Nokia Aborts Meltemi Linux-Based Feature Phone

No alarms and no surprises? by BanHammor · 2012-07-26 05:00 · Score: 1

Pretty much.

dibs by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 05:01 · Score: 1

I got dibs on the phones stem-cells!

Microsoft? by steelfood · 2012-07-26 05:01 · Score: 1

I wonder if this means Microsoft is going to bring out a lightweight version of Windows Phone.

It's hard to imagine Nokia ditching the market of normal cellphones. There's still a huge market there for them, even if those phones are not as sexy and headline-grabbing.

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Re:Microsoft? by gl4ss · 2012-07-26 05:19 · Score: 3, Insightful

technically they might have figured out that s40 does everything and anything meltemi was meant to do anyways(the linux was never ever meant to be accessible for users) - and while doing it with less draw on the cpu. afaik meltemi was meant to have web apps or parts of the ui done with html tech but it's been a while since I read the rumours about it, in any case it did sound like it could replace s40 only if fast cpu prices and memory costs dropped in costs a lot( a lot meaning pretty much infinite since a dollar is always a dollar, especially if you're doing a phone for fifty bucks).
it's also possible that the driving force behind meltemi just left for jolla too, rumours about meltemi surfaced about when meego dev was getting scaled down.
either way it always sounded to my ear like they were replicating the fuckup that was motorolas linux based razrs (some of the later featurephone razrs ran linux, which as well wasn't meant to be accessible to the user, it was just meant to make developing the thing faster and cheaper since they could use just general linux coders readily available at any university: SURPRISE IT NEVER FUCKING WORKS OUT THAT WAY).
as to lightweight wp? well, I expect wp7.5/7.8 phones to drop to around hundred bucks in a year(brand new, off the shelf). that's where they've been now selling their cheapest s60 offerings for a while and wp has to replace that, at least in their roadmaps if they don't have anything for that segment they're idiots(the guys left might be, margins aren't too great on those phones but it's still business). nokia already made some wp models with only 256mb of memory(which is huuuge when compared what s40 and symbian usually run on). this might be an added factor to why meltemi didn't seem that interesting to pursue. as to why someone would buy a wp7.8 phone in a year when there's going to be wp8 phones available the: because it's going to be just a hundred bucks and not 400 and as far as phoning and quick web browsing of news sites go they'll function identically.

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Re:Microsoft? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 05:43 · Score: 5, Interesting

Meltemi was going to use QML as its main API and UI/UX. The reason why Nokia even bothered to release the N9/N950 was to give developers a head start with Qt Components which was supposed to be supported in Meltemi.
One of the major ideas behind Meltemi was that it was going to be almost as "powerful" as a smartphone, but still be as cheap as a feature phone.
(Posting Anonymously in case I went a little too far with the NDA)
Re:Microsoft? by Tough+Love · 2012-07-26 05:49 · Score: 2

It's hard to imagine Nokia ditching the market of normal cellphones. There's still a huge market there for them, even if those phones are not as sexy and headline-grabbing.
Microsoft would view that as competing with Windows Phone.

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Re:Microsoft? by hawkinspeter · 2012-07-26 06:42 · Score: 2

Why were the linux based Razrs failures? I owned a Motorola A780 which was one of their early linux based smart phones and it was a great phone for it's time. It was one of the first phones with a GPS chip built in and had a pressure based touch screen in a clam-shell design which I really liked as it protected the screen in your pocket and had real buttons on the outside.

The main problems I had with it were the chunky size and the battery life wasn't great. It didn't have many apps, but had a full version of linux under the hood. In a lot of ways, I think it was ahead of it's time.

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Re:Microsoft? by PurpleAlien · 2012-07-26 07:06 · Score: 3, Insightful

The whole idea within Nokia was to move all their phones (low end to high end) to one platform: Linux + Qt. It did not make sense economically to keep supporting several platforms internally with different GUI tool kits, etc.

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Re:Microsoft? by icebike · 2012-07-26 08:15 · Score: 1

I wonder if this means Microsoft is going to bring out a lightweight version of Windows Phone.
It's hard to imagine Nokia ditching the market of normal cellphones. There's still a huge market there for them, even if those phones are not as sexy and headline-grabbing.
They aren't ditching the market. Not yet any way.
There is just no point in re-doing what feature phones already do. They are entry level phones for people that want entry level phones.
Contrary to the story's claim about leaving the upgrade path in question, the upgrade path is to a smartphone. Nobody wants a better feature phone.
Nokia's investment in the code base for its current line of feature phones is still returning a profit and that's not likely to change while there is still a market for that type of device. Its in the can, and paid for, and there is nothing new in the feature phone market that warrants any additional R&D money.
The world is going to smartphones.

