made it again just a couple of weeks ago, the last time I saw him]

Re:Good luck

[Teun]

Indeed, the closer it is to a standard Linux, preferably a deb system, the better the chance software is easy to port.

Why would a manufacturer that presently is depending on Google to update Android not be tempted by something much more common?
The price is in large parts of the world not an issue, most people I know do like me and buy their phone outright and then get a service with it.

The US market is important but not exactly the standard of things mobile.

Re:Good luck

[gbjbaanb]

and I guess there's options here for the OS to be picked up by a big electronics corporate (say, LG or Sony perhaps) who wants to have a "presence" in the smartphone market without having to be another me-too Android manufacturer.

There's marketplaces that can be tapped - especially the featurephone marketplace, if the OS can be trimmed down to fit on a supercheap phone, it has a place. Even if it can't, it can be positioned as a computer-in-your-pocket with a desktop/TV dock that is the holy grail of smartphones IMHO.

And, of course, if its Linux-based, there's the possibility it'll be able to run Android apps as well as the usual Linux ones.

In any case, they don't need to become massively huge with more phones than Apple and Google combined... they just need to make a profit to keep them in their jobs (I never quite subscribed to the MBA approach of 'maximising profits even if it means dumping a profitable division') and sell more than Windows to take not only take the number 3 smartphone position but to also do a mighty number 2 on Nokia and Microsoft combined.

Re:Good luck

[ChunderDownunder]

The late Steve declared keyboards were bad, so every second-rate Jobs wannabe declared keyboards had to go.

Nokia's last horizontal slider phone, I believe, was the E7 released in Feb 2011.

RIM, for the time being, offers vertical sliders.

Re:Good luck

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

There are precedents for a newcomer overwhelming the dominant player, or at least gaining significant marketshare, in a given software category. Android has surpassed iOS as the dominant smartphone OS in terms of total deployment. First released in 2004, Nginx gained significant marketshare against Apache, first released in 1995, and even IIS.

Re:Good luck

[Randle_Revar]

>(so basically like the true-Maemo n900 was, rather than the fake-MeeGo-broken-Maemo n9)

I haven't heard this (n900 user, haven't seen or used the n9), please elaborate.

Re:Good luck

[Randle_Revar]

Agree completely.

Re:Good luck

[KiloByte]

While N900 is the best smartphone currently existing, it is a terrible phone exactly due to the telephony interface. If it rings while in a bag, there's a ~50% chance some random button on the touchscreen will press itself (and an incoming call unlocks the screen!). It can drop calls entirely due to a "turn the phone face down" gesture which must have taken some serious drugs to invent. The interface for calling someone is not any better.

So really, if there's a way to initiate (and perhaps even receive!) calls from the command line, it would actually be better than current shit. After beating some sense into the keyboard code, the terminal is more convenient to use than most laptops, I'd sure take having to type "accept" or an alias over randomly rejecting calls.

Re:Good luck

[Microlith]

The N9's Harmattan is basically Maemo 6, only without GTK and the "Aegis" security system in place. It was "MeeGo-compatible" due to sharing a number of platform APIs and including Qt, but not MeeGo due to lacking some APIs MeeGo had as well as being DEB based and not RPM based.

Re:Good luck

[Tough Love]

Their strongest arguments are native execution speed and full QT power. It might be enough to get them somewhere.

Re:Good luck

[unixisc]

Most Linux fans see Android as Linux and have no problems getting normal Android phones. Those who are either Applecionados or BSD fans are happy to get their iPhones. There is all of the Linux & BSD fanbase right there. They hardly even have any desire for WebOS, much less things like Vivaldi, Mer or Tizen. Phones and tablets are not the markets that new Linux entrants ought to be trying to break in. Instead, go after Windows 8 - they'll have a lot better chance there.

Re:Good luck

[davydagger]

sure there are.

the n9 sold more phones with no support than the overhyped windows phone in the same time peroid.

People will ask for it by name, and the people who want it are usually willing to pay, as its more than just a phone, as the rest of them are to other people.

Re:Good luck

[davydagger]

nobody wants windows on a cellphone. People only use windows on the PC because they feel they are stuck with it.

Partnering with microsoft was a terrible idea. Unless windows 8 phone is some total game changer, its all lost.

They were much better sticking with maemo, because at least when you have GNU/linux, you have the monopoly on a solid niche. All of which are rabid fanatics who both shell out 10x money for a phone, only to turn around and do free work on it. When you have windows, you really don't have a base. The techies don't want it. The average user is comfortable with android, and the newbsauces, trendies have apple. Even corporate is going to apple, and there is nothing that windows phone does the iphone doesn't to counter this trend.

As for microsoft, "windows" is a toxic brand. If I were any other company, I'd be hesitant in selling "windows" anything. If I were microsoft, I would call "windows phone" "xbox phone", as the xbox brand is far less hated. In fact, I'd discontinue the windows brand alltogether except for corporate, and just use the xbox name.

Re:Good luck

[davydagger]

davlik-alien had a maemo port.(something like WINE but for armel android/liunx to gnu/linux). So its not unfeasiable to run anrdroid apps.

Re:Good luck

[drkstr1]

I paid ridiculous eBay money for my Nokia 9290, so I'm sure there is at least a small market there with people like me. I don't think their goal is to be the next Apple, but rather eek out a respectable profit in a niche market. If you ask me, being the only player in a niche market is good businesses.

Re:Good luck

[RobbieThe1st]

I'd love that.

--Posted from my N900.

Re:Good luck

[DMiax]

the company was not bleeding money. they had a profit instead and it was also growing. However it was expected that the symbian based revenue and profits (it made profits) would be down some time around next year (2013). Elop could have delayed the current crash by two years at the very least by just doing nothing.

So yes, something needed to be done, but there was no hurry, and surely no need to actively kill symbian and all phones that were already being produced and focus only on something that came several months later.

The in house OSes are currently the only chance Nokia has of not being dismantled. If Elop took the time to evaluate the strategy maybe he could have had a backup plan. It seems instead that he wanted to put Nokia in a place where it was either success with windows or bankruptcy with windows, and the "staying alive with our own OS" was not really an option for him. Now it is clear that the path will be bankruptcy with windows.

