I've had Maemo in my pocket nearly four years now--first the 770, then the N810. I love my N810. The browser's only so-so, but the xterm is fantastic. I can do development on it, running gcc, python, python3, clisp, guile, hugs, mosml, emacs, and I forget what else. git and svn, of course.
When I got a new phone a year ago, I considered the N900, but held back because its 3G was only for T-Mobile. (Yes, I actually travel in areas where T-Mobile doesn't have 3G. I spend one week a year in a spot where they don't even have GSM coverage.) But I figured I'd get its successor in 2012 or so.
Then Nokia and Intel announced MeeGo. I still haven't seen a good explanation for this--merge two OSes, only one of which has shipping products, instead of dumping the one that doesn't? Cue sinking feeling.
Nowadays I don't think I'll ever run MeeGo. Even when I get an Android phone, I'll have to carry my N810 until it dies. When it does, I'll have to try building a decent dev environment on Android. People have xterm running on it, but it doesn't have most of the tools that make Unix useful.
Just being curious, are you comfortable doing serious coding on a machine with such a little keyboard? I can't even imagine using Emacs efficiently on a device like that. Don't you think a small netbook would increase your comfort and productivity without a considerable loss of portability?
>Just being curious, are you comfortable doing serious coding on a machine with such a little keyboard?
It's certainly slower than with a larger screen. The keyboard doesn't actually slow me down much. Hacking with one of the crappy 3-row keyboards common on phones (e.g., the N900, mrphl) would be a lot worse; but the N810 has most of the symbols I need right on the keys. For the others ({}, [], |), the xterm has a customizable palette; I just tap the right button on the screen.
>I can't even imagine using Emacs efficiently on a device like that.
Shrug. It's emacs. I've been using it for 20 years now; the control keys are burned into my brain. The main impediment is the screen size; I can't see much of my code at once.
>Don't you think a small netbook would increase your comfort and productivity without a considerable loss of portability?
No. With the N810, I can hack while walking down the street. Can't do that with a netbook.
I am impressed that you can hack while walking down the street! When I'm coding my wife has to call my name 3 or 4 times before I notice she is speaking to me. I would be doomed on a busy street.
I believe you mean "Maemo 6", i.e. what Harmattan would have been if there was no MeeGo.
Latest MeeGo release is 1.1 for handsets, netbooks and in-vehicle infotainment systems, each with their own "user experience" layer on top. The handset UX in 1.1 is for developers to have a peek on the new direction. 1.2 is coming up in a couple of months.
MeeGo distribution will be RPM based; that is inherited from Moblin. That shouldn't change anything substantial. The kernel and other guts are still all true Linux goodness.
As an N900 user who has never had an N810, I love it! The keyboard is fine for hacking and the screen is pretty high resolution. The CPU is fast and it has lots of memory. The JDK works great on it too :)
Their biggest concern has to be their share price. In December 2008 it peaked around $40. It's now around $9. If it keeps falling like that people will start talking about takeovers and/or private equity buyouts.
"You will have a browsing capable machine in your car, kitchen, living room, pocket and probably bathroom. For optimal convenience, each of these devices needs to communicate."
iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch.
"Doug played us a charming little video that showed cartoon MeeGo-people pausing movies on their televisions, stepping out into the car and playing the movie immediately from its last pause."
Netflix streaming, more or less. Wii, XBox, PS3, iOS, Windows, Mac, some Blue Ray players, I think. All of which know what's in your queue and even where you left off watching on your other device.
The future happened while this guy wasn't looking.
Well, that's a downer. I had such high hopes for Maemo/MeeGo. It just wasn't meant to be.
I do love my N900. Coincidentally, I just started getting into app development the past few weeks. No SDK for Windows or OSX? Seriously? The SDK only works on specific versions of Ubuntu? Really? It all makes sense now why the platform has been a failure.
It's early days... it's a bit early to say that it's a failure, Maemo was never really pushed and Meego is not finished. Of course this is an ominous start. The SDK will come to Windows, thats pretty much a given, KDE works in Windows.
If it doesn't, then virtual machines are not too painful, this has a chance of working after all the stack is pretty much the standard Linux stack.
