

Maemo vs. Android - shmichael
http://discuss.gdgt.com/nokia/n900/general/Maemo-vs-Android-what-makes-Maemo-a-winner-/

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bjelkeman-again
To me the arguments made in the article sounds like _"Maemo is more like
_real_ Linux than Android, and therefore it will win"_.

I don't see much support for that in the marketplace for consumer and non-IT
department mandated products. The overall user experience is way more
important than anything else, even backwards compatibility, i.e. compare
Windows Mobile with iPhone.

The competitor who will really square it off with the iPhone in the future
will have to be really good at the integrated user experience IMHO.

I talked to some Maemo marketing guys at FOSS.in in Bangalore the other day
and their key message was that "You can run multiple applications at the same
time. You don't have to shut down one application to be able to run another,
like on an iPhone."

But the handset they were showing (they called it a handheld computer, not a
smartphone) was clumsy and unattractive. They were not even showing them
turned on, so I couldn't really judge the user experience, but if you don't
want to show it I don't believe it is a strong selling point.

The Android team seems to concentrate more on the user experience, something
which I haven't seen the Nokia teams really do yet, so I think Android is
better placed, for now.

~~~
davidw
That about sums it up. I love Linux, but Android works for me: it's open
source, which is what I care about. I don't really need to try and run 'the
gimp' on my phone.

Also, Nokia just seems a bit confused. Maemo? Symbian? Open source? Yes? No?
Besides the iPhone, Android seems to be the only thing out there with a fairly
clear "mandate" and direction.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Gtk? Qt?

~~~
davidw
I have yet to see them make the case that running stuff from my Linux desktop
(which I _am_ quite happy with, thanks) on my phone is going to work very
well. My feeling is that it won't, and so having Gtk and Qt just won't buy
them much.

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dagw
The poster seems to be confused about what he is trying to argue. Is he
talking about technical merits or which will sell more? Even as a fan of Maemo
there is no doubt in my mind that there will always be more Android phones on
the market than Maemo phones. Also if you're intention is to sell apps and
make money you're best bet of the two is Android.

If writing phone apps was my day job I'd easily choose Android over maemo any
day of the week. As a geek programming simply for my own enjoyment the Maemo
platform is far more enticing, if for no other reason than the fact that I get
to use tools like Qt4, C, python, and all the libraries available for Linux.
The idea of having basically a slightly stripped down Debian on my phone is
just really cool. Plus the new Maemo 5 seems to finally be a truly usable
environment running on some nice hardware.

~~~
shmichael
The prospects of the marketing success are closely tied to technical aspects.
Any OS you go with, great as it is right now, would require upkeep. This
upkeep is directly related to success of devices carrying the OS.

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b-man
My take on it:

The multitude of useful apps that are already on the market and can be easily
ported for maemo makes it a _very_ strong player.

I know I'm not mainstream market, not even close, but KeePassX, Vim, Mplayer,
VLC, Xmms, Abiword. Those are valuable open source projects that are already
there for the maemo.

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bluebird
Maemo 5 seems great. Nokia though really seems to lack a coherent strategy and
should have taken Maemo-based phones to market much earlier.

