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

Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)

Posted Feb 11, 2011 9:13 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
In reply to: Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters) by pboddie
Parent article: Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)

> 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.

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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.