This was the worst possible outcome. Even if a minority government collapsed and the following election mirrored the ~2.4% (IIRC) swing of October 1974, we wouldn't end up with a Tory majority
So what would have happened? We'd be back to a hung Parliament again. I'd rather Lib Dems trying to work with the Tories, than Tories running a minority Government alone.
To say more on your comments about no opposition - there's more chance for effective opposition in a hung Parliament, than usual where a Government has a majority. It's those cases where opposition is almost always useless.
How do you mean? The DEA was passed by Labour. The potential opposition to that law are the ones in power. You're saying it's better to have Labour in power, so that the other parties can "oppose" it even if it means nothing? I'd rather have them actually able to repeal some of these laws.
Sure, if the new Government now starts doing authoritarian things, that's depressing, but that's nothing new - it's always been a choice between Labour and Tory, both of whom have been authoritarian in the past. Lib Dems may now form a part of the Government, but they still don't have anywhere near the power to change that.
There were two companies who seemed to have problems with me telling them I'd moved house.
One was Virgin Media, who had come round to my new house to install it, and started sending out paper bills (despite me being on the e-bills), and charging me for that - and sent the paper bills to the old address. Oh, and they disabled my email account and it took a week to get them to fix it.
(The other company, who seemed unable to accept my new address even after telling them, was my bank, who I have my mortgage with...)
Although to be fair, this seems more to extend their hours. I've still had UK people AFAICT[*] when phoning during office hours in the week, but it seems to be outsourced to India at the weekends. The point being, before they did this, they were only open during office hours in the week anyway. (And at least the days of waiting half an hour in a phone queue, as used to happen when they were NTL, are gone.)
I once phoned in the evening and got someone with an American accent, which would work with the time zones...
[*] Obviously I realise that making judgements via accents isn't perfect, but there's also the point that they weren't reading off a script and could actually be helpful.
That's a technical limitation - obviously you need a HD TV, to receive HD television. Is there a technical reason why these apps can only work on an Iphone?
I mean yes, even if they supported all phones, you could say "But someone without a phone can't use it", but now you're conflating the problem with a technical problem.
I can buy a HD TV from a company I choose. Can any phone I choose to buy work with these Government apps, even though they'd be technically capable of supporting those required features? No.
Any company can make a TV that conforms to the HD spec. Can anyone make a phone that runs these apps?
Given that you don't live in the UK, it's not your government, and it's not your tax money. So spare us the pleas.
I'm in the UK, and I agree with his pleas, and I'm thankful that he made them so well.
Re: the rest of your post - so the details of the app are not quite right, but that doesn't address the criticisms.
So a rocky start, but at each step of the way, the message has become more twisted still.
So actually they're mistaken, and the Government is providing something that is platform neutral (either web based, or supporting Symbian, J2ME, along with Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android etc), and not just the Iphone?
The problem is there are two debates - one is "money being wasted" the other is "only supporting a minority of people, and locking out many others".
The former is rather less of a problem, but the latter is a valid criticism. Consider if the Government only supports Windows, there is rightly an uproar. Not about the money spent, but because it should be catering for everyone. And at least Windows is the market leader, unlike the Iphone, which doesn't come anywhere near close (especially in the UK).
I'd rather have the government expand this project to other platforms than to stop it completely.
Sure, let's have the Government expand it to provide for Symbian, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, J2ME etc.
Also, looking at it in terms of value - an Iphone app reaches about 3% of phone users compared to near 100% that a website can. So the scaled cost of £40,000 is over £1.3m. Also note that the costs of the website aren't just writing the website - they include building nd running infrastructure, hosting, etc. Do the app costs include all the money for purchasing development machines, and writing, building, hosting all the back end servers needing to support the apps?
I agree entirely with your post, though just to add:
although no one model outsells the iPhone
Don't get fooled by the "only one model" myth we get from Apple users:) There have been several generations, with very different features. Even within a single generation, there are different models (albeit very similar, but then the same is true of many Nokia phones say, that have different model numbers despite only minor changes in features and running the same CPU/OS/etc).
