- some tiles are animated, some not - pretty distracting experience.
I don't get this complaint. You want all tiles to be animated, or none at all? Live tiles are very useful. They could do without some gratuitous animation, I agree. I guess they wanted some attention grabbers for the first few minutes in the store.
- while the interface is responsive, you still need to do several taps and slides to get a result you can set a single tap under an Android or iPhone.
Any specific examples?
- battery - ye gods, hopefully those of you who purchase Nokia Lumia 900 do not experience the issues we have in EU with Nokia Lumia 800. In short, it's buggy, unpredictable, goes haywire in areas with worse coverage and generally tends to suddenly expire on you quickly. A show stopper.
A recent update has fixed it for my Lumia 800. It didn't feel buggy to me to begin with, it just drained too soon. I would very much welcome a warning chime when the battery charge gets low; I understand some people may hate it, but this helped me to avoid running out of battery with other phones.
Also, you can prevent most applications from running in the background unnecessarily, and there is a battery saving mode to shut down non-essential background activities when the battery is running low.
- no easy way to access file system.
This is a geek requirement. Even the matter of having a file system bears little relevance to what most people use their phones for. This one does not have removable storage, neither does it pose as a USB mass storage device (and it's a good time we'd moved on from that antiquated interface), so what would you need the file system access for?
WP is a good piece of software, and has the opportunity to make itself secure and business friendly, but by crippling the platform with single core processors
Here it comes again. Please explain what kind of extra awesomeness WP could attain if it ran on multiple cores. The OS and all applications I use are pretty snappy, so it's not about UI lagging. Are people too mentally conditioned by the sluggishness of Android? Or is it that iPhone has multiple cores, so it's an unquestionable rule of the day that all comparable smartphones must have the same amount or more?
and no removable memory it will never interest power users.
For the past five years or so, I never felt myself wanting to use removable memory on my phone. I guess there are people who need gazillion gigabytes of swappable storage, but I guess their numbers are much smaller than the number of people who tend to get a life and just need a convenient phone.
With the risk comes the potential reward: being #1 on one of the three major smartphone platforms. Nokia seems to have already reached it with Lumia 800 in the markets where it is being sold.
If Microsoft can actually deliver a streamlined no-nonsense interface and solidly hit the midrange price point I think they'll find buyers. It's true that people don't care _that_ much, but at the same time I think there's a lot of frustration building up over Apple's walled garden and Android's bloatware/platform issues. They may not be all 'wow I can shave 100ms of my time-to-pic', but when they go to buy their next phone they'll remember Microsoft advertising a snappy simple interface and their problems with their old phone and be willing to give it a try.
This. It's pretty much a phone for grown-ups who don't go "ooh, it has four cores, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these", but who choose a device that is usable for their daily needs, and is perhaps good enough for their casual needs.
Everybody else seems to have it in their strategy to only put Windows Phone on half-assed, bland-looking models. In fact, their Android phones are hardly better, but somehow everybody puts up with that because Android is "free" or something.
For the price (and that does count a lot) the Lumia 900 is a decent phone. It struggles to compete with dual core phones
It only "struggles" in the imagination of people who believe that more cores = better, before they have actually tried to do anything with the thing.
Nokia, or one of the WP7.5 launch partners should have a quad core phone out the door nowish
Why the hell? Lumia 900 is fast enough for anyone whose perception is not affected by reading spec sheets.
Re:If they plan on going mobile then i'm afraid
on
Qt 5 Alpha Released
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· Score: 1
With plain GObject, you had to handwrite all that crap! In Qt, you write a method signature once, you declare it as a signal or a slot, and you're done. IIRC with GObject you have to tell the framework about everything: the name of the method, what arguments it takes, all that other crap, it's insane that anyone would still be expecting application developers to handle this crap by hand.
Of course not, the GObject introspection compiler can extract basic types from the source. It needs extra annotations for semantics that cannot be reflected in plain C.