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Re:Microsoft? by gl4ss · 2012-07-26 09:24 · Score: 1

Why were the linux based Razrs failures? I owned a Motorola A780 which was one of their early linux based smart phones and it was a great phone for it's time. It was one of the first phones with a GPS chip built in and had a pressure based touch screen in a clam-shell design which I really liked as it protected the screen in your pocket and had real buttons on the outside.
The main problems I had with it were the chunky size and the battery life wasn't great. It didn't have many apps, but had a full version of linux under the hood. In a lot of ways, I think it was ahead of it's time.
a780 isn't one of those. a780's problem was that it was too exotic and moto didn't really push it or support 3rd party dev for it, so it was sort of a clusterfuck money drain at the time as well. I remember finding it and it's siblings interesting devices at the time but one could find even less info about them than what you could find about motos symbian-uiq phones, so as developer they weren't terribly interesting.
but I was referring to razr2 v8 and it's siblings as the clusterfuck http://www.osnews.com/story/18475/Review_The_Linux-based_Motorola_RAZR2_V8
and that's problem was that it couldn't compete with s60 and seemingly needs beefier cpu/ram than what motos own older os needed whilst providing only just about identical feature set.
android is like 432432 miles away from this pos.
the real main problem for these was price, nokia just ate motorola in the global segment those phones(razr2's etc.) were supposed to compete in. so moto exited featurephone and got chopped up to the pieces of which one(what was the unprofitable portion) is now being bought by google.

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Re:Microsoft? by gl4ss · 2012-07-26 09:30 · Score: 1

Oh then, I don't remember reading that before, not that I've actively tried to follow it anymore lately.
at least not that it was supposed to be publicly accessible, if it was going to allow 3rd party qml apps then it's a no brainer to see why elop cut it. that would have pushed it into full blown smartphone territory(and frankly what would have been the difference between it and nokias meego variant then?).
it would still be more expensive than s40's though and in 50 bucks territory every buck starts to matter(they've sold smartphones for little over 100 bucks for years now, older gen symbians.. they've sold pretty well too).

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Re:Microsoft? by hairyfeet · 2012-07-26 09:51 · Score: 2

Why would they need to? What Nokia has now works and as the prices continue to fall it'll only be a matter of time before the dumbphone goes the way of the 8-track. Hell even Wally world has several smartphones for their pay as you go plans for around $130, when that price drops to less than $50 dumb phones will be toast.
So its nice to see Nokia showing a brain for once, nobody is buying dumbphones for OS features anyway, they buy for the price. Just keep cranking out phones using what they've got while working on cheaper smartphones, that's the way to go. Of course eventually they'll have to get away from MSFT because Ballmer is tarded and thinks he works for Apple and can get Apple margins for Windows which just ain't gonna happen. Like it or not its a global recession and with the exception of a few upscale brands like Apple its gonna be X86 all over again, he who can sell for the cheapest price and still make profits win.
Personally I can't wait until phones that are as powerful as the iPhone 3 are less than $50, my family breaks too damned many phones for me to trust them with a smartphone at current prices.

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Re:Microsoft? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 10:54 · Score: 0

So it turned out to be better than Windows Phone so Nokia had to kill it?
Re:Microsoft? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 11:02 · Score: 0

There is just no point in re-doing what feature phones already do. They are entry level phones for people that want entry level phones.
There is one key feature which is comletely missing on all phones available today. That's two week battery life. You used to get that on old Nokias but even their Asha phones don't do that. There are plenty of people who would like phone + html5 + two weeks battery on standby.
If something close to that could have been achieved then there would be a real big benefit over the current smartphones.
Re:Microsoft? by hawkinspeter · 2012-07-26 11:37 · Score: 1

You're certainly right about Motorola not pushing the a780 (or it's siblings like the a1200). They seemed reluctant to sell it in Europe and I ended up importing mine to the UK from Spain as no-one seemed to be selling it.

I did also get hold of the previous model (the a600, IIRC) that just had the touch screen, and no GPS. They were trying to position that one as a media phone, but I think they were just confused about what strategy to take with their phone models.

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Re:Microsoft? by hawkinspeter · 2012-07-26 11:39 · Score: 1

Just looked and it wasn't the a600, it was called the e680/e680i.

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Re:Microsoft? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 22:24 · Score: 0

at least not that it was supposed to be publicly accessible, if it was going to allow 3rd party qml apps then it's a no brainer to see why elop cut it. that would have pushed it into full blown smartphone territory(and frankly what would have been the difference between it and nokias meego variant then?).
It would be a lot cheaper. The point was to make a phone in the feature phone market, that could compete cost-wise with low-end smart phones, but without being crap, just purpose build for a different market. (Hint, Nokia dominates Asia, where Microsoft, Google and especially Apple has almost no foot-hold, so it would have a different set of app-developers with very little overlap)
Re:Microsoft? by oh_my_080980980 · 2012-07-27 01:04 · Score: 1

Like the Kin.....

Nokia, why you troll us so? by ryzvonusef · 2012-07-26 05:01 · Score: 0

Okay, I know bashing Elop is lame, but still, I can't help it, after he became CEO, everything linux or even remotely so is getting canned, shoved or otherwise neglected.

I am sad Elop, why you hate open source? :(

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Re:Nokia, why you troll us so? by mcneely.mike · 2012-07-26 05:06 · Score: 2, Informative

Because he used to work for Microsoft? Open source is a cancer!

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Re:Nokia, why you troll us so? by r1348 · 2012-07-26 05:07 · Score: 2

Ahem... ex-Microsoft guy maybe?
Re:Nokia, why you troll us so? by ryzvonusef · 2012-07-26 05:23 · Score: 1

Yes, but he has entire board over him, including ex-nokian CEOs and finnish politicians, for oversight, were they asleep? Elop's stance can be guessed, but why did the entire board suddenly change their stance?

