Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters) [LWN.net]

Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)

Posted Feb 10, 2011 8:22 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
In reply to: Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters) by drag
Parent article: Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)

> They literally threw it all away to start over from scratch.
> Huge waste of time.

Yeah, Nokia seems to have a potentially fatal case of not-invented-here syndrome. It's the same illness that made the OLPC project such a disaster.

And in the few cases they did try to reuse things, they were always things that didn't quite make sense to reuse. Like what is QT doing on a cell phone? Don't get me wrong, QT is a great toolkit-- for developing desktop applications. But the wrong set of assumptions are baked in-- stuff like "the user will have a mouse." Meanwhile, it was deemed very important to write a brand new package manager rather than using dpkg or rpm, because obviously those latter two projects were totally insufficient for the needs of installing Nokia software.

Based on the memo, it sounds like they've more or less abandoned the Symbian platform to its fate. Now they're "burning" MeeGo too. Seems like a death spiral to me.

If the CEO of Nokia believes he can escape the incoming tide of commoditization by moving to Windows Phone 7, he's living in a dream world. Microsoft has its own cloud services that it wants to push, and a huge team of talent software engineers to push them with. Ironically, if they had gone with the BSD-licensed Android, Nokia would have been able to modify the OS and probably somehow force it to use Ovi rather than Gmail, Google Calendar, and so forth. If they are indeed moving to WinPhone 7, Ovi is already dead.

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Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)

Posted Feb 10, 2011 14:10 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, Nokia seems to have a potentially fatal case of not-invented-here syndrome. It's the same illness that made the OLPC project such a disaster.

One would argue that OLPC has been anything but a disaster in the larger scheme of things: the concept of the netbook became more pervasive, despite the best efforts of Microsoft to tax/suppress that kind of product (and of Apple to belittle the concept whilst offering something similar for ten times the price); the screen technology is a lot better than stuff that the LCD cartel is still forcing people to have. And I'd rather people tried out new interfaces than copy stuff like Vista, which is what KDE 4 seemed to be all about.

And in the few cases they did try to reuse things, they were always things that didn't quite make sense to reuse. Like what is QT doing on a cell phone? Don't get me wrong, QT is a great toolkit-- for developing desktop applications. But the wrong set of assumptions are baked in-- stuff like "the user will have a mouse."

I don't know what irrevocable assumptions Qt has, although I believe it had stuff like gesture support a while ago, but from my limited experience playing with PyQt every now and again, the biggest obstacle with Qt is how much stuff the libraries contain and how much pruning has to be done to get the footprint down to something that us "old timers" would feel comfortable putting on an embedded system.

There's also the argument that the various paradigms don't really translate to effective non-desktop interfaces. I played around a bit with the model-view stuff in order to mock up a small-screen interface (which was actually quite convenient given the Qt VNC backend, and as I noted elsewhere, convenient testing during development is crucial), and it got to the point where I'd need to develop a widget to convey the information I needed to, and as with many GUI toolkits, I started to feel that the amount of work required was about to increase significantly (and started to wish I was doing the thing in something ultra-simple like PyGame).

I agree with much of your assessment except...

Ironically, if they had gone with the BSD-licensed Android, Nokia would have been able to modify the OS and probably somehow force it to use Ovi rather than Gmail, Google Calendar, and so forth.

Android is GPL- and Apache 2.0-licensed, depending on which bits you're looking at. And modifying the OS is something they could do under either licence, although I imagine that what you mean is that they could modify things and keep it proprietary under the BSD or, in reality, Apache 2.0 licences.

Of course, if Nokia paid more than lip-service to openness, rather than saying "These bits are closed, do not ask why! Join us!" they'd have their developer ecosystem.

Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)

Posted Feb 11, 2011 9:13 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

> One would argue that OLPC has been anything but a disaster in the larger
> scheme of things: the concept of the netbook became more pervasive,
> despite the best efforts of Microsoft to tax/suppress that kind of product
> (and of Apple to belittle the concept whilst offering something similar
> for ten times the price); the screen technology is a lot better than stuff
> that the LCD cartel is still forcing people to have. And I'd rather people
> tried out new interfaces than copy stuff like Vista, which is what KDE 4
> seemed to be all about.

Around 2008 a lot of things started to converge: Intel released the Atom processor, which they had had in development for several years, Asus started to get interested in creating small laptops, and the term netbook started to gain credence. OLPC (which was arm-based if I remember correctly) probably led people to take the idea of small laptops more seriously, but it's kind of hard to prove cause and effect here.

Unfortunately, what netbooks turned out to be for most people is rather far from OLPC's original vision. Most people run Windows XP on their netbooks and use an x86-based chipset. "Windows in a small form factor" seems to be what netbooks are all about these days. The true innovation in interfaces is taking place in products like Andrdoid's Honeycomb and Apple's iPad.

> There's also the argument that the various paradigms don't really
> translate to effective non-desktop interfaces. I played around a bit with
> the model-view stuff in order to mock up a small-screen interface (which
> was actually quite convenient given the Qt VNC backend, and as I noted
> elsewhere, convenient testing during development is crucial), and it got
> to the point where I'd need to develop a widget to convey the information
> I needed to, and as with many GUI toolkits, I started to feel that the
> amount of work required was about to increase significantly (and started
> to wish I was doing the thing in something ultra-simple like PyGame).

Well, Android also requires you to do a fair amount of up-front work to get things running smoothly and well-integrated with the rest of the system. Proper GUI design is harder than most people think.

The key insight is really that the touch interface changes the game. Nokia really should have known this already. The whole reason why they ever had a viable platform, as opposed to being yet another Windows OEM, was because the interface requirements for a cell phone were so different from those of a desktop computer.

> Android is GPL- and Apache 2.0-licensed, depending on which bits
> you're looking at.

Thanks, you're right. Still, as you also noted, the practical effect seems of BSD vs. Apache 2.0 seems negligible in this case.

Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)

Posted Feb 11, 2011 12:28 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Around 2008 a lot of things started to converge: Intel released the Atom processor, which they had had in development for several years, Asus started to get interested in creating small laptops, and the term netbook started to gain credence. OLPC (which was arm-based if I remember correctly) probably led people to take the idea of small laptops more seriously, but it's kind of hard to prove cause and effect here.

The OLPC uses an AMD Geode CPU which one might argue isn't really as great a choice as ARM for, say, power efficiency, but then the screen is usually a bigger concern in a laptop, hence the interest in a non-backlit viewing mode for the screen (as well as the benefits of the back-reflective screen in bright sunlight).

Most people run Windows XP on their netbooks and use an x86-based chipset.

Most people don't really get a choice about that, however. Indeed, there are various devices out there which would once have been called "subnotebooks" using MIPS processors, such as those made by Lemote and other Taiwanese/Chinese vendors, not to mention stuff from the likes of Sharp which is only available in Japan, but these are kept conveniently outside the mainstream.