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Nokia Aborts Meltemi Linux-Based Feature Phone

Posted by timothy on from the you're-finnished dept.

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."

8 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Nokia is dead by Steve+Max · · 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.

    1. Re:Nokia is dead by Anonymous Coward · · 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?

    2. Re:Nokia is dead by Kenja · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

      --

      "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    3. Re:Nokia is dead by Tough+Love · · 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.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    4. Re:Nokia is dead by steelfood · · 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.

      --
      "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
  2. Double down on black by DeTech · · 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

    1. Re:Double down on black by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

      It is if your CEO is from Microsoft.

  3. Re:Microsoft? by Anonymous Coward · · 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)