Nokia are insane. They seem to be intent on destroying any chance of success for their new interesting phones.
They announce the N900 and then soon after give a confusing message about MeeGo being the way forward and it not being supported officially on the N900. They deprecated the device almost immediately it became available. What commercial developer would try to produce applications for it now?
Now they announce the N8 with the amazing Symbian^3. Everything will be awesome about it according to press releases. Now, even before it becomes available Nokia announces it'll be the last N series device running Symbian. Another device deprecated just as it gets out the door.
Nokia, I used to like your devices. You made great phones. But please give them some future proofing and stop abandoning them the moment you release them.
I agree with the general spirit of your post, but IIANM Maemo apps will work on MeeGo and vice versa with minimal effort. Not to mention Maemo's been around for over four years now -- significantly longer than the iPlatform's existed.
Anyway, let's see how long MeeGo sticks as the go-to platform.
Maemo has been around for a while, but it keeps changing. Maemo 4 had a stylus UI, Maemo 5 switched to a fairly different finger UI, Maemo 6/MeeGo 1.0 is planning to introduce multitouch and replace Gtk with Qt, etc. What breakage will MeeGo 2 bring us?
It sucks for app devs but it's good for the customer. Until the platform has matured halting progress is a bad idea. Otherwise you're stuck supporting legacy crap forever and cannot move forward fast enough, especially in the mobile space.
You could argue that Nokia should have been doing this R&D behind closed doors but considering the openness of the platform that may or may not have been a wise choice.
They've also abandoned each generation of Maemo hardware shockingly fast as new models came out. I still have a Nokia 770 running OS 2007. After the N800 was released with OS 2008, the Nokia 770 never received a supported upgrade. (There is "OS 2008 Hacker Edition" for the 770, but its performance and stability was noticeably degraded compared to OS 2007.)
I'm glad to hear they'll be focusing on Meego as their flagship OS, since it's been at best a hobby until now. But somehow the platform has had as much fragmentation as Android even though they are a single company producing all the hardware and software (and only four models ever produced, at that).
I don't know about Gtk/Qt, but the 4/5 change is a difference, not a breakage: the N900 comes with a stylus, so your Maemo 4 stylus apps will work fine.
Think of it as pre-notifications vs notifications vs limited backgrounding functionality changes on iOS. The older apps still work fine, they're just not taking full advantage of the newer features.
Finally. I've long believed that Nokia's biggest problem lies with their software - I have an E63, which has a 400mhz processor, and it either lags like mad or dies randomly (thankfully rare, but it does happen).
PS: On an unrelated note, I found the line:
<^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Graphic on Nokia N-series losing to iPhone: here ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^>
About time. N900 was released last year, and just recently got it's second major update. It still feels very much like beta software. It just feels like a small sideproject for Nokia, which is very disappointing. N900 had such potential, but lack of focus and US markets ruined it.
Yeah sure. Thanks to Opera it has a great browser too.
With the maemo-update battery live is also great. Still the coolest phone on the market - when is came out it was by far the most advanced phone.
I have been expecting death of Symbian for a while. It existed for when all phone software sucked big time. Not anymore. There is android + iphone and symbian has no chance there.
The problem is symbian is clunky. The UI looks old and boring. It is slow, it is written in C++ with complicated interfaces. Not great software for a limited device like a phone.
Its also worth noting that it is not only Symbian, but Nokia's conservative and limited vision on innovation.
Actually, Symbian is great for limited power devices like phones.
It's a real-time OS that has a long history of running on weaker hardware. Consider that most new Symbian phones have an ARM processor clocked at ~400mhz (the fastest have a 600Mhz CPU) and have 128MB of memory. This has a big impact on price, Symbian devices are (much) cheaper than the iPhone/Android devices.
The problems you are complaining about are connected to the UI, which indeed is no match for the UI of the iPhone or even Android. Even so, Symbian will make for a great middle-level and low-level OS. Due to the low hardware requirements Nokia can lower the prices and offer longer battery lives.
There is no future in software designed for limited CPU and low memory. Moore's law all but ensures that it'll be completely irrelevant.
Symbian was designed for even weaker devices than I used when I developed for it years ago. As a developer, you're dealing with technology designed for hardware that simply doesn't exist anymore. When you have enough hardware to deliver what people want (like a full web browser) you have enough hardware for a decent OS.
Only that batteries don't tend to obey Moore's law. All other being equal, a smaller battery means not only lower BOM but also more freedom in physical desings of the devices.Not everyone likes to have a device size of a brick.
The UI offerings of manufacturers are converging to not being a differentiator. When that point is reached the war will go on how well your software manages the limited resources.
> Only that batteries don't tend to obey Moore's law.
My current smartphone is massively more powerful than my old Symbian smartphone and gets better battery life as well (and is smaller). We've seen massive gains in the power consumption of components inside computers and phones.
> When that point is reached the war will go on how well your software manages the limited resources.
That's never been true. Nokia is losing the smartphone market to a company that ported their desktop OS to a phone! The original Palm OS is no more because it was designed for devices of the day, not for devices of the future. What is considered "limited resources" changes daily and it doesn't matter how well your OS handles them if nobody bothers to write software for it.
> There is no future in software designed for limited CPU and low memory
Uh, what do you think the whole "embedded" thing is?
What happens is that things get cheap enough that they tend to find new uses.
