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Nokia's N1 Android Tablet Is Actually a Foxconn Tablet
sfcrazy writes:
"Nokia surprised everyone when it announced the N1 Android tablet during the Slush conference in Finland, today. This story has a twist, though: the N1 is not a Nokia device. Nokia doesn't have a device unit anymore: it sold its Devices and Services business to Microsoft in 2013. The N1 is made by Taiwanese contract manufacturing company Foxconn, which also manufactures the iPhone and the iPad.
But Nokia's relationship with Foxconn is different from Apple's. You buy iDevices from Apple, not Foxconn; you call Apple for support, not Foxconn. You never deal with Foxconn. In the case of N1, Foxconn will be handling the sales, distribution, and customer care for the device. Nokia is licensing the brand, the industrial design, the Z Launcher software layer, and the IP on a running royalty basis to Foxconn.
But Nokia's relationship with Foxconn is different from Apple's. You buy iDevices from Apple, not Foxconn; you call Apple for support, not Foxconn. You never deal with Foxconn. In the case of N1, Foxconn will be handling the sales, distribution, and customer care for the device. Nokia is licensing the brand, the industrial design, the Z Launcher software layer, and the IP on a running royalty basis to Foxconn.
It's a quad-core Atom, not ARM, meaning apps using the NDK will have to either be recompiled to x86 or run in emulation. But if the bootloader is unlocked, watch someone figure out how to dual boot Android/x86 with Windows 8.1.
What does the fox say? Apparently Boom Boom.
This is the problem with outsourcing manufacturing and keeping the "brand". Eventually, if they're good, the outsourcing company takes over. It's about time for this to happen to Apple. The hardware is approaching maturity. The last rev of the iPhone was only a minor change over the previous one, and the technology was comparable to HTC's product of two years ago.
Nope, only the phone division of Nokia was sold to Microsoft... this product is by one of the other divisions of Nokia not part of Microsoft.
If you have a look at the pictures, you can see that it has more than a similarity to the iPad mini than just "rounded corners". It basically looks identical except for the Apple Logo and home button.
What else is distinctive about an iPad apart from those two things? Really, all tablets look the same. They're basically just a rectangular touch-screen. About the only variations possible in their hardware are colour, size, and buttons - and some utilitarian designs as to which ports are located where, which are hardly distinctive.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Now with this piece of news, it does seem like Foxconn have ripped off the iPad mini design (given their detailed knowledge of the manufacturing process)
No, if you read the article you'll see that Nokia is responsible for the design and the Z Launcher.
and are using the "Nokia" (Microsoft) brand to sell it, given that Microsoft have a cross-licensing deal with Apple that lets Microsoft and Apple rip each other off as much as they like.
No, Microsoft has nothing to do with this.
I really don't want a power hungry Intel CPU on a tablet, no matter how many benchmarks are faked to make it seem as fast and as low power as an equivalent Arm.
Most android apps will run without issues, that shouldn't be a problem anymore as there have been some Intel tablets out there for several months (I've seen some Asus in bargain bins at the Cora supermarket chain).
Still, the only advantage is if someone manages to run Linux on it. Might make up for the extra heat and lower battery life, to be able to run full featured Linux on it.
it does seem like Foxconn have ripped off the iPad mini design
actually it says this is a Nokia design:
Nokia is responsible for the industrial design
and are using the "Nokia" (Microsoft) brand
wrong, from the summary:
This story has a twist, though: the N1 is not a Nokia device. Nokia doesn't have a device unit anymore: it sold its Devices and Services business to Microsoft in 2013.
given that Microsoft have a cross-licensing deal with Apple that lets Microsoft and Apple rip each other off as much as they like.
but Microsoft has nothing to do with this, Nokia is not owned by Microsoft, they just sold one of their divisions (one that is not involved with this device at all) to Microsoft.
how is parent modded "informative" it is completely wrong in every aspect except pointing out the similarity to the ipad. in fact it is plainly clear the commenter did not even read the summary much less the article and just started commenting based on what he thought the story might be about and then drawing conclusions. should be modded "misinformative".
Nope, only the phone division of Nokia was sold to Microsoft... this product is by one of the other divisions of Nokia not part of Microsoft.
There are no "other" divisions of Nokia. All of the employees who worked in every other division is now a Microsoft employee.
All that remains at Nokia is a skeleton of upper management (and not even that really, most of those work for Microsoft now too. Including Nokia's CEO).
At least until they re-invent themselves Nokia is basically a patent and intellectual property troll and a brand name. They have sold their name to Foxconn for use on it's own product.