Re:Good luck

[ChunderDownunder]

Many of us have never seen webOS - e.g. the Palm Pre series was never sold in my country.

Re:Good luck

[hughk]

Actually that was a clever move. Take a 3G iPhone 4 and it is more or less saleable in most of the world (barring chargers). Put a physical keyboard on it and you have a single market dependency. In Europe, even Germany, France and the UK (amongst others) have different layouts. Software keyboards are easy.

OTOH, a good hardware keyboard is so much easier to use, even a small one. I still loved my E71 for messaging.

Re:Good luck

[Randle_Revar]

I should have included the bit before that. I know about that, but how does that affect its openness?

Re:Good luck

[nobodie]

Ya, snark all you want, but this kind of process is still looking for its opening. It can happen, it just needs the right yeast to help it grow. Mobile phones might be just the over crowded place where it could happen, by going against popular belief it actually has a better chance. I have a meego- based tablet and it really is a great system, and there is a lot of good work sitting htere waiting to grow.

on the other hand, the need will be for a charismatic leader to marshal the developers. Meego has an awesome crew of full and part time devs, what it has never had was a leader who could connect to both the devs and the buyers. It needs someone, a personality that provides the spark.

Re:Good luck

[nobodie]

I was in Moscow last summer at a second hand phone market. I asked around for one with a number of the dealers, they said that there was not a single N900 available in all of Moscow. Then they said that if I could find one it would be worth a fortune because some real .... interesting people would like to have one.

Re:Good luck

[hairyfeet]

Wow, look at the crazy from the mods here. So you are HONESTLY saying that even though MSFT couldn't crack into that market with over a BILLION DOLLARS SPENT that Nokia could magically have taken share with Maemo...because? What you think "Linux hackers" would set the world on fire? Have you forgotten OpenMoko?

Hindsight is always 20/20 and while we all agree that Win 8 hasn't got a prayer the simple fact is Maemo needed at least another year of polish and work and Droid and Apple were drinking Nokia's milkshake bud. Mark my words the new Maemo phones won't even sell 100,000 units and will go the way of OpenMoko, the mobile market is driven by developers developers developers and ironically all the developers are on Android and iOS and NOT Maemo or WinPhone. All you'll get on Maemo is a few half baked ports of FOSS software, maybe Abiword or VLC, and then it'll die. Sorry to burst your bubble but its as crazy as saying PalmOS could compete with iPhone, its just not in the same league and wouldn't be without tens of millions spent and another year or two of development, by which time the race would have been over.

Re:Good luck

[ladoga]

I should have included the bit before that. I know about that, but how does that affect its openness?

Aegis prevents messing with some of the system files, but it's not too hard to circumverent/disable Aegis alltogether. Install open kernel or use Inception.

Though I haven't bothered with either. Aegis hasn't (yet) come into my way when porting software to the phone or installing stuff from community repository with apt-get. Much of stuff in community repos are just stock debian armel packages, with slight modifications in control files.

If you know how to compile programs in Linux, then that's the only thing you need to know to port stuff to Harmattan. Install Scratchbox to your computer, log in to it, download sources, apt-get necessary -dev packages, ./configure && make and scp resulting binaries to your phone. For extra points you can ofcourse roll it into debian package and kindly ask at #harmattan IRC channel for your package to be added to the community repository so that everyone can install it on their phones with apt-get.

N9 is just awesome. Swipe UI wipes the floor with Android and IOS + it really feels like a true Linux computer. Elop has made sure it's hard to get, but IMO it's easily worth all the money you throw for it.

Re:Good luck

[Compaqt]

You have a point.

But wouldn't it be possible just to add an Android runtime to the Linux environment? Best of both worlds.

Re:Good luck

[fatphil]

"Steve declared keyboards were bad"

That I didn't know. I do know that the description "second-rate Jobs wannabe" is fitting in the history of not just the N9. I heard, and used, the terms iClone, and iPhoney, more than once whilst working on the project. The people behind the UI clearly had zero expertise in the field, dangerously so (they even deliberately ignored results of usability studies, and lied about those results), and were just pulling in features from other contexts that they thought were cool, even if they were inconsistent, confusing, or just plain broken in our context. You wouldn't believe how many usability bugs were filed (and closed "wontfix", and reopened) by three angry low level developers (Phillippe in system software, Felip in the graphics codecs stack, and Phil in the kernel (me)) before it turned into what was finally released.

Re:Good luck

[fatphil]

> "turn the phone face down" gesture

That predates the N900. It's pretty much nokia standard behaviour.
Very useful for meetings.

Whether it was implemented free of bugs, I don't know. (But I do know the quality of developers in different teams ranged from rocket-scientists to droolers.)

Re:Good luck

[fatphil]

With the feature phones, we were still making a profit. But you're right that the issues do predate Elop by about 3 years. I only have marginal insight into the platform that never wanted to be dominating the world, it only wanted to technically superior. I, and others, were hoping that it would remain small enough that it could continue under the radar. The big "S" platforms - I can only presume that they were riddled with as much incompetence at the higher levels as we were, but due to their size that meant that billion-dollar mistakes were made. Nokia's management structure was broken, it was way too top heavy, and by having 3 times as many managers as they needed, they spent 10 times as much time having to communicate things to each other. Which meant that they appeared overloaded (some were in meetings 100% of the time, no joke), which means sometimes their roles were split, and more managers were brought on board. Tada - bigger communication problem!

Perhaps it deserved to die. Elop was just the quickest way of bringing that about.

Re:Good luck

[fatphil]

I agree, the urgency wasn't there. Clever choice or change of direction would have worked fine. Hasty thrashing around, and chosing the worst ever partner in the history of IT, was clearly doomed.

"The in house OSes are currently the only chance Nokia has of not being dismantled."

The in-house OSes are the problem (according to Elop). There's no "innovation" in those OSes. That's why "the project based in Ulm" whose name hasn't been officially been mentioned (and about which there's a *lot* of misinformation, even if The Register calls the non-facts "confirmed") had its death sentence enacted 3 weeks ago, and why I'm spending much of my day reading slashdot rather than hacking linux...

Re:Good luck

[KiloByte]

A phone in a bag gets tossed around a lot, especially when you're dropping the bag to open it and pluck the phone out. It is likely it will go face down at least for a moment.

