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Nokia Aborts Meltemi Linux-Based Feature Phone
judgecorp writes "Nokia has closed down the Meltemi low-end Linux phone which was supposed to replace its System 40 devices. The platform had never been officially announced and now, apparently, will never see the light of day. Feature phones still make up a giant market where Nokia has dominated, but this leaves its upgrade path in question."
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.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
I'm beginning to think M$ management culture is infectious
It is if your CEO is from Microsoft.