I'm not sure why it matters if it was only one phone anyway - just because one company decides to produce several models doesn't mean they're guaranteed more sales, rather, their sales may be split between the models. It might be special if it meant a phone sold well for a long period of time, but that's not true here anyway, since Apple update their phones as often as anyone else.
For a real example of a single model, look at the RAZR 3. To put things into persective, that phone sold twice as many phones as Apple have ever sold in their entire product range! And that's just one of Motorola's many phones!
For another comparison: Nokia sell more phones every quarter than Apple have ever sold...
I entirely agree with this of course, but there's another point: it's not just about marketshare.
When the Government (or the BBC, or even private companies) only support Windows-only solutions, people rightly criticise them. On Slashdot, there's no end of criticism. The fact that 90% of people use Windows is beside the point - those 10% should still have a right to use it. So even if we lived in a fantasy world where the Iphone was the market leader (as some people here bizarrely seem to believe), it would still be worthy of criticism.
There's also a point about unfair competition. Why is the Government giving an unfair advantage to one company, by using taxes to write apps for their platforms? Not to mention the problems of allowing Apple total control over whether the Government apps are approved or not!
Of course, the fact that the Iphone is only owned by about 3% of the population just makes this all the more ridiculous.
People have already pointed out that that's a US survey (where Nokia have virtually no presence), and anecdotal "evidence" is not a good argument.
The other problem is that you don't know how many people you know have Symbian phones. The thing to remember is that an Iphone user will advertise this fact. They get an Iphone, and post "I'm on my Iphone". And if they don't say it, their app will advertise it with every single post: "Posted using XXX for Iphone".
Everyone else refers to their "phone". Apple users talk about their "Iphone".
Everyone else just uses their phone. An Iphone user gets it out and says "I'm going to check the Internet On My Iphone" as if unaware that this stopped being impressive by about 2004. I've even had random strangers butt into my conversation to brag "Oh, we've got Iphones".
Thus, your brain spots all the Iphone users, even if it's just 5% of people, and thinks it's greater than all the users who never tell you what their phone is.
I agree entirely with your post, although I'd add that even this isn't true. I'm lucky enough to have money, but even at the same price I would prefer anything over the Iphone. Also, just because I have money, doesn't mean I throw it away unnecessarily - whilst I think Android looks just as good as Symbian, I have no desire for a 1GHz phone, and spending £180 was more than good enough for me. That meant I got a Nokia phone, as there was nothing that ran Android in that price range (nor from RIM, come to that).
There's a common myth that "rich people get Iphones" - it's turning into the technological equivalent of designer labels. People pay for an expensive logo to show off their wealth, but no one else cares, and we get the same functionality and save money elsewhere.
Hell, I was at the pub the other day, and someone interrupted our conversation about phones to say "Oh, we have Iphones. We don't care about your open source operating systems. We like that it's sexy!" I mean, what?
However, it seems to be an internal trend in the BBC too unfortunately, prioritising iPhone and iPad access over more open platforms
Yes, I agree it is appalling. Remember the uproar over the Iplayer and being Windows only? At least Windows was 90% of the market. Now the BBC gives priority to an even more closed, and far less used platform, and that seems to be fine.
His link was for the ill-defined "smartphone" category - Table 2 was "Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System".
Worldwide, Nokia actually have less market share (35%), although they're still number one.
Apple incidentally are at 2.7%, which means that the Government is locking out 97.3% of phone users (probably more, when we look at the installed user base rather than current sales).
No one I know browses on a standard phone
That's a good survey. Even my mum (who has yet to work out the address book) manages to access the BBC site for news and weather.
and the app market for standard phones is pretty much limited to really bad Tetris, or bejeweled clones.
It's good enough for Opera Mini and Google Maps. Sure, if a particular Government app can't run on J2ME because it needs high end "smartphone" features, they can't write for it. But if they can, it should be supported.
It may be true, but it's also irrelevant. Just because IQ tests aren't a general test of irrelevant, doesn't mean that they are therefore completely useless tests that test nothing.
They certainly test some logical skills. The criticism is that this isn't the be all and end all of "intelligence". That doesn't mean the test can't be used by a company wanting to test a candidate's logical skills.