Of course Vala changes all that, and it provides more functionality than Qt's moc, I give them that. But it's a work in progress, so it's not really on equal footing to Qt.
It's quite stable and is used for things such as Folks, the GNOME contact information storage.
Re:If they plan on going mobile then i'm afraid
on
Qt 5 Alpha Released
·
· Score: 1
Never mind the handwritten introspections in GTK. You'd think people could use, you know, computers to do the mundane for them. The distaste for using tools other than the holy compiler is awful. You've got all those beautiful resources, yet you choose to be confined to the expressiveness (rather, lack thereof) of C. Yay.
Not being a blue blood accustomed to first class travel, I see airplane food strictly as something to sustain me through a long flight, and relieve the boredom.
On shorter range flights (such as across much of Europe), only drinks are necessary, and anything is vastly better and more convenient on the ground, even in airport restaurants. Short layovers when connecting flights may be a problem, though, so it's good to be able to get a meal sometimes. Low cost carriers know all this, so they offer in-flight food for an extra charge.
They could transition back to Harmattan, and continue the N9's success.
They could... if they had fired the incompetents who brought Harmattan to where it was: late, horribly bloated, and not even on track to become the future development platform (that was the role of meego.org proper).
Citation, from someone not pulling numbers out of their ass, needed. Preferrably with dynamics over the few months that all devices mentioned have been on the market. Oh, forget it, this is Slashdot, you get +5 Informative just for crying out something that pleases the crowd.
_Just_ Symbian had something like 12% of european market last year. And they're phasing it out in favor of WinPhone which is a smashing success with around 1% (that's twice as much as last year!) in Europe after two years in the market, while Symbian is already down to 8%.
So I take it that Lumia sales having overtaken Symbian in the UK are excellent news for Nokia? Extrapolated across EU, it could translate to some 10% market share already this year, which is no small feat for a device line that has only been out for several months.
I see Windows Phone as a smartphone for grown-ups. It does not have 5000000 apps, but I don't really care, as long as the stuff I need is there. I don't want to learn the 15th creative way that some developers decided their app will reimplement basic interactions such as the back button. I absolutely don't want to be on a quest for that unofficial firmware or add-on that is supposed to fix all the problems that your Android manufacturer neglected to address out of the box. No, I don't care about how many cores or how many megapixels they have thrown in to make you want to buy their devices; higher specification metrics do not by themselves translate to doing stuff I need to be done, better. I want to have good offline navigation software, good offline maps, and as of yesterday, I know that any of my future smartphones must have a public transit route finding software as awesome as Nokia Transport. The things I somewhat miss are integrated Skype, Google Talk/Handouts, and Google+. These are rumored to arrive with the next couple of Windows Phone iterations.
The N950 (developer only) and N9 (publicly available) have meego actually, not maemo.
I happen to know more about these things than some marketing materials may have led you to believe.
The software in N950/N9 is a direct development of Maemo. MeeGo, in its proper sense of a platform that was intended to be supported in the future, was a system co-developed with Intel, which got many of the Maemo components bolted on after repackaging and other adjustments, but was never completed to be released on a smartphone. The plans called for a MeeGo smartphone release to happen some time after N9, which was released some six months ago. This means that we could see first real MeeGo smartphones hitting the market about now. Instead, we got a second iteration of WP7, which already enjoys quite an evolved feature set and some 60000+ apps.
Thanks, but this looks mostly like a regurgitation of his earlier writings. "It is a severe downgrade of past Nokia flagship phones like the N95," wow. This guy piles shit high, and he wants to find problems so badly he invents use cases for them. So, if you compose lengthy prose in SMS you may want drafts. Of course he did not notice that you can return to a recently abandoned message view and this is all that you really need most of the time; he decided he found a problem, and he is not interested in a solution. Bad build quality, in a device that is a rip-off of the venerable N9? He needs to settle on some coherent line of thought, even though it's probably not required to win appreciation from people who take him seriously.