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Re:Nokia, why you troll us so? by ryzvonusef · 2012-07-26 05:24 · Score: 2

Elop is one guy, there is an entire board over him, they are not ex-MS, they have no excuse...

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Re:Nokia, why you troll us so? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 05:24 · Score: 2, Informative

Where are you figuring the "ex" part from?
It's pretty clear one of two things is going on here: Elop is trying to drive the stock value down to a level a hostile takeover becomes feasible, or Elop is trying to drive the company bankrupt so Microsoft can buy just the parts it wants at auction. The fact that the stock has fallen to US$2 means the investors think the second one is more likely. I'm inclined to believe them (reverse splits followed by issuing new shares would consolidate voting power and make #1 easier).
Re:Nokia, why you troll us so? by Vyse+of+Arcadia · 2012-07-26 05:34 · Score: 0

Hmm. I'd say it's closer to a virus. Or at least the GPL-licensed stuff.
Re:Nokia, why you troll us so? by Tough+Love · 2012-07-26 05:50 · Score: 2

he has entire board over him, including ex-nokian CEOs and finnish politicians, for oversight, were they asleep?
Asleep or bought.

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Re:Nokia, why you troll us so? by Tough+Love · 2012-07-26 05:54 · Score: 2

It's pretty clear one of two things is going on here: Elop is trying to drive the stock value down to a level a hostile takeover becomes feasible, or Elop is trying to drive the company bankrupt so Microsoft can buy just the parts it wants at auction.
No, it's not that, because Microsoft would still need to bid against Google and others to pick up the pieces. It would seem that the Elop strategem is no deeper than an attempt to force Windows Phone into the market.

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When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Re:Nokia, why you troll us so? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 05:56 · Score: 0

Given that Jolla have been operating in stealth mode for a year already, and have been picking up ex-Nokia engineers and such, there may be some subset of the Nokia investors that are trying to save the knowledge and such that came out of Maemo. Then if they later manage to out Elop, they can re-absorb Jolla and get back working on Maemo/Meego/Meltemi. Or if Nokia gets bought by Microsoft, they can cash in their Nokia shares and put that into Jolla fully. Would be kinda sad to see the latter happen tho as Nokia has been around in Finland for ages, making just about anything at one point or other.
Re:Nokia, why you troll us so? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 06:17 · Score: 0

because in a couple years MS will be able to buy Nokia at a ridiculous price and use its IP and hardware know how to do MS phones.

Nokia is dead by Steve+Max · 2012-07-26 05:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

They had the dominant smartphone OS AND the dominant dumbphone OS. They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare. They had the best development tools, which would allow one to target those 3 OSs simultaneously. And they were developing this new Linux-based dumbphone OS that would be created around those tools.

Now they have Windows Phone.

Re:Nokia is dead by Kenja · 2012-07-26 05:18 · Score: 1

To be fair... they also had the n-gage.

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Re:Nokia is dead by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 05:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

They had the dominant smartphone OS AND the dominant dumbphone OS. They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare. They had the best development tools, which would allow one to target those 3 OSs simultaneously. And they were developing this new Linux-based dumbphone OS that would be created around those tools.
Now they have Windows Phone.
Really, REALLY, REALLY makes you wonder what kind of deal Microsoft has with Elop personally, doesn't it?
Re:Nokia is dead by davester666 · 2012-07-26 05:19 · Score: 1

If you had seen the sales projections of WP that Microsoft presented to Nokia, you would have switched to Windows Phone too.

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Re:Nokia is dead by Kenja · 2012-07-26 05:21 · Score: 4, Insightful

No... I would have assumed that Microsoft was full of bull droppings and showed them the door.

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Re:Nokia is dead by gl4ss · 2012-07-26 05:24 · Score: 2

the sad thing is that elop announced the burning platform self-destruct just when symbian phones were selling well(globally they were), their meego variant was coming mature and most importantly: the qt sdk matured enough to not drive you insane.
though.. uh.. target all 3 simultaneously? that's a biiiig stretch. like said the qt tools matured nicely but way too late and even then you had to write parts differently for the two different os's that it supported(s40 doesn't have native code, the apps were j2me. meltemi wasn't meant to have native code either. that's what makes it featurephone).

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Re:Nokia is dead by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 05:32 · Score: 1

Which sold 10x more than all Lumia models put together (not that this is saying much).
Re:Nokia is dead by NeutronCowboy · 2012-07-26 05:44 · Score: 3, Insightful

I'm starting to really think that Elop is prepping Nokia to become a fully-owned subsidiary of MS. I can't see any other reason for the smorgasboard of decisions whose only possible outcome are a dead Nokia.
I mean, really - what has Nokia done since Elop took over that did anything but generate facepalms, groans and a rapidly diminishing market share? Anything? I'm not normally prone to conspiracy theories, but this is either the world's most incompetent CEO (harsh, considering how high Carly set the bar for that...), or there's something nefarious at work.

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Re:Nokia is dead by NeutronCowboy · 2012-07-26 05:45 · Score: 2

Beaten to the punch by an AC, apparently. Yep, I am indeed now wondering what the last discussion was that Elop had with MS head honchos.