This one should be the easiest for developers, your not stuck with a language or framework that is foreign, getting started should be easy.
As it is now, we haven't even got any phones running it, so of course it doesn't all work and hasn't been polished yet. Whether Nokia can survive long enough to see it through, we'll have to wait and see, I hope so.
I really don't trust Nokia. They have a systemic internal culture that thrusts engineering into the lowest possible role. The number of engineers within Nokia who would fail at the FizzBuzz problem is staggering, often in key roles. The problem is that upper management doesn't understand why that's a problem.
Their hoping that Open Source will save them from themselves I suppose, but that rarely works. As long as Nokia is largely fronting this project, I don't have a lot of faith in it's long-term viability.
I concur. I once spent a couple of days in Tampere "attempting" to fix a couple of serious bugs between our app and the telephony layer on a S60 device. Never once did Nokia pair us up with a hard core device engineer - I honestly don't know if they exist. I can tell you all about the fluffy product manager types and the great times we had eating Reindeer!
There was a pretty good discussion of the alternatives available to Nokia on ESR's blog yesterday - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2772 - all the real alternatives: Windows Phone 7, MeeGo, and Android were discussed.
How does one get an invite to an event like that? Are they common? All I ever heard of are the 'MS Tech Days' for which you have to pony several thousands and you don't even get cool stuff, afaik.
I'm not so sure. I tried to get a free Android device to see if Android is an interesting platform to develop for, but couldn't find anyone that could get one for me (and I'm not ready to sign a 2-year contract just for an experiment :)).
Seems a reasonable strategy to me if you have plenty of money but are short on time. Probably the largest barrier to having university students play with the platform is the cost of the hardware.
P.S. "At one point, after a long explanation that failed to answer the question of why MeeGo didn't yet have a framework for developers to sell their apps, a developer from Norway shouted out: "We don't care about openness, we need to be able to make a living.""
Well an app store isn't a framework either :)
The author's sentence then doesn't make sense. Either-ways, my point was MeeGo has a great platform for developing applications, Qt is great, and QtCreator is an excellent IDE.
Using Android would put them in direct competition with (very) low-margin Chinese manufacturers. This is what Apple got right: if you have your own operating system and ecosystem nailed down correctly, people do not mind paying larger margins, and you are in a different game.
I guess this is what Nokia is aiming for with Meego. But, despite the excellent work of the Qt trolls, it doesn't really seem to get off the ground...
I think Nokia is already capable of producing phones cheaply, in good quality. For all I know, they even might have some factories in China already.
As an Android fan, I can only say: all I want is a really good Android device. Some are good enough (Nexus One), but there is still room for improvement. And Nokia probably would be able to pull it off. It is very unlikely that they'll go that route, unfortunately.
Yeah, but it worked for Apple only because they were first (more or less). Nokia can't go that way. Their only hope is to adopt a successful OS and produce top-notch phones.
Nokia has always produced top notch phones. Their only problem is that it looks like they couldn't write decent software for phones if their life depended on it (randomly shuffling browser bookmarks every time I open the IMAP-client? Come /on/...)
Right, that's my point--I've been using Nokias since 2001. If they built an Android phone, its phone bits could be dramatically more usable than stock Android.
The number of cellphones that are actually running Android, iOS, Blackberry, WP7, etc. compared to the total number cellphones is very small. Nokia has a lot of room to get market share for a competing OS.
Also, if the average user of the above OSes does not download a lot of apps for that platform, the stickiness of the platform is reduced and Nokia could benefit if it could come up with a coherent OS / developer strategy.
There is almost nothing to get off the ground yet… Running meego on some cheap netbook is meaningless, I can put anything there and I'm going to use it in the same way, I want some tablet or smartphone form device.
I'm not sure there is enough room in the high end market for anyone other than Apple. I don't think the new tablet market is going to be nearly as tolerant of fragmentation as the phone market.
Using Android would put them in direct competition with (very) low-margin Chinese manufacturers.
This is the "Android is the race for the bottom" argument. It is perplexing how it keeps getting a free pass on here.
Nonetheless, for the sake of argument let's go with the notion that Android really is the domain of "(very) low-margin Chinese manufacturers" (ignore that the top selling devices are high-end devices like the Droid X, Galaxy S, Desire Z, etc), would having their own OS really defend Nokia from competing with them?