Consider, a job interview is hardly a good test of "intelligence". Does that make job interviews useless as a means of assessing potential employees?
On the one hand we have a job where problem solving skills and logical thinking are likely to be useful. On the other hand, we have college where people may be studying any kind of subject. Clearly they're similar, and yes, obviously an IQ test that is basically testing logical thinking, spotting patterns etc, is useless for both cases.
I find this odd - it's okay (presumably) for companies to set candidates tests, but they're banned from including questions that test problem solving? How is it decided if a test counts as an "IQ test"?
Whilst IQ in general is a poor test of general intelligence, I don't see it's stupid as an interview process. IQ tests may only test a specific set of problem solving skills rather than general intelligence, but those are still skills plausibly useful for jobs like programming. Yes, you can get better at problem solving, which is just what the company wants - it's like saying exams aren't relevant, because you can study and do better.
(At one software company in the UK, I was set a test with questions basically very similar to those in IQ tests I've done, and in that context it made perfect sense. Was the test a perfect way of judging candidates? Sure, it wasn't, but the same could be said of all tests and processes in the interview - there's no perfect method.)
IQ is not concerned with - the candidate knows about the job - the candidate has good (enough) people skills - the candidate showers, shaves, etc
Who says they're only using these tests to hire people? By that logic, I could say the same about your criteria - knowing about the job isn't concerned with whether they can do it; whether the candidate showers/shaves tells you nothing if they have good enough people skills, etc. If you're criticising the relevance of IQ tests, I'd criticise the relevance of your examples just as much.
It seems to me that a lot of people are still obsessed about cars today, and how they look.
Not to mention that "When this thing is no longer new, there won't be as much 'buzz' about it" is a statement of the bleeding obvious. That's not what he was saying at all.
Perhaps, but let's face it - the same kind of story "On The Iphone" would be news. Hell, we've had stories which were basically "You can view this website On The Iphone".
Of course, I'd rather that stories on Nokia's products (who are only the biggest seller in mobile phones and smartphones) were specifically on actual product news, given how rare coverage for them is. But still, I'd rather take a once in a blue moon story for MeeGo, than the usual three "Someone did something trivial On Their Iphone" stories we get every day.
I'd also point out that it's interesting to know that MeeGo will run on things like netbooks, since I'd only heard it being planned for smartphones and tablets.
I'm not talking about the OS's technical capabilities/potential. Go check Nokia's strategy, and you'll find out I'm right.
So what are you talking about?
Even if we go by what the company markets it by (which, in terms of looking at the "smartphone market", is a poor indicator anyway), Nokia refer to Symbian phones as smartphones, and they refer to Symbian as a smartphone OS. E.g.:
I presume you were thinking of S40, which (despite still being a smartphone by any non-arbitrary definition, in that it runs apps and has Internet access, and is an OS for a mobile computer in a phone) they market as not being a smartphone, to distinguish it from their Symbian (i.e., S60) phones.
Yes, they have some high end phones too like the N97 (and N900) (I'm not sure it's more expensive than any Iphone or Android phone though?), but the likes of the 5800 and X6 offer the same level of functionality of the Iphone (though lower specs than high end Android phones like from HTC) at lower prices. If you want to sacrifices the extra bells and whistles, you can get even cheaper Symbian phones in the 5XXX range.
Nokia's "smartphones" (I hate that term, ever since Jobs redefined it to mean "Locked down phone that only runs software approved by the manufacturer"
I'm glad it's not just me:) Once upon a time, smartphone meant running apps and Internet access, basically a computer rather than just a phone. Since at least 2005, almost all phones were "smart", yet we've now had "smartphone" only used for some arbitrary high end phone. These days, even low end "feature" phones have large touchscreens.
It's more a marketing thing I think - vendors and manufacturers want a reason to explain why the more expensive phones are better, so they label them as "smart", rather than merely "feature" phones. At least one could still argue that the smartphones were more open, rather than being locked down like feature phones.
But as you say, since Apple decided that claim the Iphone was a "smartphone", this distinction no longer applied. It now allows them to misleadingly inflate their market share, by only quoting the market share of "smartphones" (they're still way behind Nokia though). Yet it's unfair to include the Iphones in that, whilst saying that the "feature" phones shouldn't be included.