Re:Good luck

[AVee]

I agree, the urgency wasn't there. Clever choice or change of direction would have worked fine. Hasty thrashing around, and chosing the worst ever partner in the history of IT, was clearly doomed.

True, but owning a few million bucks worth of MS shares kind of changes your priorities doesn't it...

Re:Good luck

[hairyfeet]

Not without another year to a year and a half of work and polish that Nokia didn't have the money nor the time to spend friend. You are talking about building a VM to run the applications of a moving target, hell a target as slow as Windows has been tried to emulate by the ReactOS guys for years with little to no success, and Windows lasts a decade an OS.

Now try imagining doing that for an OS that comes out yearly, is designed for a platform currently undergoing a MHz war on both the CPU side AND the GPU side, and which will have to integrate into a market controlled by a rival which will naturally not want you accessing their market, and what you are suggesting is as "easy" as hitting a dartboard off a moving truck with a live bumblebee.

Sure you could do it, but by the time you came out you'd have support for Android 4 and they'd have already moved on to Android 6. IBM tried a similar situation with OS/2 back in the day with their Win16 support which came from MSFT no less but when Win32 came out they found that to add support would have been a living hell. Even though android uses a Linux kernel its still a Google product and Google has a HELL of a lot more being sunk into new versions R&D than Nokia could ever hope for. This is why I get irked at the "just use Linux" crowd because they act like its a magic word and all those problems will disappear when the opposite is true, Google didn't "just use Linux" but spent over a billion on R&D for Android to build it, a billion Nokia didn't have.

Re:Good luck

[illtud]

$ sms anna 'coming home soon, do I need to go to the shops?'

I can do that on my n900 - google 'smssTend n900'. I haven't found a way to initiate calls, nor make a pre-recorded call to somebody via cli.

Re:Good luck

[illtud]

doh! 'smssend n900', not 'smssTend'.

Re:Good luck

[DarwinSurvivor]

Not really. The keyboard itself is basically the same, you just switch the letters around. It's not much more work to make a different sticker/printing layer on the keyboard than it is to make different covers for the each language.

Re:Good luck

[fatphil]

I remember the Comms team gave us a dbus command which would do the same thing, to help us with testing. If 'smssend' is more than a dozen lines of script, then it's overkill.

Re:Good luck

[hughk]

The difference being that once you have a physical keyboard device for the German market (D/A/CH), it is less easy to divert to another market so it means that you have to create keyboard specific batches.

Re:Good luck

[LurkerXXX]

Maemo was just getting to the point where the gadget reviewers were saying it was worth taking a look at. Reviews for the N900 were good, and then they killed it. A shame.

Something tells me...

[Anonymous Coward]

... they would rather see you translate Jolla as "Lifeboat," rather than "Dinghy."

Re:Something tells me...

[westlake]

... they would rather see you translate Jolla as "Lifeboat," rather than "Dinghy."

"Lifeboat" tells me that your project is the Titanic and the ship is sinking.

Re:Something tells me...

[furbearntrout]

"Lifeboat" tells me that your project is the Titanic and the ship is sinking.

Actually it's the the Lusitania, and it got torpedoed by Microsoft.

Re:Something tells me...

[Znork]

What, I thought it was a burning platform? At least once Elop got done with his thermite plans.

Re:Something tells me...

[2Y9D57]

If they meant lifeboat, they would have called it 'pelastusvene'.

Re:Something tells me...

[Man On Pink Corner]

More like the Costa Concordia, skippered by the intrepid Captain Ballmer.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[Microlith]

No worries, I doubt there will be a product named MeeGo. In fact, it isn't even using MeeGo, but Mer, which spun off from MeeGo when it became obvious that Nokia was going to walk away and Intel was off to pursue other things.

Jolla will probably name it something else exclusive to them. All that matters is by going with Mer (or as they've been saying, MeeGo) you know one thing: Qt.

"Jolla" means "dinghy" in Finnish?

[93 Escort Wagon]

What does "Nokia" mean - "lie back and think of Finland"?

Re:"Jolla" means "dinghy" in Finnish?

[Tancred]

The company started as a pulp mill in 1865 in the city of Nokia, whose name might be from the word for sable, marten or beaver.

Re:"Jolla" means "dinghy" in Finnish?

[fatphil]

The implication in the name of the creature seems to be that it had a soot-coloured (i.e. black) fur. The word "noki" means smut or soot.
The town's emblem is this black creature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nokia.vaakuna.svg

If you're a Finn, or in Finland, then you might be interested in an exhibition in Vapriikki museum in Tampere which documents the history of Nokia very thoroughly. It's either just started, or will start soon. (Disclosure - I am not connected to it apart from the fact that they are regular indirect clients of my company.)

Re:"Jolla" means "dinghy" in Finnish?

[Anonymous Coward]

It also means "Jewel" in Spanish.

Re:"Jolla" means "dinghy" in Finnish?

[Tough Love]

The company started as a pulp mill in 1865 in the city of Nokia...

And pretty soon it will have to go back to being a pulp mill. It's just too bad nobody reads newspapers any more.

Re:"Jolla" means "dinghy" in Finnish?

[unixisc]

I recall a time when the company used to make multicolor monitors.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yugo, MeeGo, WeAllGo

Chairs

[Anonymous Coward]

Over in Redmond, Washington, millions of chairs cried out in terror as a sweaty monkey realised that all that money he's spend was in vain.

It is actually a good idea

[miknix]

If they start selling some phones, who else better than Nokia to buy the company?

Re:It is actually a good idea

[Jahf]

At this point? Nearly anyone.

Re:It is actually a good idea

[squiggleslash]

I dunno, maybe they should buy Nokia?

How long until their market share exceeds Nokia's?

[micheas]

12 months?

Joking aside...

[F69631]

Nokia is the name of the city where the company was incorporated in 1871.

As for the story... I've been waiting for this to happen. I'd love to see them succeed but I have very hard time imagining that it'll actually happen. I guess their best bet is staying afloat a while and hoping that Nokia decides to buy them back.

Re:How long until their market share exceeds Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

By the time they get their MeeGo phones to market? Probably as soon as the first phone sells.

long live the n900!

[fikx]

Please please please please buy the IP on the n900 hardware...don't let such a good design vanish....

Re:long live the n900!