What else is distinctive about an iPad apart from those two things? Really, all tablets look the same. They're basically just a rectangular touch-screen. About the only variations possible in their hardware are colour, size, and buttons - and some utilitarian designs as to which ports are located where, which are hardly distinctive.
Sure... except that this one has exactly the same colour (although Apple has three colours and they have only copied two of them), exactly the same size, exactly the same buttons in exactly the same locations, ports in exactly the same location except that Apple has two rows in their speaker grill and this has three rows of holes and it has USB-Type C instead of Lightning (which are also visually indistinguishable from each other).
The design is so close one has to wonder if they are actually using the same machinery for some of the components between this tablet and the iPad. They really are that similar.
Many phone and tablet sellers don't even design them anymore.
You're mistaken... the independent Nokia still has a mapping, network equipment and devices business.
Ummm, nope?
Nokia is actually making profits again, market cap is 25Billion, and has some 50000 employees. Now there is a thin layer of upper management for you :-D
Nokia wasn't just a phone company you know?
All that remains at Nokia is a skeleton of upper management
Nokia is now a network solutions company, and they are doing pretty well.
(and not even that really, most of those work for Microsoft now too. Including Nokia's CEO).
Nokia's current CEO Rajeev Suri certainly does not work for Microsoft.
market cap is 25Billion, and has some 50000 employees.
Nokia wasn't just a phone company you know?
Wow! I had no idea the rubber boot business was so lucrative.
You have this tablet, by pure specs doesn't look that much better than the newer atom tables coming out and the glorified auto app sorter for your android (Z Launcher)? When I worked for US Nokia as a lowly support, developers and managers were just screaming at Finland about trying something to innovate. If you didn't speak Finish, your opinion didn't matter.
To make matters worst, they thought they "won" when they released the N97 and just planned to make reversions off that thing. Sure it was good, but they just never paid attention to Google. Got laid off about 6 months after that.
So now that the non-compete clause is almost over they are trying again? I still think Stephen Elop was a Trojan horse. It doesn't help maters how he and his cronies got a sweet deal after the merger.
I know Nokia isn't "just a phone company". They have multiple divisions and a large part of Finland economy. But to just come out with an Android tablet, branded launcher all relying on Foxcom's support and build quality? I am not saying I know much about Foxcom, but it still feels kind of a big gamble right after you get burned badly from a market you dominated. What the hell are they thinking?
Maybe Foxconn had some spare iPad mini cases left over
it's a Nokia brand name, not Microsoft, nor Microsoft owned Nokia.
you see, Microsoft didn't buy the rights to the name Nokia for everything. Nokia just can't make _phones_ for a few years using the Nokia brand, they can make devices though. even though the part that MS bought included Devices and Smart devices(the microsoft infested shit, which had at that point barely any original r&d going into it that wasn't from microsoft).
this can all be very confusing and may raise many questions about why microsoft bought a brand name it's going to kill off from it's own products, why they bought the most dysfunctional division to integrate into itself and so forth. but I recommend that it's just better to just try to not think about it. possibly to stop them from jumping ship to android(this is an android device and what seems to have been most popular phone from nokia in asia is an android phone too, the x series). did they buy them for the developers? they fired most of them, pretty fucking expensive.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The design is so close one has to wonder if they are actually using the same machinery for some of the components between this tablet and the iPad. They really are that similar.
Foxconn makes the Apple iDevices, and China is known worldwide for its copying. Foxconn actually has some real engineers that can design things. So they just went ahead and copied the overall design, making only those changes which were necessary. They won't be using any of the same components, but the devices might well be produced on lines formerly used for Apple equipment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yep, that's true. NSN has been doing that stuff for a long time, although it was kind of a separate company to Nokia. In the recent times (especially when the name change from Nokia Siemens Networks to Nokia Solutions and Networks happened) NSN has become part of the core Nokia.
super.
"Jolla launched Sailfish 2.0 Tabled that is crowd funded . The indiegogo crowd funding collected the targetted $380,000 in just in 138 minutes of the launch. The Jolla Tablet features a 7.9-inch screen with a resolution of 2048 x 1563. The device is powered by a 1.8GHz 64-bit quad-core Intel processor, comes with a 32GB of storage, has 2GB of RAM and a 5MP rear camera. Judging by its size, we can see that this is another take on the iPad Mini and even on the ‘sister’ company Nokia. While there aren’t too many Sailfish-specific apps available, just like the phone, Jolla’s tablet will be compatible with Android apps."
Nokia also manufactures hardware for operating cell phone towers. That was not sold to Microsoft.