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Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Re:Nokia is dead by Tough+Love · 2012-07-26 05:47 · Score: 4, Informative

They had the dominant smartphone OS AND the dominant dumbphone OS. They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare. They had the best development tools, which would allow one to target those 3 OSs simultaneously. And they were developing this new Linux-based dumbphone OS that would be created around those tools.
Now they have Windows Phone.
Amazing to think that was little more than a year ago.

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When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Re:Nokia is dead by TejWC · 2012-07-26 05:50 · Score: 3, Informative

Except writing Qt application on Symbian^3 was like stabbing yourself with a needle every second. Nokia never bothered to fix QWidget on the Symbian platform and just told developers to wait until QML's Qt Components were ready. And, of course, Qt Components for Symbian^3 wasn't stable until after Nokia already announced the transition to Windows Phone.
Maemo did a good job of implementing QWidget (including kinetic scrolling), but they threw all that out in MeeGo when they decided to drop native support for QWidget and have everybody just use QML instead.
And don't get me started on how Intel confused everybody with their version of MeeGo.
Re:Nokia is dead by gl4ss · 2012-07-26 05:55 · Score: 2

I'm starting to really think that Elop is prepping Nokia to become a fully-owned subsidiary of MS. I can't see any other reason for the smorgasboard of decisions whose only possible outcome are a dead Nokia.
I mean, really - what has Nokia done since Elop took over that did anything but generate facepalms, groans and a rapidly diminishing market share? Anything? I'm not normally prone to conspiracy theories, but this is either the world's most incompetent CEO (harsh, considering how high Carly set the bar for that...), or there's something nefarious at work.
well the only thing to his defence in that regard is that he'd(and the board) would get sued by smalltime investors for intentionally damaging the shareholder value for that purpose. not that he worries about that though probably.

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Re:Nokia is dead by Kjella · 2012-07-26 06:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare.
Just like YotLD is next year, right? Here's a sobering quote:

On Jan. 3, Chief Development Officer Kai Oistämö walked over to his boss's tiny cubicle to share his concerns about the MeeGo software that was supposed to be Nokia's answer to Apple and Android. The pair decided to quietly interview two dozen influential employees about MeeGo, from executives to rank-and-file engineers.
Before the first interview, Elop drew out what he knew about the plans for MeeGo on a whiteboard, with a different color marker for the products being developed, their target date for introduction, and the current levels of bugs in each product. Soon the whiteboard was filled with color, and the news was not good: At its current pace, Nokia was on track to introduce only three MeeGo-driven models before 2014 - far too slow to keep the company in the game. Elop tried to call Oistämö, but his phone battery was dead. "He must have been trying an Android phone that day," says Elop. When they finally spoke late on Jan. 4, "It was truly an oh-s--t moment - and really, really painful to realize where we were," says Oistämö. Months later, Oistämö still struggles to hold back tears. "MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's not a nice thing."
Nokia bought Trolltech and QT in January 2008 and that's all they had to show after three years - they had one helluva piece of technology but wasted it and never managed to make a decent platform. The reality is that the N9 - even with Nokia still fully behind it - was a lightweight that wouldn't touch iOS or Android market share and they had no heavy punches to follow up the stop-gap either. They just couldn't let go of Symbian to develop Meego to the platform it needed to be.

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Re:Nokia is dead by Col.+Klink+(retired) · 2012-07-26 06:53 · Score: 1

"Now they have Windows Phone."
More specifically, they have a soon-to-be out-of-date Windows phone which their "partner" will not allow it to be updated.

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Re:Nokia is dead by ChunderDownunder · 2012-07-26 08:01 · Score: 1

Analysts predict RIM is on a downward spiral to match Nokia.
Nevertheless, if BB10 ever hits the market perhaps it will have perfected the Qt on a phone concept where Symbian, Meego, Qtopia failed.
Re:Nokia is dead by 21mhz · 2012-07-26 08:17 · Score: 2

Your comment is full of wishful thinking. The dominance of Symbian was eroding fast even before Elop came to Nokia. S40 is good, but not exceptional; Bada and cheap Chinese crap based on Android are giving it a hard time. Meego was almost there, right... for some liberal definitions of "almost", which are compatible with the software being buggy, having a very meager set of apps, and the platform developers changing direction at the drop of a hat.

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Re:Nokia is dead by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 08:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

Except in 2011, even after Elop killed all non-microsoft OSes, they were still able to deliver two MeeGo based phones - N9 and N950. Anybody really believes Nokia couldn't produce more than one device over the next three years, and if so it would be because of MeeGo?
As you see, the given reasons actually don't make any sense and rather raise more questions about what kind of idiots are running the show.
Re:Nokia is dead by steelfood · 2012-07-26 09:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