[Microlith]

The N900's only real stellar point is the slide mechanism for the keyboard. Mine's probably been opened and closed more than a thousand times in the last 2.5 years and it's still rock solid.

The rest could be readily re-done, possibly thinner and better (see the N950.)

Re:long live the n900!

[CRCulver]

The rest could be readily re-done, possibly thinner and better (see the N950.)

The N950 isn't better. One of the reasons Nokia choose not to market it directly to the public is that it is flimsy enough that carriers would be turned off by something guaranteed to raise a lot of support problems with customers.

Re:long live the n900!

[Microlith]

I think they chose not to market it directly to the public for other reasons. It was rejected by the carriers as being too flimsy, but I haven't heard anything about that despite knowing a lot of people with N950s who use them on a daily basis in lieu of their N900s.

Moot point though. The problem there was the hinge. It was still thinner and larger.

Re:long live the n900!

[alantus]

You have to be kidding, the n900 has a terrible design, the whole thing appears to be upside down.
The microusb port is surface mounted, its so delicate that it comes right off unless you are not extremely careful.
Additionally, the port is on the top, that means that its hard to use while charging because a cable pops from the top and puts additional stress on it. The battery lasts less than a day, so you have to charge it even more frequently.
The unlock and headphone connector is at the bottom, it should be on the top, the whole thing is upside down.
Besides all that, the thing is too thick, and the camera protrudes, when you put it on a desk its not flat.

If you want a good design look at the E71.

Re:long live the n900!

[fikx]

I'd love an updated version of the n900: thinner, lighter, maybe bigger screen, but just tweaks to the original. A compass would be nice :) The n900 to me is a great piece of hardware. I've yet to see another phone that has all the features of the n900 so far. The n950 is close on features and functionality, I still prefer my n900.
With Nokia abandoning both the hardware (see n950 as the new direction) and software, I was resigned to something less when my n900 gave out. But I still have hope!

Re:long live the n900!

[fikx]

I've never used it in that orientation except when talking on the phone, and then only when I can't gt my headset out quick enough. I don't like holding any smart phone to my face, so I'll likely use a headset for any phone. For landscape use, you comments make no sense. And the usb charging port has given me no troubles and never come out while plugged in...as far as being thick, feels solid to me, which I like. could be thinner, but OK as is. Camera lens with good cover is great. It's not flat but it doesn't rock on a flat surface either, so who cares...
So, design is great to me, maybe you should try it in landscape more, all the buttons are accessible with one hand for me that way, and make sense.

Re:long live the n900!

[Teun]

It seems you didn't understand the N900 was designed as a tablet and to be used in landscape mode.

That way all connections are on the side and work perfectly well.

Re:long live the n900!

[jonwil]

As an N900 user, I say they should NOT release another N900, they should release something that's like an N900 but BETTER.

Re-design the USB port so it cant come loose and render the phone as good as dead. Improve the battery life. Give it an up-to-date browser and rendering engine. Have less closed-source software on the device (especially in the lower level libraries).

Add a maps app with better (and more up-to-date) maps and better features (e.g. easy way to search for specific streets/landmarks/etc and get walking directions to that location)

Support missing features like Cell Broadcast SMS and the various WiFi encryption standards.

Re:long live the n900!

[CRCulver]

And the usb charging port has given me no troubles and never come out while plugged in.

Then you are lucky. Many thousands of people have had issues with the USB port breaking, just take a look across the blogging world or talk.maemo.org. Your USB port might still come undone no matter how gentle you use the device, though even if the product is no longer under warranty it may still be fairly cheap to send it into Nokia for servicing (I paid 30 euro here in Romania last year).

Re:long live the n900!

[CRCulver]

Add a maps app with better (and more up-to-date) maps and better features (e.g. easy way to search for specific streets/landmarks/etc and get walking directions to that location)

Not an official app, but the popular Mappero application for N900 does address searching and car/bicycle/foot routing.

Re:long live the n900!

[alantus]

I know it works well in landscape mode, but most phones can be used both ways, so why not the n900? It does implement auto-rotation after all.

Don't get me wrong, I love my n900, but I don't deceive myself like other people into thinking this is the best design ever, it has flaws.
Maybe when it was released it was good enough, but nowadays a new device would have to be:
- multitouch and more precise screen, perhaps capacitive
- at least 30% thinner
- no camera protuberance
- better battery life
- faster cpu, maybe multicore
- more memory

Things that I would like to stay the same:
- speakers, better quality than others
- keyboard

Re:long live the n900!

[G-forze]

multitouch and more precise screen, perhaps capacitive

The N900 has a much preciser screen than any capacitive I've yet to try. Though I admit, I have never used a capacitive screen with a stylus. To me, the N900 resistive screen is way better, precisely because it can correctly interpreting me pointing with a nail, which is orders of magnitude more precise than if I would have to use my fingertip.

The other things I can agree on, most of them natural since the N900 is already many years old.

Re:long live the n900!

[TeknoHog]

The N900 already has a compass of sorts, via its GPS receiver. For example GPSJinni can show the raw compass direction.

Re:How long until their market share exceeds Nokia

[ClaraBow]

That was funny! Thanks for the laugh!

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are actually already based on Mer:
https://twitter.com/JollaMobile/status/221688205672595456
I guess they are just using the MeeGo name for publicity. :)

Re:Angels and Lawyers

[Anonymous Coward]

The investors better have a very strong stomach. With the group's prior access to Nokia's and Microsoft's patent portfolio it won't take much to see Jolla sued right out of existence before they even announce a product.

No, not really.
They'll have to get a licence and pay royalties for any patented technology they use, some of which will be under FRAND and some of which won't be.
If they don't ask for licences and pay royalties, then you could expect someone to ask them if they wouldn't mind paying, via some legal means.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[Microlith]

There's only a few actual connections.

Intel: Moblin -> MeeGo -> (huge disconnect, much package shedding) -> Mer
Nokia: Maemo -> Harmattan
Samsung: Tizen

You've got until...