Seriously, I did not look into Lumia myself, but reading that list, I would expect sales to be bad.
If all people based their purchase decisions on ramblings of somebody with an obvious axe to grind, then sales would be bad. But they are not.
There are two layers of bias. The first is the tone of the submitter. Then there is a the second layer with the ex executive. All we need is a Netcraft meme thrown in for good measure...sigh...
It's amusing to read Ahonen in retrospect. It's basically goes like this: shout things about Nokia, be proven wrong about most of them in the next few months. He claimed Nokia lost leadership in cameras (citing some silly megapixel race numbers), before they announced PureView. He said Lumia lacks the all-important front facing camera and the overall specs are lackluster, then Lumia 900 was announced. The development platform is limited, um, but soon we expect the Windows 8 convergence and its native C/C++ APIs. Nobody is buying Lumia phones, oh wait, this just in, the sales are taking off.
Even more amusing is Slashdot, cherry-picking this bozo among all the recent news about Nokia or Windows Phone. I guess many people here would be pissed to see a strategy involving Windows Phone succeed, after a strategy involving Linux failed (through no fault of Linux, I must say).
Have you ever used maemo or meego? Maemo is perfect for developers/geeks. Meego is perfect for everyone else.
I'd be thrilled to see a smartphone running MeeGo. As far as I know, there is only Mer for N9, which is far from perfect.
All the backends/insides are the same, BTW.
Care to elaborate? Maemo was the software for some older Nokia models such as the N900. N9 got the last Maemo release which was rebranded as "MeeGo instance" for face-saving reasons. No phone has ever been released with MeeGo installed on it.
No, some people do not have to see Windows Phone to know that it is bad. They just remember DOS 6 and Windows 3.1 and can extrapolate the rest starting from that.
I agree. Linux 1.0 was awful crap, too, which is why it can never mature to be put on anything serious. Hold on a sec...
Maybe not, but the Prosecutor General of Finland might. You know, given Nokia is headquartered in Finland and all..
There's a good chance that the dude is right now enjoying his evening read of Helsingin Sanomat on his Lumia 800, which is selling like hodareita in Finland.
I think everyone who follows closely the industry was already aware of that fact.
Everyone who actually follows the industry, instead of reading fringe blogs like Disgruntled Ex-Nokians Dominate, cross-reinforced with the Slashdot groupthink, knows that the Lumia line is, in fact, selling quite nicely. And just today they released Nokia Transport, which to me is a killer app that any smartphone will need to match to be considered a viable replacement.
OK, that's over, now we all should have a brainwave and flip back to the tale of how N9 was the great future simply because it runs Linux, MeeGo was a competitive platform that had been made ready for a smartphone, and S60, if you squint at it just so, did not look like a barely maintainable pile of crap that has long outlived its heyday. If not that, then becoming the 57th Android(-oid) vendor in line was a gold-paved road to success. Elop can't be trying to whack some sense into Nokia to keep it afloat, no, he's a trojan horse because being an executive in M$ (spelling obligatory) is an everlasting mark of the Dark Side, and everybody's read that story on the internet that he held on to Microsoft stock, or did not sell it too quickly, or, anyway, he's evil, I tell you! MSFT!
The worst case is probably what is actually happening, which is that nobody is buying Windows phones.
Probably, really? Lumia is already outselling Symbian in the UK. Lumia 800 is listed among best-selling phones at many operators' websites. The U.S. have only seen the cheaper Lumia 710 on T-Mobile, and it is gaining quite a following. Check the approval rate and the reviews at T-Mobile's website.
Living in the Slashdot groupthink bubble is cosy, but the disadvantage is, reality sometimes differs.
Given that early humans were probably starved or close to it for most of their existence, eating a juicy crustacean doesn't seem like such a crazy idea. Grubs are even better.
