Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
12 months?
Work bio at MMWD
There's only a few actual connections.
Intel: Moblin -> MeeGo -> (huge disconnect, much package shedding) -> Mer
Nokia: Maemo -> Harmattan
Samsung: Tizen
...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.
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.