[Duncan J Murray]

...my unreplaceable one-of-a-kind Nokia N900 becomes irreparable, to come up with a phone worthy as its successor. It seems pretty solid, so I'll give you a few years. (fingers crossed)

The mobile market definitely needs a full gnu/linux phone. In fact, the N900 follows on from a privileged few mobile devices with desktop-like capability - the psion 3a, psion 5mx, Nokia 9500 communicator, Nokia E90 (only just). And it was only really the Psions that didn't shy from giving you the full OS experience just because it was a mobile device. Why can't my mobile device have a full fledged file-manager with drag-and-drop capability or a desktop where I can place regularly used files as well as applications?

But maybe I'm mad - apparently you don't need these things on the desktop either.

Re:You've got until...

[couchslug]

"my unreplaceable one-of-a-kind Nokia N900 becomes irreparable"

It's a tool. Buy spare(s)?

Re:You've got until...

[rdnetto]

...my unreplaceable one-of-a-kind Nokia N900 becomes irreparable, to come up with a phone worthy as its successor.

Pretty much any (GPL-compliant) Android phone with an unlocked bootloader can run any Linux-based OS you want. And while this company has just started, the KDE project is nearing version 2.0 of Plasma Active, which runs on top of Mer (a fork of Maemo/Meego that Jolla will almost certainly also be basing their OS on).

We already install Linux on desktops that come pre-installed with Windows - I'm surprised there aren't more people installing Mer on their Android phones.

Directors and core professionals believe in MeeGo

[Anonymous Coward]

Those great people believe in bright future for MeeGo based phones. Microsoft also believed in bright future of MeeGo, so they spent billions of dollars to kill it. Windows phones are disaster: non-existant or buggy software (I can not download more than a dosen books on my new Windows phone - if I do that I have to reinstall Kindle App to get access to my books).

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[fatphil]

There's a fine line between "Flamebait" and "saying what a lot of people think, and delivering it very bluntly". "Me go plop plop" is in fact a very common phrase on the alt.tasteless newsgroup, for example. I'd have modded it insightful rather than flamebait!

Probably more of the blame for that should go on Intel than Nokia. I always felt (I was a Nokia dev.) that Intel was the dominant part of the "partnership". (And that the "partnership" was about as fake as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes'.)

As an n900 owner I say..

[Anonymous Coward]

SIGN ME UP! I love my n900 - using an android phone feels like being in jail compared. The iphone feels like a north korean jail. PLEASE let this startup release something good! I'm wondering how they will when Nokia holds such a massive patent bat. I guess we'll see

Re:Angels and Lawyers

[Anonymous Coward]

With the group's prior access to Nokia's and Microsoft's patent portfolio it won't take much to see Jolla sued right out of existence before they even announce a product.

I know this is a silly question, but you do realise that patents are published and available to everyone, right?

Re:Nice joke... but it isn't.

[jones_supa]

There is no plural form for noki in the Finnish language.

Why not? I believe the plural base form is "noet".

This is GREAT

[attah]

This really made me happy to the very core of my being! Sign me up to buy the first phone you make, no matter if none of my two N9s are dead by then. Wonder if they take smaller, albeit non-trivial, investments... I actually wouldn't even get mad if they failed and lost "my" money. At least they would have tried to do the right thing. When they get some traction i would love to come and work for Jolla, but for now I guess they'll keep the team pretty small still.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[GameboyRMH]

Same thing that killed the Wii and the Kindle book reader, will then never learn?

gtk+ and qt don't mix well

[Anonymous Coward]

I liked the all C, Gnome, and Debian style of maemo. I was hoping for a properly done C, Gnome style API for phone and 3G. Mixing it with Moblin, qt and C++ ruined the purity in my opinion, and the appeal to program.

Re:gtk+ and qt don't mix well

[Anonymous Coward]

Writing apps in C and GTK? No thank you, that is way to complex for many simplish apps. I've written a Qt Quick / QML app recently for the N9. I honestly couldn't remember when it was the last time I had so much fun writing a GUI as with Qt Quick. Very easy, excellent data binding and spot-on for the task. It truly is perfect for those quick, heavily animated, finger friendly and asynchronous GUIs we've com to expect on mobiles. For the harder bits or more low-level system access the bridge with Qt / C++ is easy.

Re:gtk+ and qt don't mix well

[gbjbaanb]

and in other words, maybe this is what the 'year of linux on the desktop' is going to be : linux on the (mobile) desktop. That would be awesome :)

Re:gtk+ and qt don't mix well

[Tough Love]

Developing in C++/QT kicks C/GTK to the far side of the moon. Speaking as a longtime C hack.

Re:gtk+ and qt don't mix well

[unixisc]

Since Android already rules tablets and phones, that's already there. The only competition being Apple, but aside from XNU, their only difference is that they are FBSD, rather than Linux based.

Could be the next Intel

[evilviper]

Hey, if a few former Fairchild Semiconductor employees can form Intel and go on to take over the world, I don't see any reason to doubt a bunch of former Nokia employees could have a big impact on the cell phone market. Of course the odds of any startup just avoiding liquidation are very slim, so I don't recomend sinking money into them, but this is a very fast moving, immature market, so there's huge potental there.

Re:Could be the next Intel

[gl4ss]

Hey, if a few former Fairchild Semiconductor employees can form Intel and go on to take over the world, I don't see any reason to doubt a bunch of former Nokia employees could have a big impact on the cell phone market. Of course the odds of any startup just avoiding liquidation are very slim, so I don't recomend sinking money into them, but this is a very fast moving, immature market, so there's huge potental there.

it's like the third offshoot from Nokia, that's aiming to make phones.

Benefon actually made a lot of phones too(they were the first with tetris on a phone, first with t9, had dual sim phone ages ago and so forth), but their heyday went a decade ago.

the question for this new venture is if they can scoop up enough money to actually produce the hw properly. there has been literally dozens of OS only producing companies which amounted to pretty much nothing.

Re:Could be the next Intel

[jonwil]

The biggest problem they will face is getting the hardware to run their new OS on, especially things like cellular chipsets.

