Comment by theshrike79
2 years ago
The teams that did Maemo stuff etc. weren't allowed to ship any features before the Symbian side (which had more political and monetary power) had achieved feature parity...
2 years ago
The teams that did Maemo stuff etc. weren't allowed to ship any features before the Symbian side (which had more political and monetary power) had achieved feature parity...
I never understood this memo. All they had to do was to switch to MeeGo. There was no burning platform.
Hardware was great and software was great, but needed a bit more polish. MeeGo was more advanced than iOS in many ways at the time of this memo, and Maemo had been released way before the iPhone. The 770 was released in late 2005 and it was totally futuristic.
However, Elop had no interest in going this route. When MeeGo was released they dumped the project publicly shortly afterwards and then N9 was sold with no advertising. Despite this, it had a phenomenal demand.
> I never understood this memo
I totally understood it as soon as it was leaked. MicroSoft exec joined a phone company as a CEO back when MS was trying to convince manufacturers to adopt Windows Phone. Double bonus: they could kill and incipient Linux competitor in one stroke.
If you've read the Halloween Documents or docs from the Comes case, it's quite clear: classic "love them to death."
>MicroSoft exec joined a phone company as a CEO
One does not just "join" the biggest company in a foreign country as CEO. The board decided to hire him after evaluating all options.
The board's chairman was this guy who was CEO of Nokia for 14 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila
Why would he allow Elop to be hired unless he thought it was in the best interest of Nokia to align with Microsoft?
Not to mention the board could've fired Elop anytime if they thought he was prioritizing MS's interests over Nokia's.
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N9 was not "proper" MeeGo, internally it was still mostly Maemo Harmattan, followup to N900, though they had few canceled hardware projects between N9 and N900. MeeGo was suppposed to be co-developed with Intel, but it was never going to go anywhere, because neither Nokia or Intel had no idea what they were doing. Nokia wasn't built to be a software company and Intel has given up on x86 in phones.
Only reason why N9 ever was released is because they simply brutally cut down the scope of the project, e.g. dropping Qualcomm-based variant for US/CDMA markets (that one was repurposed to be their first Windows Phone).
I know, but despite being a weird hybrid between Maemo and MeeGo, it was really capable.
I used a N9 as my daily driver for 7 years. The card-based UI was incredibly elegant and easy to use with one hand. I prefer it to current iOS or Android. Besides, gestures blended really well with the curved screen edges. It had a great dark mode which also blended well with the AMOLED screen.
Offline GPS navigation was a pleasure to use, and unmatched till date. It had a terminal, which let me SSH anywhere to do quick jobs. I handled lots of tasks this way. For example, I used a remote Mutt instance running on my workstation to read email. The terminal was a real terminal running on the N9. For example, ifconfig could work on all network devices, including the mobile radio.
Messaging was highly integrated. Different services (e.g. XMPP, Skype, etc) were just addons. All contact management, chat and calls were performed from the same application irrespective of the protocol used to handle transport.
And lastly, it was an open device. You could install anything you wanted. It was truly Linux on your pocket.
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> Intel has given up on x86 in phones.
Intel gave up on x86 in phones right before Microsoft gave their Windows Mobile 10 Continuum demo, which was almost an eternity after the N9.
If N9 had been widely released and marketted and successful (it did well in small release, but who knows), that may have changed Intel's course. If Nokia hadn't abandoned it before release, it would have gotten application support; I joined WhatsApp around all this, and there were plans to support it as Symbian users were a large part of user base, so the next thing from Nokia was highly likely to be used, but not when Nokia drops it. Third party WA client development for the N9 was somewhat successful and became the start for a lot of other third party clients.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x057oh0x5p8
Blast from the past!
Similarly it seemed obvious early on, to me, that RIM should switch blackberry to Android with some customization aand port some apps over. They could still be a major player if they had done so. Instead they doubled down and buried their heads in the sand.
RIM was far smaller then Nokia. Nokia actually had resources and scale to make an Android/IOS competitor.
Maemo and MeeGo were sandbagged from the beginning because of Gnome and Gtk+, which were simply not fit for the job. IMHO what Nokia should have done was release Qtopia phones from day 1, as an alternative to Symbian, and prepare the migration from Symbian to Qtopia after that. But they did it in reverse: first Symbian, then Symbian to whatever will be new (Maemo, MeeGo, who cares: something new to be developed, so a disadvantage of years), etc. It was stupid.
N9 (and N950) were Qt-based, not Gtk.
7 replies →
Aah that's awful.
I remember when Maemo first arrived wanting one, and they never made it mainstream.
Let's compare the Nokia N900 (Nov 2009) to the Motorola Droid (Oct 2009).
They arrived at about the same time. They used the same CPU. They both had (approximately) 800x480 screens, which at the time was flagship class. They both used slide-out keyboards, removable batteries, a 5MP camera, 256MB of RAM, and some on-board storage plus a microSD slot. They weighed within 20g of each other.
The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative. Both had an official price of $600-650, but would actually be sold for $200-250 when bought with a 2 year carrier plan (that was the norm back then).
Maemo had a small developer community. Android had a medium-sized dev community. Android had marketing -- for about 2 years, people were calling all Android phones "Droids". Maemo had none.
> The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative.
N900 touchscreen was great. Not only was it perfectly readable in direct sunlight, it was also much more accurate than capacitive screens and not anywhere close to cheap resistive screens' clunkiness people usually imagine when hearing the term. The only issue I had with it was that they tend to develop issues after years of use, so my Nokia N900 does some very annoying ghosting these days.
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I had both at the time... the nokia was more capable. Android kept iterating and copying apple until it was pretty useful.
The N900 was as close to a pure Linux phone as you could get at the time.
People ran IRC clients directly on the console on it. A few friends of mine ran them as IRC hosts on their home network well into the 2010s - it was basically a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard and display =)
The N900 had 32 GB of storage, which was absurdly huge at the moment. That phone could have seen sold at $300-400 with 2-4 GB of storage, which was more than enough at the time. My first Android phone, in 2010, had 0.5 GB of storage.
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My company back then did some NDA'd research prototype work for Nokia about Linux and touchscreens. My personal conspiracy theory always was that they had tied the company so strongly to Symbian that they just couldn't announce anything else. I hypothesized that they only got some big companies on board Symbian by promising to be "exclusively Symbian for X years" -- and the X ended up being too long, the industry moved on before they could move off of Symbian. Or they were just too afraid of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
They had everything they needed to run Linux on (some of) their phones quite early on. Battery life might not have been great, but they had plenty of Linux-running mobile hardware around, kept in bags outside of the building.