It's also allowed them to perpetuate the myth that you need a smartphone "like the Iphone" to access the Internet. I've even seen geeks on Slashdot claim this - anyone would think it was still 2000.
Actually I think one of the best things about Nokia is that they do provide decent smartphones for lower end. Sure, they aren't the company if you want a phone with 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM like you get with HTC. But you can get a smartphone with several hundred MHz processor and hundreds of MBs or RAM that works just as well for most people, much cheaper than that HTC phone.
It would be nice if Android started appearing on more lower end devices, but the newer versions that come out require higher and higher specs. Nokia have the problem though that if they hold Symbian back for lower end phones, they also lose out on the high end. So I can see the advantage of having a separate OS for higher end phones.
Why should it not work? It doesn't split the application market, as Qt will cross-compile to both Symbian and Meego. (S40 is a different kettle of fish altogether, intended to run the Java apps you can get on all phones).
Apple have IOS and OS X. Google will have Android and ChromeOS. Microsoft have god knows how many versions of Windows.
They now use Qt - the days of Symbian C++ are long gone.
Easy to set up. I had Hello World in less than two hours, easily (and I didn't have to buy a special Nokia computer, unlike a certain mobile OS...)
Firstly there is S40, S60 and countless other types of symbian devices.
No, S40 isn't Symbian. S40 doesn't support native code, only J2ME (as with all "feature" phones). You can't expect to write the same application for S60 and S40, anymore than you can expect your Motorola "feature" phone to run Droid apps, or your Ipad to run OS X apps.
There is only one type of "Symbian" device as far as development. Not to mention that Qt will compile the same code also to Maemo, Windows, Linux and OS X.
Then there are versions to each of S40, S60 etc.
There aren't different versions of Android and IOS? Of course, there are.
Slashdot Mirror
This was the worst possible outcome. Even if a minority government collapsed and the following election mirrored the ~2.4% (IIRC) swing of October 1974, we wouldn't end up with a Tory majority
So what would have happened? We'd be back to a hung Parliament again. I'd rather Lib Dems trying to work with the Tories, than Tories running a minority Government alone.
To say more on your comments about no opposition - there's more chance for effective opposition in a hung Parliament, than usual where a Government has a majority. It's those cases where opposition is almost always useless.
How do you mean? The DEA was passed by Labour. The potential opposition to that law are the ones in power. You're saying it's better to have Labour in power, so that the other parties can "oppose" it even if it means nothing? I'd rather have them actually able to repeal some of these laws.
Sure, if the new Government now starts doing authoritarian things, that's depressing, but that's nothing new - it's always been a choice between Labour and Tory, both of whom have been authoritarian in the past. Lib Dems may now form a part of the Government, but they still don't have anywhere near the power to change that.
There were two companies who seemed to have problems with me telling them I'd moved house.
One was Virgin Media, who had come round to my new house to install it, and started sending out paper bills (despite me being on the e-bills), and charging me for that - and sent the paper bills to the old address. Oh, and they disabled my email account and it took a week to get them to fix it.
(The other company, who seemed unable to accept my new address even after telling them, was my bank, who I have my mortgage with...)
Not only are they outsourced to India
Although to be fair, this seems more to extend their hours. I've still had UK people AFAICT[*] when phoning during office hours in the week, but it seems to be outsourced to India at the weekends. The point being, before they did this, they were only open during office hours in the week anyway. (And at least the days of waiting half an hour in a phone queue, as used to happen when they were NTL, are gone.)
I once phoned in the evening and got someone with an American accent, which would work with the time zones...
[*] Obviously I realise that making judgements via accents isn't perfect, but there's also the point that they weren't reading off a script and could actually be helpful.
The current government has promised to repeal stupid laws, and this is one that's getting a lot of votes on their site for suggesting laws to repeal.
For anyone interested, it's at http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/repealing-unnecessary-laws/digital-economy-act .
Currently on the top 5 of most commented, with one of the highest ratings at 4.9, with 1304 votes.
That's a technical limitation - obviously you need a HD TV, to receive HD television. Is there a technical reason why these apps can only work on an Iphone?
