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."

Comments

Nokia is dead

[Steve Max]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Kenja]

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

Re:Nokia is dead

[steelfood]

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.