Source for your quote.
They had 3 MeeGo phones on the roadmap by 2014, with one already one the way. This was written in June 2011, referring to events that transpired Jan 2011. Between Jan 2011 and 2014, I'll be willing to bet that Apple won't have released more than 3 models of phones (including the 4S, which was more of a dot refresh rather than a completely new model).
It sounds like they had trouble with the iPhone's one-generation-one-phone strategy. They were too stuck in their old ways of releasing several different models of high-end, mid-range, and low-end "smartphones" to capture the entire market. What they probably should've done was offered one high-end, one mid-range, and one low-end phone. That's 3 phones. And they could've rolled it out slowly, so that the high-end came first, the mid-range one generation later, and the low-end replacing all the existing Symbian phones out there after one more refresh.
Instead, they squandered all of the in-house talent they spent years acquiring and developing. They wrote off all of their recent major business acquistions. They went from an industry leader and standards setter to the lackey of the biggest back-stabbing software company there ever was. And the worst part is, they did so knowingly and intentionally, because they felt they couldn't compete with Apple and Google.
Well, duh they couldn't compete with Apple and Google, and quite frankly, I don't think switching to Microsoft did anything but make them less competitive. They were late to the game two years ago with MeeGo, and all this time spent transitioning made them even later to the game. I especially like how the article quotes the Art of War at the end, as if that somehow vindicates Elop's actions. I like it because Elop's excuse for turning to Microsoft was that he didn't--couldn't--believe in Nokia's existing software engineering talent in the first place. What a crock of bull.

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Re:Nokia is dead by bill_mcgonigle · 2012-07-26 09:11 · Score: 1

this is either the world's most incompetent CEO (harsh, considering how high Carly set the bar for that...), or there's something nefarious at work.
Well, sure. Microsoft wanted to be Apple (stop me if you've heard this before). Apple makes its own phones, and Microsoft wanted to be that too. They'd also need carrier relationships, testing, FCC, qualifying the hardware, labs, designers .... and all that yesterday. It was far cheaper to install their guy in Nokia, have him dump everything but Windows Phone, and then tell customers that there is no upgrade for the phones on the market. The logical outcome there is that earnings crash, stock price crashes, and then Nokia is ripe for an amicable or hostile takeover.
So, mission accomplished and a many years and billions of dollars are saved. The interesting bit is probably what the relationship looks like between Nokia's board members and Microsoft.

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Re:Nokia is dead by gtall · 2012-07-26 09:40 · Score: 1

I think the situation was more opportunistic than that. Nokia was on the ropes from Apple and Androidists in the sense that they were losing their markets. Nokia's board decides they need someone from more consumer electronics background and decide on Elop because he worked for the 95% desktop producer hoping he had the magic wand. MS, realizing they had one of their own at Nokia, decides to make him a deal, i.e., take a beeelllion and promise to use our alleged phone software. Elop, not really having a clue about how to fix a company like Nokia, figures he's just been tossed a lifeline by his former employer. MS knew the right things to say because Elop was already drunk on the kool-aid from his time at MS. Nokia's board would have looked stupid if they countered Elop because they were the ones who were busing mismanaging Nokia and had put their "professional opinion" on the line by hiring Elop.
I think that is all there is too is. Any speculation about deals is probably wrong, MS was upfront about their deal, take the Beeeellion and use our alleged software.
Re:Nokia is dead by 21mhz · 2012-07-26 10:09 · Score: 1

I forgot to add that Qt was never meant to be ported to S40, and calling it "best development tools" is to speak fanboy.

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Re:Nokia is dead by 21mhz · 2012-07-26 10:16 · Score: 1

Except in 2011, even after Elop killed all non-microsoft OSes, they were still able to deliver two MeeGo based phones - N9 and N950.
Deliver N950, really? Could you get it sold and supported by customer care anywhere? In an incredibly off chance you can get your hands on an N950, try use it with the hardware keyboard open.

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Re:Nokia is dead by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 10:28 · Score: 2, Informative

The N9 got released before the Lumias, was less buggy on release data, and has lot more features. They had three phones basically ready and the claim that they could not release more was debunked by one of Nokia's own engineers:
http://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/my-disagreement-with-elop-on-meego/
Producation of the Lumias was basically outsourced and has to use non-Nokias ports because of limitations of Windows Phone. Yhey were rushed to market and released with serious bugs. Not even speaking of the fact that the OS is now outdated.
Re:Nokia is dead by hairyfeet · 2012-07-26 11:06 · Score: 1

Insightful? Really? I bet everyone here blames Intel for the death of SGI too.
Look folks its actually VERY simple, and has happened a bazillion times in tech, hell MSFT are seeing it now in the fact they can't give away WinPhone. A distruptive tech comes along, company has internal problems to begin with, company can't adapt in time, company gets screwed. Its just that simple folks, no different than how SGI had built their company on only high end machines being able to do content creation and then the MHz wars caused them to have to deal with X86 units that were leaping by dozens to hundreds of MHz each rev with PC gaming making the GPUs jump faster than their exotic hardware could, or how MSFT tried to sell itty bitty desktops on smartphones and then the one two punch of Apple and Google combined with a FB living generation to screw them as they had believed X86 would grow forever instead of becoming mature and just another commodity that nobody replaces until it dies like their dryer.
When Elop showed up they had no less than THREE different OSes, all fighting for resources, and as far as i know none were compatible with the others. You had MeeGo which wasn't anywhere near what it needed to be to compete with iPhone, Symbian which was making money but long in the tooth, and the dumb phone Java based OS whatever it was called. They could have gone Android i hear you say? Bullshit, they'd have been curbstomped by HTC and Samsung who frankly do Android better and already had good products in the market. They didn't have enough to buy WebOS from Palm, apple sure as fuck wasn't gonna sell them iOS, so it was either throw every cent they could scrape at MeeGo and hope like hell developers and consumers would give a rat's ass which as we saw with OpenMoko appealing to hackers rarely brings money, or take the big fat check from MSFT and hope to God Redmond knew what they were doing.
Was going with WinPhone a bad call? i think we can all agree that is a yes, but hindsight is always 20/20 and i'm sure if they could do it over again MSFT wouldn't have sat on ass pushing WinCE for years either. The question is "Did he make the best call he could have at the time with the available information?" and I would have to say yes, yes he did. This isn't like HP, where they bought WebOS and then didn't know WTF to do with it, MeeGo simply wasn't ready, didn't have the developers, and certainly wasn't able to compete with iPhone. I'm sorry folks but Elop simply didn't have a choice, his ass was in a sling and they simply didn't have a product ready to sell.