Of course it wouldn't. Android isn't taking marketshare from Android -- it's taking it from every other maker. You can't stick your head in the sand and pretend that somehow that helps your margins. Consumers generally consider every other option available out there.
This is what Apple got right: if you have your own operating system and ecosystem nailed down correctly, people do not mind paying larger margins, and you are in a different game.
It's interesting to consider that in the PC space Apple used to control their own hardware, even developing their own chips. It was a disaster. Now they use commodity hardware with a glossy shine, and it has dramatically helped their bottom line: They differentiate on top of the common, and that is their secret to success. This is almost entirely the case with the iPhone as well, where the processor is made by Samsung, the wireless chipset by broadcom, the screen by various manufacturers, etc.
The whole "the iPhone model proves the case" analysis is a profound example of a confirmation bias. You can't throw a corpse without finding a dozen counter-examples where such a "go your own way" model was an absolute, unabated disaster (including about 90% of Apple's existence), yet somehow that conclusion keeps getting restated like it's a scientific fact. It's absurdity.
No, it's not. There are always counterexamples, but in your argument you completely ignore margins in the PC and laptop market. The vast majority of laptop and PCs are sold at low margins. Since most manufacturers cannot compete one software, they compete on price. One of the few vendors that makes large margins has its own operating system. Of course, Macs are nice hardware-wise, but most people will switch 'because it is not Windows'.
This doesn't mean that every company differentiating on software-succeeds.
ignore that the top selling devices are high-end devices like the Droid X, Galaxy S, Desire Z, etc
The smartphone market is relatively small and new, as is Android. The race to the bottom has just started.
The cell phone market, in the US at least, is very different than the PC market. Since phone carriers subsidize the manufacturers, we've actually seen margins remain relatively high.
We certainly haven't seen a race to the bottom. To be clearer, the subsidy model changes the equation. The reason for getting you on a new phone is to get you to reup a $2000 contract. If you have a phone that drives this (iPhone) then the cost of the phone is worth it to the carriers. If the phone doesn't do that (Kin) then it doesn't matter if the phone is free.
Until the US market sells unlocked phones directly to consumers (as the dominant way to distribute phones to consumers) there will not be a race to the bottom.
UPDATE: And one other thing. Since the carriers largely lock down their networks, you can't just buy a generic smartphone from cheapphones.com and have it work (at least not on the 3G/4G networks). So we also have the added factor of very limited shelfspace. Whereas in the PC market, there are tons of PC makers and DIY.
Realistically, the carriers probably won't have more than 10-15 smartphones available at any one time to purchase (testing costs money), and have good relationship with a handful of phone manufacturers -- all of which work to avoid a race to the bottom.
> "Since the carriers largely lock down their networks, you can't just buy a generic smartphone from cheapphones.com and have it work (at least not on the 3G/4G networks"
I believe that's a temporary situation with a clear end in sight. LTE is rolling out with a unified SIM standard, right? 4G should finally bring the US a market where you can consider phone and carrier separately.
>Since the carriers largely lock down their networks, you can't just buy a generic smartphone from cheapphones.com and have it work (at least not on the 3G/4G networks).
Not true of the GSM carriers, at least. I have a Nokia N86 which I bought unlocked from Amazon; it works fine on AT&T's 3G. And the Nokia N900 was sold only unlocked, and works on T-Mobile's 3G.
That's good to hear. I'd figure that TMo would be early on this. Surprised to hear about ATT. I know in the past I've tried and was stuck with EDGE. Almost certainly not the case with CDMA.
You say race to the bottom, I say fierce competition in a free(-ish) market i.e. the basic driver of capitalist progress. At least we agree that it's only just started.
Yes, true. 'Race to the bottom' may be a bit too negative. I guess one downside is that it is tough for new players in the market, since selling in large quantities is required.
On the other, thanks to competition, Acer Laptops are now available at a little over 300 Euros. The free market made computers accessible to nearly everyone in the Western world (and hopefully everywhere in the future).
Actually, one of the impacts of Android (and Linux generally) is to reduce the barriers of entry and allow new players to produce relatively small runs.