Slashdot Mirror
- some tiles are animated, some not - pretty distracting experience.
I don't get this complaint. You want all tiles to be animated, or none at all?
Live tiles are very useful. They could do without some gratuitous animation, I agree. I guess they wanted some attention grabbers for the first few minutes in the store.
- while the interface is responsive, you still need to do several taps and slides to get a result you can set a single tap under an Android or iPhone.
Any specific examples?
- battery - ye gods, hopefully those of you who purchase Nokia Lumia 900 do not experience the issues we have in EU with Nokia Lumia 800. In short, it's buggy, unpredictable, goes haywire in areas with worse coverage and generally tends to suddenly expire on you quickly. A show stopper.
A recent update has fixed it for my Lumia 800. It didn't feel buggy to me to begin with, it just drained too soon. I would very much welcome a warning chime when the battery charge gets low; I understand some people may hate it, but this helped me to avoid running out of battery with other phones.
Also, you can prevent most applications from running in the background unnecessarily, and there is a battery saving mode to shut down non-essential background activities when the battery is running low.
- no easy way to access file system.
This is a geek requirement. Even the matter of having a file system bears little relevance to what most people use their phones for. This one does not have removable storage, neither does it pose as a USB mass storage device (and it's a good time we'd moved on from that antiquated interface), so what would you need the file system access for?
WP is a good piece of software, and has the opportunity to make itself secure and business friendly, but by crippling the platform with single core processors
Here it comes again. Please explain what kind of extra awesomeness WP could attain if it ran on multiple cores. The OS and all applications I use are pretty snappy, so it's not about UI lagging. Are people too mentally conditioned by the sluggishness of Android? Or is it that iPhone has multiple cores, so it's an unquestionable rule of the day that all comparable smartphones must have the same amount or more?
and no removable memory it will never interest power users.
For the past five years or so, I never felt myself wanting to use removable memory on my phone. I guess there are people who need gazillion gigabytes of swappable storage, but I guess their numbers are much smaller than the number of people who tend to get a life and just need a convenient phone.
With the risk comes the potential reward: being #1 on one of the three major smartphone platforms.
Nokia seems to have already reached it with Lumia 800 in the markets where it is being sold.
If Microsoft can actually deliver a streamlined no-nonsense interface and solidly hit the midrange price point I think they'll find buyers. It's true that people don't care _that_ much, but at the same time I think there's a lot of frustration building up over Apple's walled garden and Android's bloatware/platform issues. They may not be all 'wow I can shave 100ms of my time-to-pic', but when they go to buy their next phone they'll remember Microsoft advertising a snappy simple interface and their problems with their old phone and be willing to give it a try.
This. It's pretty much a phone for grown-ups who don't go "ooh, it has four cores, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these", but who choose a device that is usable for their daily needs, and is perhaps good enough for their casual needs.
Everybody else seems to have it in their strategy to only put Windows Phone on half-assed, bland-looking models. In fact, their Android phones are hardly better, but somehow everybody puts up with that because Android is "free" or something.
For the price (and that does count a lot) the Lumia 900 is a decent phone. It struggles to compete with dual core phones
It only "struggles" in the imagination of people who believe that more cores = better, before they have actually tried to do anything with the thing.
Nokia, or one of the WP7.5 launch partners should have a quad core phone out the door nowish
Why the hell? Lumia 900 is fast enough for anyone whose perception is not affected by reading spec sheets.
With plain GObject, you had to handwrite all that crap! In Qt, you write a method signature once, you declare it as a signal or a slot, and you're done. IIRC with GObject you have to tell the framework about everything: the name of the method, what arguments it takes, all that other crap, it's insane that anyone would still be expecting application developers to handle this crap by hand.
Of course not, the GObject introspection compiler can extract basic types from the source. It needs extra annotations for semantics that cannot be reflected in plain C.