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Re:Nokia is dead by UpnAtom · 2012-07-26 17:11 · Score: 1

The best rumour I heard is that Elop was drafted to slow the downtrend in Nokia's share price -- so that major investors could get out.
Re:Nokia is dead by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 18:30 · Score: 0

The point is the HW exists and is real, it's not just some lab prototype with 18 more months of work before being barely usable, so claiming there could be only three devices is totally absurd. That Elop didn't allowed N950 into wider market is another matter.
Re:Nokia is dead by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 20:15 · Score: 1

They had the dominant smartphone OS AND the dominant dumbphone OS. They had an experimental high end, Linux-based OS that was almost ready to retake the top spot in mindshare. They had the best development tools, which would allow one to target those 3 OSs simultaneously. And they were developing this new Linux-based dumbphone OS that would be created around those tools.
Now they have Windows Phone.
Amazing to think that was little more than a year ago.
This is re-writing history. One year ago Nokia was loosing scaringly fast on all fronts, to iPhone and Android, and this was why Kallasvuo had to step down as CEO. The last 3 years before Elop's appointment Nokia lost 70% of it's market value (!) due to this trend.This is their 5-year stock trend.
Re:Nokia is dead by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-27 01:38 · Score: 0

but this is either the world's most incompetent CEO (harsh, considering how high Carly set the bar for that...),
Leo Apotheker made Carly look like a friggin genius.
Re:Nokia is dead by 21mhz · 2012-07-27 02:46 · Score: 1

The point is the HW exists and is real, it's not just some lab prototype with 18 more months of work before being barely usable
But this is what N950 was: it needed months of work before it was usable with its hardware keyboard. These months were instead spent to polish the software towards the N9.

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Re:Nokia is dead by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-27 03:53 · Score: 0

The SW certainly deserved improvements, but nothing that would require 18 months of work and it doesn't change the fact that in 2011 Nokia had two MeeGo phones ready, thus the reason given by Oistamo and Elop was false.
Re:Nokia is dead by ecki · 2012-07-27 07:18 · Score: 1

They had the ... dominant dumbphone OS.
Uhm, they still have S40 and are still selling quite a bunch of S40 based phones (especially the Asha series).
...target those 3 OSs simultaneously.
Nope, you couldn't target S40 with Qt.

Double down on black by DeTech · 2012-07-26 05:11 · Score: 4, Interesting

So our market share is shrinking after the launch of the Windows Phone... Quick, stop doing everything else, that will fix it!

I'm beginning to think M$ management culture is infectious

Re:Double down on black by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 06:41 · Score: 5, Informative

I'm beginning to think M$ management culture is infectious
It is if your CEO is from Microsoft.
Re:Double down on black by SilenceBE · 2012-07-26 08:16 · Score: 1

I'm beginning to think M$ management culture is infectious

Then it shouldn't surprise you which history Elop has. It seems he was a good MS soldier then.

To be honest the moves he did seems very incomprehensible and just plain weird. In that sense I'm asking myself how long it will take for a group investors to sue him or the Nokia board for the painfully wrong decisions that they have made. Every fool knew that there was (and imho won't be) a lot of demand for Windows Phones.

I know that in Europe we don't have the "sue over everything" attitude, but I know some European cases where unhappy shareholders went to court to sue ceo's (and their boards) about their part in the demise of a company. I can't help to think that the general Nokia shareholder isn't that happy with Elop's doing.

If it comes to the situation that Nokia loses a lof of its value so that Microsoft can buy them for cheap, I really hope the European commission files an investigation of the role of Elop and Microsoft. Because man this whole Nokia ordeal really stinks.
Re:Double down on black by Mr_DW · 2012-07-26 11:44 · Score: 1

You sound like Nokia was fine before this M$ deal. If that's really what you thought I think you should review their history. They had flubbed all the advantages they had held. What do you think they should have done? Got out a device based on Linux (which they already hadn't been able to make work for years, for whatever reason). Or do you think android would have saved them?
Re:Double down on black by tomofumi · 2012-07-26 16:23 · Score: 1

I remember that symbian was still had No.1 market share at that time, it was his "burning platform" memo cause the osborne effect and that whole thing going downhill. If they choose to go with Android, they can easily beat Samsung with Nokia's loyal user base and superior hardware (like Carl Zeiss lens...)
Re:Double down on black by jfanning · 2012-07-26 19:49 · Score: 1

Wishful thinking. They were dead man walking already.
The board must have known they were coasting on momentum alone and the shit was about to start. Sure they were growing, but they were growing far less than the market. Elop came in just as the momentum ran out and the dive started.
They are nearing the bottom of the dive now and the only interesting thing is whether they can pull out before they hit the bottom. There are signs it is starting to level out, but it will be a close call.
About the only stupid thing I can attribute to Elop is that he should have known that internal private memo would leak.
Re:Double down on black by SilenceBE · 2012-07-26 21:18 · Score: 1

Or do you think android would have saved them?