I mean yes, even if they supported all phones, you could say "But someone without a phone can't use it", but now you're conflating the problem with a technical problem.
I can buy a HD TV from a company I choose. Can any phone I choose to buy work with these Government apps, even though they'd be technically capable of supporting those required features? No.
Any company can make a TV that conforms to the HD spec. Can anyone make a phone that runs these apps?
Given that you don't live in the UK, it's not your government, and it's not your tax money. So spare us the pleas.
I'm in the UK, and I agree with his pleas, and I'm thankful that he made them so well.
Re: the rest of your post - so the details of the app are not quite right, but that doesn't address the criticisms.
So a rocky start, but at each step of the way, the message has become more twisted still.
So actually they're mistaken, and the Government is providing something that is platform neutral (either web based, or supporting Symbian, J2ME, along with Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android etc), and not just the Iphone?
The problem is there are two debates - one is "money being wasted" the other is "only supporting a minority of people, and locking out many others".
The former is rather less of a problem, but the latter is a valid criticism. Consider if the Government only supports Windows, there is rightly an uproar. Not about the money spent, but because it should be catering for everyone. And at least Windows is the market leader, unlike the Iphone, which doesn't come anywhere near close (especially in the UK).
I'd rather have the government expand this project to other platforms than to stop it completely.
Sure, let's have the Government expand it to provide for Symbian, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, J2ME etc.
Also, looking at it in terms of value - an Iphone app reaches about 3% of phone users compared to near 100% that a website can. So the scaled cost of £40,000 is over £1.3m. Also note that the costs of the website aren't just writing the website - they include building nd running infrastructure, hosting, etc. Do the app costs include all the money for purchasing development machines, and writing, building, hosting all the back end servers needing to support the apps?
I agree entirely with your post, though just to add:
although no one model outsells the iPhone
Don't get fooled by the "only one model" myth we get from Apple users :) There have been several generations, with very different features. Even within a single generation, there are different models (albeit very similar, but then the same is true of many Nokia phones say, that have different model numbers despite only minor changes in features and running the same CPU/OS/etc).
I'm not sure why it matters if it was only one phone anyway - just because one company decides to produce several models doesn't mean they're guaranteed more sales, rather, their sales may be split between the models. It might be special if it meant a phone sold well for a long period of time, but that's not true here anyway, since Apple update their phones as often as anyone else.
For a real example of a single model, look at the RAZR 3. To put things into persective, that phone sold twice as many phones as Apple have ever sold in their entire product range! And that's just one of Motorola's many phones!
For another comparison: Nokia sell more phones every quarter than Apple have ever sold...
I entirely agree with this of course, but there's another point: it's not just about marketshare.
When the Government (or the BBC, or even private companies) only support Windows-only solutions, people rightly criticise them. On Slashdot, there's no end of criticism. The fact that 90% of people use Windows is beside the point - those 10% should still have a right to use it. So even if we lived in a fantasy world where the Iphone was the market leader (as some people here bizarrely seem to believe), it would still be worthy of criticism.
There's also a point about unfair competition. Why is the Government giving an unfair advantage to one company, by using taxes to write apps for their platforms? Not to mention the problems of allowing Apple total control over whether the Government apps are approved or not!
Of course, the fact that the Iphone is only owned by about 3% of the population just makes this all the more ridiculous.
People have already pointed out that that's a US survey (where Nokia have virtually no presence), and anecdotal "evidence" is not a good argument.
The other problem is that you don't know how many people you know have Symbian phones. The thing to remember is that an Iphone user will advertise this fact. They get an Iphone, and post "I'm on my Iphone". And if they don't say it, their app will advertise it with every single post: "Posted using XXX for Iphone".
Everyone else refers to their "phone". Apple users talk about their "Iphone".
Everyone else just uses their phone. An Iphone user gets it out and says "I'm going to check the Internet On My Iphone" as if unaware that this stopped being impressive by about 2004. I've even had random strangers butt into my conversation to brag "Oh, we've got Iphones".
Thus, your brain spots all the Iphone users, even if it's just 5% of people, and thinks it's greater than all the users who never tell you what their phone is.