I'm not really interested in some Chinese conglomerate I've never heard of's idea of of a touch based tablet or phone OS. But I'll happily buy some oddball phone or tablet running Android. In fact I just did buy a ZTE Blade, and think it's pretty stunning for the price. I'm also considering a 7" Android tablet from a range of unlikely sources including Archos and the Dixons group.
No, it's not. There are always counterexamples, but in your argument you completely ignore margins in the PC and laptop market.
Just to digress for a minute, a related memes that I keep reading is "Apple is comfortable in their very profitable niche".
Through most of Apple's history, their niche was remarkably unprofitable. In 2001 Apple lost $52 million dollars, while Dell made $3.19 billion. How does that play into your theory? In 1997 Apple lost $1.08 billion dollars, while Dell made $747 million.
I could find counter-example after counter-example.
The smartphone market is relatively small and new, as is Android. The race to the bottom has just started.
Competitiveness is indeed just kicking off in earnest. No company is immune to it, and pointing to Apple's tremendous success at leveraging iTunes and their iPod franchise into a lucrative smartphone initiative in no way can be applied to anyone else. Again, there are endless counter-examples (how's Amiga doing these days? Atari? The ST was a pretty great machine, so they must be storming the margins), yet you demonstrated a perfect and remarkably myopic confirmation bias to demonstrate a competitive lesson.
Through most of Apple's history, their niche was remarkably unprofitable.
Yes. And it is common knowledge that Apple was notably mismanaged company during the nineties.
Explain Apple's popularity, taking OS X and iOS completely out of the equation.
Now think why Jobs refuses to set up licensing contracts with other vendors. Those iMacs and iPhones don't look so interesting anymore if you can get a HP computer/phone with OS X/iOS two third of the price, one and a half times the performance. I am pretty sure the majority of the Mac users that I know would've bought HP.
Explain Apple's popularity, taking OS X and iOS completely out of the equation.
Steve Jobs and his quest for perfection.
Now think why Jobs refuses to set up licensing contracts with other vendors. Those iMacs and iPhones don't look so interesting anymore if you can get a HP computer/phone with OS X/iOS two third of the price, one and a half times the performance. I am pretty sure the majority of the Mac users that I know would've bought HP.
Apple can easily compete on price with anyone nowdays. They choose not to in (low to mid range) computing, but the iPod/iPhone/iPad are ultra-competitive price-wise with anyone out there.
The real reason is because Jobs believes controlling the entire experience (both the hardware and the software) gives the best experience for the user. He may well be right, so long as he is in charge of the experience (cite: any other company that tried the same strategy).
Steve Jobs is a genius, but he's also 55. He's a once-in-a-generation leader, and Apple is lucky to have him.
>I am pretty sure the majority of the Mac users that I know would've bought HP.
Its funny you say that. Apple Cinema displays used to be the exact same LCD display as HP displays, except they had a FireWire and USB hub built into them. They also cost $400 more.
Even if Apple licensed to clone vendors again, it's unlikely HP would produce third third the price and one and a half times the performance. Apple's Pro lines remain competitive with the market.
Apple also led the way in doing things like putting accelerometers in laptops and swivel/tilt controls, Etc. HP could have done that with their hardware on the windows side (and written/loaded drivers for the hw) but choose instead to sell a bland box. Perhaps this is why Apple's hardware offerings continue to look interesting in light of cheaper alternatives.
When I got a new phone a year ago, I considered the N900, but held back because its 3G was only for T-Mobile. (Yes, I actually travel in areas where T-Mobile doesn't have 3G. I spend one week a year in a spot where they don't even have GSM coverage.) But I figured I'd get its successor in 2012 or so.
Then Nokia and Intel announced MeeGo. I still haven't seen a good explanation for this--merge two OSes, only one of which has shipping products, instead of dumping the one that doesn't? Cue sinking feeling.
Nowadays I don't think I'll ever run MeeGo. Even when I get an Android phone, I'll have to carry my N810 until it dies. When it does, I'll have to try building a decent dev environment on Android. People have xterm running on it, but it doesn't have most of the tools that make Unix useful.
Sigh.