Not delivering what the market demands doesn't really help. I have been a Nokia user for whole my life and as they went the WP route I bought my non Nokia Android phone as they can't deliver what I (as a customer) wants.

So the question would it save them ? I don't know. But I'm sure the odds would be bigger.

They also sold their firewall appliance business by SpankyDaMonkey · 2012-07-26 05:19 · Score: 2

Checkpoint bought out their firewall appliance business a while back, so where does this leave Nokia for their products? If they can't deliver a phone that the market wants then what is left to keep them in business?

Goodbye Nokia. by digitalchinky · 2012-07-26 05:20 · Score: 3, Insightful

The N95 and N900 seemed to be about the last innovative pieces of hardware to come out of Nokia. I'm not too sure about the E series but it was also popular here in Asia until a year ago. The writing was already (perhaps dry and peeling) on the wall from the release of the N900, lots of devs jumping ship and writing about why on maemo.org.

Bye Nokia, I hope you claw your way back, I used to like you.

Re:Goodbye Nokia. by jones_supa · 2012-07-26 05:40 · Score: 1

Maybe Jolla provides some comfort.
Re:Goodbye Nokia. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 10:09 · Score: 0

How about PureView? I have not seen many 41MP cameras lately, not to mention phones :)
Re:Goodbye Nokia. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 11:43 · Score: 0

And yet I bought an n900, which is slowly becoming more and more useless. :(

As the Microsoft poison slowly spreads ... by kawabago · 2012-07-26 05:20 · Score: 1

the venom kills everything that doesn't get out of the way.

Excellent by Tough+Love · 2012-07-26 05:46 · Score: 1

Go down, go down Nokia, thrall of Microsoft.

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Re:Excellent by mcneely.mike · 2012-07-26 05:57 · Score: 0

Picturing Nokia employees dressed in silver bikini outfits

I wager 400 quatloos on Android!

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But of course. by blind+biker · 2012-07-26 05:52 · Score: 1

Why would Microsoft develop anything Linux-based?

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Re:But of course. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 06:29 · Score: 0

Because sometimes they have to. Ask them, they do it.

Re:They also sold their firewall appliance busines by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 06:06 · Score: 0

Checkpoint bought out their firewall appliance business a while back, so where does this leave Nokia for their products? If they can't deliver a phone that the market wants then what is left to keep them in business?

Patents and Navteq?

Makes sense by roc97007 · 2012-07-26 06:12 · Score: 2

Why die a long painful death, when you can implode spectacularly?

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this makes slashdot now? a bit late by ardiri · 2012-07-26 06:29 · Score: 1

engadget reported this back in June http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/14/nokia-reportedly-scraps-meltemi/

Re:this makes slashdot now? a bit late by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 07:10 · Score: 0

It was never picked up outside of the tech blogs because it could never be directly confirmed, even though Meltemi officially died in April during the third round of cuts. All Reuters is doing is confirming the death with its own sources for the general public, even though the news is old to those that pay attention to such things.
The death of Meltemi does suck though. Imagine an iPhone 4 grade device running Linux with Qt for app development, all for $100 and data access support from 4G all the way down to SMS.
Re:this makes slashdot now? a bit late by UpnAtom · 2012-07-26 17:13 · Score: 1

The Meltemi development office was closed and various ex-Nokia employees confirmed it.

Windows Phone by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 06:31 · Score: 0

That's great, because the windows-phone strategy is really working out for them, isn't it, guys? Guys?

Yet it's got a better UI than Apple by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 06:32 · Score: 0

Faster too, and it's not even the 900.

http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2012/03/30/nokia-lumia-smoked-by-windows-phone-challenge-london-video/

Small time investors? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 06:37 · Score: 1

Nokia lost tens of billions of market cap, revenue and profit. Some big time investors also got wiped out.

Seriously... Prison time...

S40/Asha is already smartphone on the low end by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 06:41 · Score: 0

They make these things for peanuts, but the OS is blindingly quick on the hardware.

http://www.nokia.com/global/products/phone/asha311/

Tens of thousands of Java ME apps on GetJar too.

It's a military tactic by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 06:48 · Score: 1

The spuds fight harder with their backs against the wall. (See Sun Tsu)

This is what happens... by scorp1us · 2012-07-26 06:48 · Score: 1

When you hire a MS board member as your CEO. Nokia (Corporate) knew what they were getting. What they didn't know is how awesome their technologies were. I fully expect Jolla to succeed where Nokia failed, then watch as Nokia bails on MS and buys Jolla (and their own technology back)

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Re:This is what happens... by rahvin112 · 2012-07-26 07:02 · Score: 1

Nokia is going to fail economically long before that happens. They have less than a year till they run out of money completely. Then MS steps in with an offer to buy the company (for the patents). The only possible savior is if the government blocks the sale.
Re:This is what happens... by ChunderDownunder · 2012-07-26 08:17 · Score: 1

It could make for an interesting AGM if 'ordinary' shareholders declared a no confidence motion. Sale to MS isn't a fait accompli if another suitor offers a fair price.
How deep are Shuttleworth's pockets? Canonical has been seeking an entry into the phone/tablet business with its Ubuntu for Android initiative. Nokibuntu...
Re:This is what happens... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 09:13 · Score: 0

How deep are Shuttleworth's pockets? Canonical has been seeking an entry into the phone/tablet business with its Ubuntu for Android initiative. Nokibuntu...
Circa $200m or so. Nowhere near that deep, sadly.