Am I wrong?
People with money have moved
I agree entirely with your post, although I'd add that even this isn't true. I'm lucky enough to have money, but even at the same price I would prefer anything over the Iphone. Also, just because I have money, doesn't mean I throw it away unnecessarily - whilst I think Android looks just as good as Symbian, I have no desire for a 1GHz phone, and spending £180 was more than good enough for me. That meant I got a Nokia phone, as there was nothing that ran Android in that price range (nor from RIM, come to that).
There's a common myth that "rich people get Iphones" - it's turning into the technological equivalent of designer labels. People pay for an expensive logo to show off their wealth, but no one else cares, and we get the same functionality and save money elsewhere.
Hell, I was at the pub the other day, and someone interrupted our conversation about phones to say "Oh, we have Iphones. We don't care about your open source operating systems. We like that it's sexy!" I mean, what?
However, it seems to be an internal trend in the BBC too unfortunately, prioritising iPhone and iPad access over more open platforms
Yes, I agree it is appalling. Remember the uproar over the Iplayer and being Windows only? At least Windows was 90% of the market. Now the BBC gives priority to an even more closed, and far less used platform, and that seems to be fine.
His link was for the ill-defined "smartphone" category - Table 2 was "Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System".
Worldwide, Nokia actually have less market share (35%), although they're still number one.
Apple incidentally are at 2.7%, which means that the Government is locking out 97.3% of phone users (probably more, when we look at the installed user base rather than current sales).
No one I know browses on a standard phone
That's a good survey. Even my mum (who has yet to work out the address book) manages to access the BBC site for news and weather.
and the app market for standard phones is pretty much limited to really bad Tetris, or bejeweled clones.
It's good enough for Opera Mini and Google Maps. Sure, if a particular Government app can't run on J2ME because it needs high end "smartphone" features, they can't write for it. But if they can, it should be supported.
It may be true, but it's also irrelevant. Just because IQ tests aren't a general test of irrelevant, doesn't mean that they are therefore completely useless tests that test nothing.
They certainly test some logical skills. The criticism is that this isn't the be all and end all of "intelligence". That doesn't mean the test can't be used by a company wanting to test a candidate's logical skills.
Consider, a job interview is hardly a good test of "intelligence". Does that make job interviews useless as a means of assessing potential employees?
This is similar to college
On the one hand we have a job where problem solving skills and logical thinking are likely to be useful. On the other hand, we have college where people may be studying any kind of subject. Clearly they're similar, and yes, obviously an IQ test that is basically testing logical thinking, spotting patterns etc, is useless for both cases.
I find this odd - it's okay (presumably) for companies to set candidates tests, but they're banned from including questions that test problem solving? How is it decided if a test counts as an "IQ test"?
Whilst IQ in general is a poor test of general intelligence, I don't see it's stupid as an interview process. IQ tests may only test a specific set of problem solving skills rather than general intelligence, but those are still skills plausibly useful for jobs like programming. Yes, you can get better at problem solving, which is just what the company wants - it's like saying exams aren't relevant, because you can study and do better.
(At one software company in the UK, I was set a test with questions basically very similar to those in IQ tests I've done, and in that context it made perfect sense. Was the test a perfect way of judging candidates? Sure, it wasn't, but the same could be said of all tests and processes in the interview - there's no perfect method.)
IQ is not concerned with
- the candidate knows about the job
- the candidate has good (enough) people skills
- the candidate showers, shaves, etc
Who says they're only using these tests to hire people? By that logic, I could say the same about your criteria - knowing about the job isn't concerned with whether they can do it; whether the candidate showers/shaves tells you nothing if they have good enough people skills, etc. If you're criticising the relevance of IQ tests, I'd criticise the relevance of your examples just as much.
It seems to me that a lot of people are still obsessed about cars today, and how they look.
Not to mention that "When this thing is no longer new, there won't be as much 'buzz' about it" is a statement of the bleeding obvious. That's not what he was saying at all.
Perhaps, but let's face it - the same kind of story "On The Iphone" would be news. Hell, we've had stories which were basically "You can view this website On The Iphone".
