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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.
Because he used to work for Microsoft? Open source is a cancer!
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
Ahem... ex-Microsoft guy maybe?
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
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?
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
Elop is one guy, there is an entire board over him, they are not ex-MS, they have no excuse...
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
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).
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)
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.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
he has entire board over him, including ex-nokian CEOs and finnish politicians, for oversight, were they asleep?
Asleep or bought.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Why die a long painful death, when you can implode spectacularly?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
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.
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.
My blog, if you're interested: http://www.purp
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.