Of course Vala changes all that, and it provides more functionality than Qt's moc, I give them that. But it's a work in progress, so it's not really on equal footing to Qt.
It's quite stable and is used for things such as Folks, the GNOME contact information storage.
Never mind the handwritten introspections in GTK. You'd think people could use, you know, computers to do the mundane for them. The distaste for using tools other than the holy compiler is awful. You've got all those beautiful resources, yet you choose to be confined to the expressiveness (rather, lack thereof) of C. Yay.
Ever heard of GObject introspection and Vala?
Not being a blue blood accustomed to first class travel, I see airplane food strictly as something to sustain me through a long flight, and relieve the boredom.
On shorter range flights (such as across much of Europe), only drinks are necessary, and anything is vastly better and more convenient on the ground, even in airport restaurants. Short layovers when connecting flights may be a problem, though, so it's good to be able to get a meal sometimes. Low cost carriers know all this, so they offer in-flight food for an extra charge.
I did write "from someone not pulling numbers out of their ass", didn't I?
They could transition back to Harmattan, and continue the N9's success.
They could... if they had fired the incompetents who brought Harmattan to where it was: late, horribly bloated, and not even on track to become the future development platform (that was the role of meego.org proper).
Citation, from someone not pulling numbers out of their ass, needed. Preferrably with dynamics over the few months that all devices mentioned have been on the market. Oh, forget it, this is Slashdot, you get +5 Informative just for crying out something that pleases the crowd.
_Just_ Symbian had something like 12% of european market last year. And they're phasing it out in favor of WinPhone which is a smashing success with around 1% (that's twice as much as last year!) in Europe after two years in the market, while Symbian is already down to 8%.
So I take it that Lumia sales having overtaken Symbian in the UK are excellent news for Nokia? Extrapolated across EU, it could translate to some 10% market share already this year, which is no small feat for a device line that has only been out for several months.
I see Windows Phone as a smartphone for grown-ups. It does not have 5000000 apps, but I don't really care, as long as the stuff I need is there. I don't want to learn the 15th creative way that some developers decided their app will reimplement basic interactions such as the back button. I absolutely don't want to be on a quest for that unofficial firmware or add-on that is supposed to fix all the problems that your Android manufacturer neglected to address out of the box. No, I don't care about how many cores or how many megapixels they have thrown in to make you want to buy their devices; higher specification metrics do not by themselves translate to doing stuff I need to be done, better. I want to have good offline navigation software, good offline maps, and as of yesterday, I know that any of my future smartphones must have a public transit route finding software as awesome as Nokia Transport.
The things I somewhat miss are integrated Skype, Google Talk/Handouts, and Google+. These are rumored to arrive with the next couple of Windows Phone iterations.
The N950 (developer only) and N9 (publicly available) have meego actually, not maemo.
I happen to know more about these things than some marketing materials may have led you to believe.
The software in N950/N9 is a direct development of Maemo. MeeGo, in its proper sense of a platform that was intended to be supported in the future, was a system co-developed with Intel, which got many of the Maemo components bolted on after repackaging and other adjustments, but was never completed to be released on a smartphone. The plans called for a MeeGo smartphone release to happen some time after N9, which was released some six months ago. This means that we could see first real MeeGo smartphones hitting the market about now. Instead, we got a second iteration of WP7, which already enjoys quite an evolved feature set and some 60000+ apps.
Please read this:
Thanks, but this looks mostly like a regurgitation of his earlier writings. "It is a severe downgrade of past Nokia flagship phones like the N95," wow. This guy piles shit high, and he wants to find problems so badly he invents use cases for them. So, if you compose lengthy prose in SMS you may want drafts. Of course he did not notice that you can return to a recently abandoned message view and this is all that you really need most of the time; he decided he found a problem, and he is not interested in a solution. Bad build quality, in a device that is a rip-off of the venerable N9? He needs to settle on some coherent line of thought, even though it's probably not required to win appreciation from people who take him seriously.