Of course, I'd rather that stories on Nokia's products (who are only the biggest seller in mobile phones and smartphones) were specifically on actual product news, given how rare coverage for them is. But still, I'd rather take a once in a blue moon story for MeeGo, than the usual three "Someone did something trivial On Their Iphone" stories we get every day.
I'd also point out that it's interesting to know that MeeGo will run on things like netbooks, since I'd only heard it being planned for smartphones and tablets.
I'm not talking about the OS's technical capabilities/potential. Go check Nokia's strategy, and you'll find out I'm right.
So what are you talking about?
Even if we go by what the company markets it by (which, in terms of looking at the "smartphone market", is a poor indicator anyway), Nokia refer to Symbian phones as smartphones, and they refer to Symbian as a smartphone OS. E.g.:
http://www.symbian.org/ - "Contribute to the world's most widely used smartphone platform"
I presume you were thinking of S40, which (despite still being a smartphone by any non-arbitrary definition, in that it runs apps and has Internet access, and is an OS for a mobile computer in a phone) they market as not being a smartphone, to distinguish it from their Symbian (i.e., S60) phones.
Yes, they have some high end phones too like the N97 (and N900) (I'm not sure it's more expensive than any Iphone or Android phone though?), but the likes of the 5800 and X6 offer the same level of functionality of the Iphone (though lower specs than high end Android phones like from HTC) at lower prices. If you want to sacrifices the extra bells and whistles, you can get even cheaper Symbian phones in the 5XXX range.
Nokia's "smartphones" (I hate that term, ever since Jobs redefined it to mean "Locked down phone that only runs software approved by the manufacturer"
I'm glad it's not just me :) Once upon a time, smartphone meant running apps and Internet access, basically a computer rather than just a phone. Since at least 2005, almost all phones were "smart", yet we've now had "smartphone" only used for some arbitrary high end phone. These days, even low end "feature" phones have large touchscreens.
It's more a marketing thing I think - vendors and manufacturers want a reason to explain why the more expensive phones are better, so they label them as "smart", rather than merely "feature" phones. At least one could still argue that the smartphones were more open, rather than being locked down like feature phones.
But as you say, since Apple decided that claim the Iphone was a "smartphone", this distinction no longer applied. It now allows them to misleadingly inflate their market share, by only quoting the market share of "smartphones" (they're still way behind Nokia though). Yet it's unfair to include the Iphones in that, whilst saying that the "feature" phones shouldn't be included.
It's also allowed them to perpetuate the myth that you need a smartphone "like the Iphone" to access the Internet. I've even seen geeks on Slashdot claim this - anyone would think it was still 2000.
Actually I think one of the best things about Nokia is that they do provide decent smartphones for lower end. Sure, they aren't the company if you want a phone with 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM like you get with HTC. But you can get a smartphone with several hundred MHz processor and hundreds of MBs or RAM that works just as well for most people, much cheaper than that HTC phone.
It would be nice if Android started appearing on more lower end devices, but the newer versions that come out require higher and higher specs. Nokia have the problem though that if they hold Symbian back for lower end phones, they also lose out on the high end. So I can see the advantage of having a separate OS for higher end phones.
Why should it not work? It doesn't split the application market, as Qt will cross-compile to both Symbian and Meego. (S40 is a different kettle of fish altogether, intended to run the Java apps you can get on all phones).
Apple have IOS and OS X. Google will have Android and ChromeOS. Microsoft have god knows how many versions of Windows.
They now use Qt - the days of Symbian C++ are long gone.
Easy to set up. I had Hello World in less than two hours, easily (and I didn't have to buy a special Nokia computer, unlike a certain mobile OS...)
Firstly there is S40, S60 and countless other types of symbian devices.
No, S40 isn't Symbian. S40 doesn't support native code, only J2ME (as with all "feature" phones). You can't expect to write the same application for S60 and S40, anymore than you can expect your Motorola "feature" phone to run Droid apps, or your Ipad to run OS X apps.
There is only one type of "Symbian" device as far as development. Not to mention that Qt will compile the same code also to Maemo, Windows, Linux and OS X.
Then there are versions to each of S40, S60 etc.
There aren't different versions of Android and IOS? Of course, there are.