Apple has 3 phones by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 06:57 · Score: 3, Insightful

iPhone 3gs
iPhone 4
iPhone 4s

How many smart phone models do you think you need? More is not merrier. More is more R&D, QA, marketing... Which is more costs. Less margin, lower efficiency.

Jolla have a Meego/Mer phone on the way in the meantime... We'll see if a 50 person team can do what a 130,000 person organisation can't.

Nokia killed Meltimi because... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 07:14 · Score: 0

Nokia killed Meltimi because they managed to get touch working under S40.

As a side note, a feature S40 phone usually performs those tasks built into it much faster that a smart (Symbian) S60 phone .. I am not saying Java apps, etc are faster on S40, just the stuff built into it are faster than S60's built in.

As a side note, Qt, which was sort of the UI toolkit for Metlimi is a slow, bloated, unholy mess. Open the code of it and drop your jaw in wonder of the huge number of WTF's it has.

Your definition makes Androids feature phones by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 07:41 · Score: 0

"meltemi wasn't meant to have native code either. that's what makes it featurephone)."

No native code on Android.

Re:Your definition makes Androids feature phones by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 07:42 · Score: 0

None at all.

Mod parent up by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 07:47 · Score: 0

This is exactly right.

Nokia still do phones? by phonewebcam · 2012-07-26 09:12 · Score: 1

I thought they'd moved wholesale to the outsourced excrement distribution business.

" They just couldn't let go of Symbian..." by CockMonster · 2012-07-26 10:27 · Score: 2

I don't see what Symbian had to do with Meego. They were totally independent projects with Meego having a far higher level of secrecy. Symbian had its own developers and Meego had theirs. The problems with Symbian were several-fold: - High learning curve: chipset manufacturers didn't like it as they couldn't get decent developers. India didn't churn out Symbian developers. Their code was typically very buggy and due to low level nature of it buggy code in a driver could prevent any development in the higher levels from happening at the required pace due to development boards (early phone prototypes) freezing up with no way of diagnosing the problem easily; the baseports and higher level development were expected to be done simultaneously. Project deadlines constantly slipped (the N8 was late by about a year). A QEmu simulator was under development but ultimately abandoned for reasons I'm not too sure about. Code would be committed that wouldn't compile... basic shit. This would affect *every* developer as they'd waste several hours downloading the latest environment only to find it didn't work. - Underpowered hardware: It just wasn't up to the job, RAM was never enough. Use-case tear-down and reconstruction rarely worked (related to the point above) - Politics: Symbian was a cash-cow for years and every ladder-climbing manager wanted in. It soon became impossible to get a 'Yes' decision on anything, and if you weren't in Finland your opinion counted for little. It was unclear who was really in charge. - Symbian Signed: 3rd party developers were really shat on. Sure tools like Carbide were free (and fairly decent) but getting an app signed was a joke. I'm not sure how much of this applied to Meego development, I was under the impression they were given a free hand to do as they liked, but Politics definitely became an issue there too when it became clear the project had a future.

Re:" They just couldn't let go of Symbian..." by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 14:36 · Score: 0

I worked for Nokia as a Senior R&D Engineer until the end of September 2011. In 2009 and 2010, I got moved back and forth between Symbian and Meego. Frequently.
Other than that, I agree with what you've said.

Makes sense... by jonwil · 2012-07-26 12:38 · Score: 1

There is a limit to how low Nokia can go with the hardware specs (and hence cost) and still be able to get acceptable performance out of the Linux Kernel with any semblance of a GUI on top. Even more so if its a phone and needs to be able to run a baseband (has there ever been a phone running the Linux kernel that hasn't had a separate baseband CPU for it).

Plus, many carriers (especially in the US) would be likely to call a phone like this (Linux+QML) a Smartphone anyway (especially if you can write your own QML apps)

Let me fix that for you by uvajed_ekil · 2012-07-26 14:09 · Score: 0

Nokia Aborts Meltemi Linux-Based Feature Phone

Nokia, Linux-Based Free Crappy Phone Dead

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N950 was never released. by UpnAtom · 2012-07-26 17:06 · Score: 1

Guaranteed 2 million sales and they couldn't even be bothered to release it.

MeeGo is alive by UpnAtom · 2012-07-26 17:23 · Score: 1

Nokia will die slowly, but most of their MeeGo talent started up Jolla to bring us MeeGo, Qt 5, some HTML and a new UI.

Nokia aborts Nokia by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-26 19:10 · Score: 0

Micro$oft passes the scalpel

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Nokia Aborts Meltemi Linux-Based Feature Phone

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