It was pretty well an own goal on the part of MS - spending a lot to get to board to take Elop, kill Nokia, buy the smoking bits for far more than they were worth and meanwhile Apple got to take over the smartphone market.
They already had Nokia convinced to buy the MS phone environment for some phones whether it was good or not. All MS had to do was provide enough funding to make the MS phone software more viable and they probably could have got it into a lot of people's hands, but they got greedy, wanted all or nothing from Nokia and didn't put much effort into software development. They spent a lot of money and ended up with products far worse than they could have made with a lot less expense in the long run, and as a result probably sold far less phones than if they hadn't done the corporate raid.
I think Microsoft bought it because they thought they would get the cellphone market share of Nokia with the deal plus any patents Nokia had. The patents were the main deal here. The problem is Nokia market share collapsed after Elop and his burning platforms memo. No one wanted Windows in their cellphone.
For a little extra money you can by a commemorative edition tablet. Shaped like a toombstone each one has the engraved signature of a different Foxconn factory line worker. This is not just a tablet, it's an investment. Like a piece of art it is valuable only after the artist has died these tablets are sure to be worth more after the employee has jumped out the window.
Right, those 'off the shelf' components, which are made by their suppliers *to specifications* provided by Apple, in many cases utilizing Apple's patented designs.
Go ahead and try to find an 'off the shelf' A8 SOC and use it to put together your own device.
Wow! I had no idea the rubber boot business was so lucrative.
The world will always be full of politicians and bureaucrats so there will always be a need for hip waders.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
That's one of the chief advantages of using a VM to execute your bytecode.
Provided that an app's model is written in a language that has been ported to that VM. An app can ideally be split into a "model", the part that interacts with data, and a "view", the part that performs input and output. Versions of an app for multiple platforms can either translate the model line-by-line in each platform's preferred language or share the model and only rewrite the view. An advantage of the latter approach is that human errors in manual translation are minimized, and fixes to the model on one platform propagate to other platforms. So an Android app that shares its model with a desktop version of the same app written in C++, Objective-C, or a .NET language is probably going to reuse that model. (Or has standard C++ been ported to run on top of the JVM?)
And provided that the app isn't one for which profiling reveals Java's garbage collection to be a huge bottleneck.
I'm aware of fat binaries dating back to the mid-90s when Mac OS was still on VII, and "fat" meant "68LC040 and PowerPC". A fat binary includes the C++ code compiled to ARM object code and the same C++ code compiled to x86 object code. But if you wrote part of your app in ARM assembly language, you can't recompile it quite as easily. And if your app contains a JIT engine, good luck porting that.
You are absolutely wrong. Nokia only sold its phone manufacturing business to Microsoft. However, Nokia is actually a conglomerate that currently also operates in e.g. networking (the Nokia Siemens Networks division, now a fully-owned subsidiary of Nokia) and mapping + location technology (the "HERE" brand). Previously, they have also operated in cable, television, Personal Computer, car/bicycle tire and rubber boot manufacturing just to name a few other areas. Few people know about these other Nokias, but it's actually a really old company (founded already in 1865). The Nokia car tyre business is currently known as Nokian Tyres, and is one of the world's leading winter tire manufacturers in the world (it's get cold and icy in Finland, you know).
Nope. Nokia was a very diverse company and not just a phone maker. Nokia Networks morphed into Nokia Siemens Networks but it is still a Nokia subsidiary, and there is still Nokia Research as far as I know, and there are other small divisions.
The design is so close one has to wonder if they are actually using the same machinery for some of the components between this tablet and the iPad. They really are that similar.
The chassis is completely different, just look at them here. What components would they have used the same tooling for? I can't see any, obviously there are a lot of similarities but if you actually look at them there isn't anything that is the same.
exactly the same buttons in exactly the same locations
Buttons look pretty different actually. But before the iPad Mini came along the Nexus 7 had its volume keys and data cable port in the same spot, Apple put them in the same place on the iPad Mini because it's the logical place for them, not because they were copying them. The Nexus 7 also had the headphone jack on the bottom and then when Apple introduced their next phone they put the headphone jack on the bottom too, not because they were copying, simply because it's a logical place for it.
Any 7 inch tablet of the same aspect ratio is going to look very similar because the devices are generally pretty featureless. The idea that companies should have a monopoly on things like size, aspect ratio or placement of buttons and ports is ridiculous.
What else is distinctive about an iPad apart from those two things?
On current iterations, the polished, chamfer edge on the bezel...but this Nokia tablet doesn't have that, actually the bevel on the edge is completely different.