Re:Could be the next Intel

[gl4ss]

The biggest problem they will face is getting the hardware to run their new OS on, especially things like cellular chipsets.

oh no, that's not a problem. you can just order them up, the way a meego phone is built anyways is basically that you have an application soc and then you bolt on the phone chip - it's more expensive than running your os on the same chip though, but that's basically how almost all smartphones are done nowadays.

basically take a look at how some non-name androids are made, jolla could basically source hw from the same sources and probably will, unless they're really stupid and greedy for some state benefit money and to start dumping cash at building their own assembly plants... hope not, finland has dumped enough money on things that benefit the shareholders way too much before any product is made.

not getting sued for using industry standards used on those chips and accompanying firmwares is a wholly another matter though!(yeah they're supposed to be under frand since that's how they got included in the standards but.. eh.. look at some lawsuits..).

buying those chips in quantities big enough and on discounts big enough(as in not paying a premium because the supplier wants to screw you just for fun) can be a problem though, of course.

Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

> Jolla (Finnish for 'dinghy')

Thank you very much, as I don't understand Finnish it would be very difficult for me to associate Jolla with dinghy.

Also, mind you, I speak Portuguese not English natively. You may find it curious that "Jolla" sounds like a rubber brand, while dinghy looks like willy.

So, I'll just assume Jolla is for the dinghy, which makes much more sense than being BRAINDAMAGED AND (*breath*) using unknown words.

Have a nice night. And don't forget the Jolla!

Re:Nice joke... but it isn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

>> There is no plural form for noki in the Finnish language.

> Why not? I believe the plural base form is "noet".

First, a killer beaver (almost can see the laser rays coming from the eyes, nice vector btw).

Now, the discussion about plural. Of a Finnish word.

It's looking like Monty Python a lot... what next? Discussing whether Nokia is doomed or just resting?

Wither the Nokia Microsoft deal?

[dgharmon]

From the financial chart, it doesn't look as if the Nokia-Microsoft deal has produced much results. That a company would abandon its own OS in favor of a rival companies just beggers belief. Yet another case of death-by-microsoft?

Re:Wither the Nokia Microsoft deal?

[Naffer]

Their market share was in free-fall well before the Microsoft deal. Their own OS wasn't selling smartphones.

Re:Wither the Nokia Microsoft deal?

[dbIII]

Then it went into a power dive. Remember that they were still the number one supplier of handsets in the world the month Elop was brought in.

Re:Wither the Nokia Microsoft deal?

[symbolset]

They were selling more phones then than now. A lot more.

Re:Wither the Nokia Microsoft deal?

[Tough Love]

Their market share was in free-fall well before the Microsoft deal.

That is actually Microsoft spin and has been debunked.

Just build Android support

[DrYak]

Just build support for Android app on it !!!

Maemo/MeeGo has already had a small but dedicated following in europe. A small segment of the population appreciated a full equipped internet device running a full GNU/Linux stack.

Now, the Android-specific kernel stuff have been backported into the main kernel tree, so it's possible to run android runtimes over a default kernel, so therefore including maemo if its copy of the kernel is a recent enough.

So it should be possible to make a "GNU+Android"/Linux phone. That would add the strong android ecosystem, over the nice&powerful maemo OS, and thus make it much more attractive. Such a combination would definitely sell like hotcakes, at least in Europe, and be rather popular among the technically inclined.

Now they just have to see if their old contacts at the mothership (Nokia) can help them build the hardware. That would be a nice situation for Nokia, collaborate with Jolla to release the phone. The phone is produced under a different brand so it doesn't as strongly compete with the current Nokia line-up, and also it doesn't conflict with nokia's promise to use WinRT on their own-branded phone. And if Maemo proves to be still successful, Nokia could always try to buy back into them.

Re:Just build Android support

[davydagger]

thats not the issue. Kernel Asside, android still runs its own libraries, where maemo/meego run standard GNU and full "linux distribution" libraries.

porting android kernel patches to mainstream linux, means using a mainstream kernel on android phones, or even running GNU on android.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[CRCulver]

There's a fine line between "Flamebait" and "saying what a lot of people think, and delivering it very bluntly". "Me go plop plop" is in fact a very common phrase on the alt.tasteless newsgroup, for example.

Who cares about traditions on alt.tasteless? Usenet isn't even followed by most nerds anymore, let alone the general public.

I will buy two

[Culture20]

I'm tired of all the little bugs I can't fix with my iPhone.

Re:Wrong OS...

[Microlith]

there's just no way to get MeeGo up to speed compared to Android, iOS and WP7 at this point API wise

Since you're so familiar with the details, care explaining how? Some detail, if you would. I'm curious as to how Qt 5 and the rest of Mer (the MeeGo-type core Linux platform they're using) is deficient, API wise.

Or is this yet another empty implication?

They should have started with an OS that was not too far behind and also had a strong core following - WebOS.

So they should have gone with an OS they were totally unfamiliar with, rather than one they were familiar with... why?

Jolla does not mean a rescue boat - too small

[hkultala]

I'm a finn,so I know what "Jolla" means.

Jolla means a very small sailing boat - not meant for rescue, but meant for people who want to go sailing alone on a very small boat.
(who either cannot afford bigger boat or just likes very small boats)

Jollas cant be used as rescue boats, they are too small for that.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[wmac1]

I am starting to worry whether we can rely on less popular open source software? In recent few years many of the open source libraries and software I use were discontinued.

- a few of the developers decided to produce commercial versions and sell for money
- a few others thought they need money for living and started developing new commercial projects with functionalists similar to the open source one but better (this category includes myself)
- a few others just gave up on the project and left the source code somewhere hoping that someone else will continue developing it

The reason might be the hard fact that you cannot work for free and pay for your life.

This question comes to my mind: Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)? ... perhaps those which have a better business and sustaining plan ?

Just deliver something like the N900

[Svartormr]

Wide screen and physical keyboard with max freqencies so it can go on all mobile networks.

And Debian underneath the interface.

Re:Yeah sure poser

[Anonymous Coward]

This stupid bullshit from you again? You can make little changes to iOS apps like adding 'open in background' to safari. fucking yawn iFag. with android you can completely change and recompile any part of the system you want. Keep hating, fuck.

Re:Wrong OS...

[Microlith]

Where are the higher level frameworks in QT? Perhaps they are in Mer, but I could find no reference for that, which indicates there's not much Mer there.

All of the mobile-specific stuff is going into Qt Mobility. Anything missing will undoubtedly need to be added, I suspect that the team in question is aware of that.

Mobile programming these days is a LOT more than just being able to draw or do simple animations or being able to hit SQLLite.

No shit. Do keep in mind that this is the same team that developed the N9, I'm pretty sure they're aware of what deficiencies exist in the available APIs.