For example, in the phone world, making more features available to the phones that billions of not so wealthy people in China, India and Africa might aspire to own.
> For example, in the phone world, making more features available to the phones that billions of not so wealthy people in China, India and Africa might aspire to own.
Except the software doesn't get any cheaper. The whole argument is that Symbian is hard to develop for because it's designed for hardware that frankly doesn't exist anymore. The software is more expensive. Android is cheaper for other manufacturers to use than Symbian is for Nokia.
That is simply not true. Nokia still churns out tons of phones that don't even run Symbian, but S40, which is another step down. And they sell like hotcakes, too, even if the profit margins aren't huge. And they'll continue to sell well for the immediate future.
Clearly, Nokia has lost its grip on "the future" and isn't very competitive with things like Android and the iPhone, but to deny that the biggest chunk of the cell phone market exists is a bit absurd.
Yes, they sell mobile phones -- devices that make calls with an address book. The biggest selling feature of these devices is that don't do anything else. However, A smartphone that doesn't do anything else isn't very smart. Where's the market for Symbian here?
The phones capable of running Symbian, but not so capable of running heavier systems like Android, will get cheaper, and thus be able to reach a broader market, or new niches.
OK I agree that on low-end phones probably symbian has perfected its place over the years. But probably they run a simplified version on low-end ones. The high-end version is non-intuitive.
Believing in the death of Symbian is very premature. It has been years where the series 30 platform has been on its deathbed, but it is still being developed actively, and there are still products being produced on it.
Now that Symbian is being pushed down in segmentation by Meego, it is getting closer to oblivion, but I'll have to see it before I believe it.
It used to be, but Nokia seem to have gotten the message. Nowadays you can pick between Qt, Python and HTML + JS among otheers. I use Qt: it still has kinks, but the difference in productivity from Symbian classic is enormous, and the Qt team is doing a good job adding features and squashing bugs.
What I don't get is why we need another Linux-based mobile OS. Why not just use Android?
People flocked to iOS because it was unique and innovative when it was new, and because it runs on great hardware from Apple. People are flocking to Android because it's an open-source alternative that's in some ways superior to iOS, and because it runs on a skyrocketing number of devices from countless manufacturers and on countless carriers.
For MeeGo to win serious developer-share, it will have to either come on hardware more compelling than Apple's, or outdo Android on technical capability / developer experience or overall market penetration. To my naive eye, neither of these seem likely. So what's the deal here? Am I mistaken about MeeGo's prospects, or is this just a massive case of not-invented-here?
(Lest I be accused of ignoring the overriding issue of user response to the two operating systems, I'm working under the assumption that MeeGo doesn't currently have anything significant to add to the user experience provided by Android on smartphones. Am I wrong about that?)
Android and Maemo/Meego doesn't really compare. Android has Linux kernel, but most of its userland is very specialized custom software. Maemo on the other hand is based on Debian and has all the usual stuff what you'd except from Linux system; bash, X, apt etc.
edit: Also, Maemo is much older than Android as a project/product.
just as a thought experiment: imagine android without fragmentation, over the wire updates for all platforms, on demand by users a-la-iPhone.
different developing environments cause developers to think, and develop, differently for the devices lined within those environments. MeeGo offers something Android does not, and that is not only a "truer" linux stack that is not based on java. But this also gives a flexibility for programmers to use languages that are more within their preferences (read: not java, maybe C, maybe scripting languages, what ever).
I think meego is something more developers are going to feel comfortable with as the gap between developing for traditional desktop/mobile devices and handheld devices will shrink. Can you pack an RPM? cuz that's all you need (as far as i understand) to distribute your app to meego.
I recently began developing for the N900. First I did the basic cannon Qt tutorial on PC. Installed the Maemo SDK and recompiled my code in the cross-compile environment (which is basically a chroot+qemu or something) and throwed the binary on my phone. Worked without a hitch. Same source code, with no special considerations for mobile devices, and it just works.
Of course creating packages is bit more involved, but current Maemo uses standard Debian packages, so its not really anything special.
Nokia wants control over the roadmap of its software platform. They certainly don't want to do anything that might risk them being put into a position of being a commodity hardware manufacturer.
You can argue how big of a risk that is if they adopted Android, but that's probably the thinking behind avoiding it. Personally I think it's a smart move for them, if they can execute well.
Even when Symbian was a consortium, they didn't want Symbian to do doing a lot of things (the UI team was one of the first to get the axe when a first round of cuts occurred). There would also be political battles about whether Symbian should be implementing other aspects of the platform.
Hopefully we will see great non-fragmented hardware combined with great and open OS/ecosystem. Both of which Apple and Google deliver only halfway through.
I'd say MeeGo is already compelling to developers purely as an experience, not so much as a great market for apps. With Qt/Python etc. that will be even more compelling.
From Nokia's point of view, it's OS wars all over again. They are branding themselves as a software/service company, which profits by selling hardware.
They announce the N900 and then soon after give a confusing message about MeeGo being the way forward and it not being supported officially on the N900. They deprecated the device almost immediately it became available. What commercial developer would try to produce applications for it now?
Now they announce the N8 with the amazing Symbian^3. Everything will be awesome about it according to press releases. Now, even before it becomes available Nokia announces it'll be the last N series device running Symbian. Another device deprecated just as it gets out the door.
Nokia, I used to like your devices. You made great phones. But please give them some future proofing and stop abandoning them the moment you release them.