Seriously, I did not look into Lumia myself, but reading that list, I would expect sales to be bad.
If all people based their purchase decisions on ramblings of somebody with an obvious axe to grind, then sales would be bad. But they are not.
There are two layers of bias. The first is the tone of the submitter. Then there is a the second layer with the ex executive. All we need is a Netcraft meme thrown in for good measure...sigh...
It's amusing to read Ahonen in retrospect. It's basically goes like this: shout things about Nokia, be proven wrong about most of them in the next few months. He claimed Nokia lost leadership in cameras (citing some silly megapixel race numbers), before they announced PureView. He said Lumia lacks the all-important front facing camera and the overall specs are lackluster, then Lumia 900 was announced. The development platform is limited, um, but soon we expect the Windows 8 convergence and its native C/C++ APIs. Nobody is buying Lumia phones, oh wait, this just in, the sales are taking off.
Even more amusing is Slashdot, cherry-picking this bozo among all the recent news about Nokia or Windows Phone. I guess many people here would be pissed to see a strategy involving Windows Phone succeed, after a strategy involving Linux failed (through no fault of Linux, I must say).
Have you ever used maemo or meego?
Maemo is perfect for developers/geeks.
Meego is perfect for everyone else.
I'd be thrilled to see a smartphone running MeeGo. As far as I know, there is only Mer for N9, which is far from perfect.
All the backends/insides are the same, BTW.
Care to elaborate? Maemo was the software for some older Nokia models such as the N900. N9 got the last Maemo release which was rebranded as "MeeGo instance" for face-saving reasons. No phone has ever been released with MeeGo installed on it.
No, some people do not have to see Windows Phone to know that it is bad. They just remember DOS 6 and Windows 3.1 and can extrapolate the rest starting from that.
I agree. Linux 1.0 was awful crap, too, which is why it can never mature to be put on anything serious. Hold on a sec...
Maybe not, but the Prosecutor General of Finland might. You know, given Nokia is headquartered in Finland and all..
There's a good chance that the dude is right now enjoying his evening read of Helsingin Sanomat on his Lumia 800, which is selling like hodareita in Finland.
I think everyone who follows closely the industry was already aware of that fact.
Everyone who actually follows the industry, instead of reading fringe blogs like Disgruntled Ex-Nokians Dominate, cross-reinforced with the Slashdot groupthink, knows that the Lumia line is, in fact, selling quite nicely. And just today they released Nokia Transport, which to me is a killer app that any smartphone will need to match to be considered a viable replacement.
OK, that's over, now we all should have a brainwave and flip back to the tale of how N9 was the great future simply because it runs Linux, MeeGo was a competitive platform that had been made ready for a smartphone, and S60, if you squint at it just so, did not look like a barely maintainable pile of crap that has long outlived its heyday. If not that, then becoming the 57th Android(-oid) vendor in line was a gold-paved road to success. Elop can't be trying to whack some sense into Nokia to keep it afloat, no, he's a trojan horse because being an executive in M$ (spelling obligatory) is an everlasting mark of the Dark Side, and everybody's read that story on the internet that he held on to Microsoft stock, or did not sell it too quickly, or, anyway, he's evil, I tell you! MSFT!
The worst case is probably what is actually happening, which is that nobody is buying Windows phones.
Probably, really? Lumia is already outselling Symbian in the UK. Lumia 800 is listed among best-selling phones at many operators' websites. The U.S. have only seen the cheaper Lumia 710 on T-Mobile, and it is gaining quite a following. Check the approval rate and the reviews at T-Mobile's website.
Living in the Slashdot groupthink bubble is cosy, but the disadvantage is, reality sometimes differs.
You just cannot block it.
Given that early humans were probably starved or close to it for most of their existence, eating a juicy crustacean doesn't seem like such a crazy idea.
Grubs are even better.
Did you ever experience this, too?