That would imply I ever had any "empty implications", whatever the hell that means.

Your frequent "proclamations" or unsupported statements for or against things that, unless prompted, you never give reference to or back up. It's a very general thing that you have a habit of doing here on Slashdot.

Is that something like when you are not a mobile developer and you cast aspirations of those who are when they try to tell you how things really work?

No, I just find it highly annoying when people think others are supposed to just blindly believe what they say.

Yes, if they actually wanted to have meaning in the market instead of chasing their tails. Instead the prediction of their demise is sadly all too certain to make.

And jumping on board with a platform that is being shoveled out the door by HP, with no future development in sight, is a smart move to make? Who knows, they may adopt some of what's in webOS, maybe merge it into Qt. We don't have visibility into much more than what's been pointed out today. Odd that, given the sparse info, you're already making proclamations of their doom.

They could have folded some aspects of MeeGo into the underlying WebOS infrastructure, but Qt 5 is ANCIENT compared to modern mobile OS's. They will get nowhere with this little vanity project, which makes me sad indeed given the effort they will undoubtedly sink into it. I despise wasted potential.

Then go back to your iOS development and let everyone else try to ensure there are more options than just Apple/Google, and maybe enjoy a niche. Not everyone needs to take on the two beasts out of the gate or serve every possible customer, they just need to be profitable.

The curious thing

[symbolset]

To me the curious thing is that Nokia needs money and is selling off parts of itself. But not the Linux parts. Those it kills.

Re:The curious thing

[symbolset]

Samsung seems to be doing ok. $5.9 billion in profit this quarter.

Re:The curious thing

[symbolset]

It's not clear if you're asking about Nokia or Samsung here.

Samsung's Linux business is their Smartphone department, and it's pulling $3.8B/quarter this summer, so an annualized run rate of about $20B profit. At a reasonable 5 PER for a 15% operating margin business growing this fast this would be $100B at least for business value, plus another 40% for takeover markup. I.E. nobody has that much money. Of course, that would never happen anyway.

Nokia's Linux businesses? They have to be worth something to somebody. And anything is better than nothing, unless they get more for destroying them than selling them.

Re:The curious thing

[ladoga]

Nokia's Linux businesses? They have to be worth something to somebody. And anything is better than nothing, unless they get more for destroying them than selling them.

Nokia's Linux effort was worth billions to Microsoft. Billions to have it dead.

MS sees Linux as threat and it's their tune that Nokia dances to. Elop has gone out of his way* to ensure that there's no return to Linux at Nokia.

* Firing MeeGo and Meltemi teams and killing both projects, shutting down Salo factory where N9 was being made and laying off QT devs. Everything Linux related has been axed.

Re:The curious thing

[RoccamOccam]

Hmm. This makes me wonder if the purchase of TrollTech (QT) is what put Nokia in Microsoft's crosshairs in the first place. QT provides a very attractive cross-platform alternative to Microsoft's desktop tools.

Microsoft's "takeover" of Nokia killed multiple birds with one stone.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[Tough Love]

Still using rpm. What a bad idea. Still, it's an interesting project.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[davydagger]

well consider its the successor to maemo, I'd say most of the nerds want one. Like they wanted maemo.

Why? its a gnu/linux cellphone. Nerds like gnu/liunx. This is slashdot. News for nerds. I'm pretty sure that to the average slashdot reader, that something this nerdy is a very big deal. Especially after the whole nokia/microsoft debacle. Again, nerds are smart people and aren't driven off by silly things like labels and driven towards marketing campaigns. They are driven because its going to be easy to modify with a great community, which makes it more of a hobby than a cellphone. Being nerds, modifying cellphones is a very legitimate hobby. Again this is slashdot.

Find your way back to gawker please.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[davydagger]

there are always forks....

I used maemo, and I wish that meego could have stayed with the debian based and hildon desktop.

Hildon is free/open and will be included in Ubuntu Cellphone with 14.04

They already have! Meet Alien Dalvik

[ryzvonusef]

It's called Alien Dalvik, and the video I remember seeing about it (a year or so ago, on Engadget, I think) showed it running Google apps like Google maps on N900.

Sadly it was proprietary, and not for sale to ordinary customers (more to OEMs, I think)

Re:They already have! Meet Alien Dalvik

[ChunderDownunder]

If Android apps, there's always BB10 on the horizon - if it ever ships...

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[theArtificial]

I am starting to worry whether we can rely on less popular open source software? In recent few years many of the open source libraries and software I use were discontinued.

Ultimately it's unwise to base your business upon something that your organization is unable or unwilling to maintain.

This question comes to my mind: Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)? ... perhaps those which have a better business and sustaining plan ?

I'm sure you've heard of the phrase 'there are no guarantees in life' which also applies to software. If you (or your company) are dependent upon something that is developed by a 3rd party, it's wise to get a support contract. As an example: Redhat offers support as well as other organizations which develop OSS. Consider licensing the code, or hiring the developer(s) outright, failing that fork it and learn to maintain it in house. A lesson from my professional life: software constantly changes.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[91degrees]

I know. Give me a nice sensibly named phone based off Ice Cream Sandwich instead.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[master_p]

Don't worry, the next version of Meego will be named Yugo.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[Culture20]

This "X means milf hunter in language Y (where Y is a dead language or X is no longer used as such)" is amazing... it's a catchy meme, but it's completely insane; there's always going to be that pesky village somewhere in the internets that thinks whatever you name a thing is hilarious.

Rick Santorum? No need to be AC here; /. has a fairly even political representation amongst its users.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[Culture20]

And they could fund it with Yugioh ads and branding paint. Kids would buy it just to have a meego/yugo/yugioh phone.

Hey guys, see that dot?

[Hognoxious]

See that dot - the one on the horizon?

That's the boat that sailed after yours.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[wmac1]

Ultimately it's unwise to base your business upon something that your organization is unable or unwilling to maintain.

But the main point of using open source software for most companies/people is that they are unable to develop/maintain a software/component and they resort to obtaining it from elsewhere. Isn't it? We all use open source software with huge code bases (e.g. Apache httpd, MySQL, JBoss, ...) and it is virtually impossible for smaller companies to even touch their source code.

Thanks for your opinions about support contract. I guess it should be considered whenever available.

