Nokia is sooo f&cked
by Volker Weber
Andrew has some dirt about Symbian^3 and if only half of that is true, then Symbian is in big do-do. They have just been so busy handing out free 2GB USB sticks in Barcelona. They are probably counting all these new "developers" who quickly formatted the drive to make room for music and boobies.
And then there was MeeGo, or MeToo, where Nokia and Intel announced a bright future for Moblin and Maemo, by tying them together into yet another new platform that runs on everything from TV sets to mobile phones. Meanwhile a lot of proud N900 users are looking at their investments and scratching their heads. Will it run MeeGo? Lots of weasel words from Nokia, but will it really run? "Too early to tell." Looking at Nokia's track record with Maemo, that should read "no".
If you listen to Nokia keynotes, everything is nice and dandy. Ovi Store is a huge success, for instance. Only problem is that when I look in there, it only recommends crap. Nobody is talking about it. Yes, there are apps for iPhone, and some people have heard about "Google Phone". But Ovi Store?
HTC, Huawei, ZTE are getting big into the Android business. Sony Ericsson, Motorola, the old players are testing the waters as well.
Meanwhile in Finland, they are trying to compile.
Comments
Hasn't Nokia given up on Symbian anyway? Instead of just putting it end-of-life they open sourced it. Sounds much smarter.
I don't know if I got all the MWC coverage but I don't remeber anything interesting from Nokia, except maybe MeeGo. No phones or anything or did I miss something?
Nokia did not attend. They had a base in a hotel nearby with two heavily attended press conferences. One was used to announce MeeGo, the other one for Nokia Money. No devices.
Henning, Nokia has not given up on Symbian. Even in their Meego announcement that talked about the great future Symbian has. As usual, it was a mouthful.
Yes, it's sad. Meanwhile, Google isn't able to contribute back to upstream developers and now has to manage its kernel fork, with a software stack that is so spaghetti that embedded developers call it "a screwed, hard-coded, non-portable abomination" unless you cherrypick the target hardware.
Also, it will be interesting to see wether Google and its hardware partners will be able to maintain all those different versions of Android out there.
Symbian indeed seems to be f*cked and Maemo/Meego looks much nicer on paper than in reality, but now that Android has thrown so many balls up in the air, they will have to juggle them, too. They are heading firmly towards severe software management problems.
That's the usual and often (just for this fact) right reason why commercial companies fear going open source - 'cause then, everyone can see what (internally) low-quality software they sold for years for huge amounts...
@Hanno: you post reads as Harald says the whole platform (interesting for me as a Java developer) is bad.
But I don't see that. He even proposes to run Dalvik on a more "normal" Linux system with the known userspace tools.
If they do that for "no reason" can be doubted. Most probably they wanted people to concentrate on application development on Dalvik, and avoid other stuff (and therefore complexity) like c-coded Bainaries compiled for only a specific Hardware platform and such things.
By not enabling many different development environments, more developers work on the same thing, can use the same documentation, etc.
Apart from that this is just a quick idea that I came up with in just this instant, and I probably miss some detail, it sounds reasonable to me.
