
Nokia was developing an Android phone before the Microsoft purchase - rukshn
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/14/nokia-was-developing-an-android-phone-before-the-microsoft-purchase/
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zrgiu_
Nokia was experimenting with Android, as any serious business would. You have
to explore every option, so that if upper management decides to go that way,
they are ready. It's completely normal. Hell, they'll probably continue
experimenting, even if it's just to see how Android compares to Windows on the
same hardware in terms of speed.

~~~
huherto
It may have even help leverage their negotiations with Microsoft.

~~~
kcorbitt
That was my immediate thought. Even if they weren't planning on switching to
Android in the short term Nokia could have made Microsoft's decision to buy a
lot easier by hinting at the possibility.

~~~
joe_the_user
It seems like Microsoft's decision to buy Nokia was pretty easy. If Nokia
happened to experience a lot of success with Windows Phone, they'd have even
more money to hedge their bets and not be dependent on MS. But if Nokia kept
slipping and actually went under, MS would lose it's major Windows Phone
hardware partner.

I mean, ever since Elop became CEO, the talk was "Microsoft just bought Nokia
... for nothing".

So what I'd be curious about, after all the lies and betrayals (QT, argh...
grrr), did Nokia actually get any "real money" for jumping onto the failing MS
Phone ship (edit: given the threat of an Android double-double cross or
whatever)?

------
revelation
They weren't developing it, a bunch of random engineers ported it to the
hardware they had. Like MacOS on x86 Intel.

~~~
300bps
I read the blog post and every blog post the blog posts pointed to. You seem
to be right - some engineers ported Android to Lumia hardware. As the blog
posts stated, there are surely Microsoft employees playing around with iOS 7
and Google employees playing around with Windows Phone.

This post seems more a symptom of professional bloggers needing to fill story
quotas rather than being actual news.

~~~
JimmaDaRustla
I hate journalism so much for these types of reasons, one of my biggest pet
peeves is journalism attempting to trigger an emotion or response rather than
reporting the story.

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potyl
I wonder why anyone would be surprised of this. Nokia builds phones and has an
R&D. It just make sense that they try different OS on their own hardware as
long as they have the source and can deal with the proprietary drivers needed.

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alphakappa
Can we let go of this post-mortem analysis of the world-that-could-have-been
already? It's like the reports you get after someone dies "Oh, he was so
happy... he was working on a new album!"

Nokia could've done many things, but it's hard to argue that them making an
Android phone would have saved either Nokia, or improved the Android
ecosystem. Nokia's failings go much deeper than the choice to go with Windows,
(or the failure to go Android). And had they gone Android, they would've been
yet another hardware vendor trying to differentiate themselves in a crowded
Android field. HTC, Samsung, and Motorola are also capable of making good
hardware, but unless there was some secret sauce about Nokia that would've
solved all the existing shortcomings in that ecosystem, it's pointless to
lovingly sigh and talk about what might've happened.

~~~
shubb
Looking at the last generation of non-windows Nokia phones reveals how 'bad'
Android is as a phone OS.

Nokia's Asha range could go a month between charging. They had support for
apps, and for instance had a spotify client. They were oriented towards open
standards like email, rather than closed vendor lockin solutions like gmail.
An android phone without using google service is half what it could be.

Clearly, Android gives a superior user experience, but I think by providing
developers with an easy, PC like programming experience, Android made a design
decision that will mean it has a fraction the battery life of an OS that makes
Aps behave.

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zokier
There probably wasn't a thing on earth Nokia _wasn 't_ developing before MS
got involved.

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ARothfusz
And, of course, there's nothing to stop Microsoft from releasing an Android
phone.

~~~
tzs
Suppose that rather than making an Android phone, Microsoft were to release a
Windows phone with an Android compatibility layer.

The idea would be to lower the barrier for current Android users to trying a
Windows phone for their next phone, because they could keep their Android
apps.

~~~
yareally
A Java VM for .net already exists[1] (Scala for .net leverages it). Obviously
the presentation layer would need rewritten for the platform and also for
XAML, but an Android app and Windows Phone 8 app can share much of their base
code if done correctly. Storage mechanisms like SQLite can also run on either
device.

[1] [http://www.ikvm.net/](http://www.ikvm.net/)

~~~
jamesgeck0
Xamian also ported Android to C# a year ago. [http://blog.xamarin.com/android-
in-c-sharp/](http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/)

~~~
yareally
Yup, I actually have a license for it and currently using it with MonoGame.
It's also quite nice for native development as well with how they tweak the
APIs to be more C# like instead of Java (plus async/await).

I didn't recommend it since it isn't free, but it's well worth the money if
doing cross-platform apps (they also give students a reasonable discount). If
initial cost is a concern, Scala would be my alternative choice.

~~~
jamesgeck0
I wasn't referencing Mono for Android, although that is a neat product.

About a year ago, Xamarin did a direct port of the entire Android operating
system to C# as a research project to improve their automated tooling. It's
called
[XobotOS]([https://github.com/xamarin/XobotOS](https://github.com/xamarin/XobotOS)).
It's open source, unmaintained, and entirely unsupported.

~~~
yareally
I remember XobotOS. I was kind of excited about it, but then nothing happened
with it after they made a press announcement. I had some questions about it
when they still had comments posted on their blog. They decided to remove the
comments shortly after without answering any of them, not sure why. Can't
remember what my questions were now, but I think something related to building
it.

I was hoping to mess around with it and make some sort of compatibility layer
for dalvik based apps to run on it and everything else to use C# that I or
anyone else might do (I mod AOSP and such in my spare time).

Too bad it Xamarin has not done anything with it since the announcement, as
dalvik is the bane of performance on Android.

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dep_b
To me it doesn't seem to be extremely hard to get a Android build running on a
handset that uses off the shelf hardware for most parts. Especially not if
you're a specialist on smartphones.

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bsullivan01
Duh! Their loyalties are (or were) to their shareholders, not to Microsoft.

But I wonder if the pulled a Motorola ("we'll sue other Android phone
makers...oh, you want to buy us Google? Hmmm...let's see")

~~~
guerrilla
I think we need more comics of companies as characters. I read your comment in
stick figures :)