KickStarter!

[ryzvonusef]

KickStarter Campaign for Jolla Mobile!

Makes perfect sense, and every slashdotter would buy one :P

Re:Free OS = Cancer

[CRCulver]

This is really dangerous for Nokia. Non-compete clauses have no effect here as these guys don't "compete" in the strictest sense.

Demanding promises not to compete are not a feature of Finnish business life. In fact, it's the opposite: when laying off workers, Nokia has always pledged to help set them up with another firm doing something similar to what they were working on at Nokia. The idea is that since Nokia has decided some project no longer makes sense for its bottom line, it can't do any harm if people keep pursuing it at another firm.

This is what is playing out now with Jolla and has happened numerous times before with other Nokia spinoffs.

Completely WRONG Analysis

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at Windows Phone, it is just a new GUI on top of Windows CE. Nokia could have done exactly the same with Symbian and that would have been at least as good as what they have now.
Elop is either a dumb guy or he is still getting orders from Ballmer/Gates.

Re:Wrong OS...

[KugelKurt]

And jumping on board with a platform that is being shoveled out the door by HP, with no future development in sight, is a smart move to make? Who knows, they may adopt some of what's in webOS, maybe merge it into Qt. We don't have visibility into much more than what's been pointed out today.

Actually, the upcoming Open webOS will be based on Qt (QtWebKit to be exact): http://developer.palm.com/blog/2012/02/sams-blog-february-releases-for-open-webos/
The core experience of what webOS actually is, is just written in JavaScript anyway.
If nothing too unexpected happens, Open webOS will just be a bunch of modules that run on QtWebKit which in turn runs on Mer or any other Linux distribution.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[TeknoHog]

In fact, it isn't even using MeeGo, but Mer, which spun off from MeeGo when it became obvious that Nokia was going to walk away and Intel was off to pursue other things.

Mer was originally a community version of Maemo. I used Mer on my N800 before the N900 was launched. The current Mer is a natural continuation of this project, even if they relaunched it in some sense.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[ChunderDownunder]

Hildon is being revived as a sub project of Mer.

Cordia Hildon-Desktop.

No-Compete Contracts?

[tommituura]

So... they are effectively continuing to use the stuff that was made on Nokia's money. And they are obviously as "tainted" with inside information about it as they could possibly be. They are launching a company which is in direct competition of their late employer...

This just screams that the No-Compete Clauses (I would bet they have signed such contracts with Nokia) would kick in pretty hard. Never mind the patent quagmire where just about everyone, not just Nokia & MS, is having a full-blown thermonuclear war at this point.

Then again, depending on how much Nokia still values the inside-Finland PR thing, they could very well turn a blind eye to it. At least (and not the least because I'm Finnish) I hope they do, and that they are actually able to, considering whatever deals they have done with MS.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[farble1670]

Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)?

none? even if there's a business behind it, there's no guarantee that business will be around tomorrow, and if there is a business behind it, you will find your destiny under control of said business.

as long as you have the source, you can always staff up and take over the project. you'd be in no worse of a situation than if you had staffed up and wrote the code from scratch yourself.

if you have multiple open source projects to choose from, there are obvious things to look for: active community, consistent releases, etc. of course none of those are guarantees it will be around tomorrow - when you are relying on people that aren't paid to do the work and can therefore on a whim choose to put their efforts in other places.

GNU + Android userlands

[DrYak]

thats not the issue.

That was the issue until recently: to run android needs a special form of IPC that was baked into the kernel. Thus not possible to have the GNU and Android userland running alongside, because they require different kernels. (Or otherwise you would need to spend the efforts to back port your userland to an older kernel version which happens to have the necessary kernel patches AND the necessary drivers)

Kernel Asside, android still runs its own libraries, where maemo/meego run standard GNU and full "linux distribution" libraries.

Yeah? And what's the problem with that? Just put everything needed together on the same machine and you could both run android application (dalvik and all the necessary class libraries) and maemo (standard GNU/Linux stuff).
It's already been done by canonical (running android and ubuntu on the same smartphone and getting both to talk to each other).
The only peculiarity is that you'll probably going to use a normal full implemented C library (like elibc) instead of google's optimised bionic.

porting android kernel patches to mainstream linux, means using a mainstream kernel on android phones, or even running GNU on android.

Yup. That's the point.

Put a modern vanilla linux kerenl (with the android IPC mainlined )
+ android's specific userland (mostly a java-like environment with its own libraries)
+ maemo/meego's userland (basically a full blown GNU userland)

In short, in RMS' parlance, you make a "GNU+Android/Linux".
(As canonical has been already experimenting with)

Just spend the necessary development time and ressource to get the to play nicely along.
(In this case: Maemo is running the show regarding running the user interface, and android apps have to show up without distrupting the rest.
Also provide the necessary connectors, so Maemo can provide to Android what is expected on a smart phone: contact list, etc.)

In such a solution:
- users can enjoy a modern full scale linux smartphone OS.
- users can still play angry birds and the thousands of other Android Apps.
(- and google is happy too: that means 1 more new HTML5/CSS/Javascript phone on the market, which will surf the web using standards and to which they can serve ads. Aside they could authorise Maemo/Android hybrids to buy paying apps for Google Play and earn some pennies from that too)
(- and if its successful enough and nokia gets a clue, they could buy back ths division and use the success to survive in the market. but I'm not counting on that)

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[theArtificial]

We all use open source software with huge code bases (e.g. Apache httpd, MySQL, JBoss, ...) and it is virtually impossible for smaller companies to even touch their source code.

These are not small projects with fickle developer support. The great thing about opensource is that projects may be forked, and if there is some massive shortcoming there are other options which become available since the source is available. As an example take a look at what happened with OpenOffice.org. Your point as I understand it is we all depend upon software which we don't have the expertise to fix, and my response to that is there are commercial offerings which provide similar functionality if the free ones disappeared overnight. If you're running a business, you must invest in infrastructure at some point.

Thanks for your opinions about support contract. I guess it should be considered whenever available.

No problem, I've been involved in many meetings where management won't touch things without support contracts.

Re:Change the god damned name first...

[LurkerXXX]

Microsoft didn't kill Meego. Totally inept leadership at Nokia did. Same thing that's killing RIM right now.