Nokia Preps Linux OS For Low-End Smartphones 199
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by
Soulskill
from the eggs-in-different-baskets dept.
from the eggs-in-different-baskets dept.
itwbennett writes "Nokia is going after the low-end smartphone market with a Linux-based OS code-named 'Meltemi.' The phones are expected to cost under $100 without subsidies. A Nokia spokesman's no-comment comment went like this: 'Of course, we don't comment on future products or technologies. However, I can say that our Mobile Phones team has a number of exciting projects in the works that will help connect the next billion consumers to the Internet.'"
Now there's a threesome /. doesn't see every day (Score:2, Interesting)
Now what's great about this is the fact that with Nokia's history they have proven to put out quality hardware. They can also really use this to fight against both iPhone and what's worrisome for some, Android. Android has lots of fragmentation and patent related problem
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Sony Ericsson is known to put out quality hardware, Nokia is known for just putting out.
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Ridiculous. Nokia makes the best hardware out there. Their problem is being horribly late with software, due to terrible management.
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Ridiculous. Nokia makes the best hardware out there. Their problem is being horribly late with software, due to terrible management.
This gives them an excuse to implement my conspiracy theory:
- Nokia will have MS doing the work of "customizing" Linux for the phones. MS will brand it in a way that it both cashes in on the Linux name, and also tries to sound like "It's our own work that makes it good."
- MS will keep building up ways to make money off Linux. They'll spin two ways; they'll claim that their work exploiting^H^H^H^H extending Linux legitimizes their right to claim license fees for the rest of it, and they'll slowly solidify th
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Having worked at Microsoft, there's no way I think this will happen in the next few years.
Microsoft has a very strong culture of "not invented here", and is completely paranoid about open source contaminating their products. Any involvement with open source (and in particular, GPL software) requires a monstrous amount of paperwork and negotiation, and will be shot down in nearly all cases. Since Microsoft already has their phone OS, they will not use Linux.
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- MS will keep building up ways to make money off Linux. They'll spin two ways; they'll claim that their work exploiting^H^H^H^H extending Linux legitimizes their right to claim license fees for the rest of it, and they'll slowly solidify their position of "ownership" due to some bullshit patents they have.
So wait, Red Hat, Canonical, Google and other companies are all warmly welcome to contribute and make improvements, but when it's Microsoft we should go "noo, we don't play with guys like that. go away."
They're all profiting (or as you say, exploiting) Linux just the way you describe.
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Very true about others "exploiting" Linux, except for a major difference: They all play by the Open Source License rules. You make a change to FOSS code, AND RE-RELEASE THE PROGRAM, you must provide the source code when requested. That requirement totally negates MS's number one, and historically proven, business strategy: embrace, extend, extinguish. If they embrace and extend, they have to let it out into the wild. They can't extinguish it. That's why they have always treated FOSS like the Gods Damned Pla
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They all play by the Open Source License rules. You make a change to FOSS code, AND RE-RELEASE THE PROGRAM, you must provide the source code when requested.
When have Microsoft not adhered to the license terms for releasing the source code?
That's why they have always treated FOSS like the Gods Damned Plague.
Yes, there is no doubt that they have done scare tactics against FOSS, but then they have also done things like create http://www.codeplex.com/ [codeplex.com] to host open source projects (which they contribute a great many themselves).
I would love to have MS come play with Linux. As long as they follow the rules and play in good faith.
And yet Microsoft do contribute to Linux [osnews.com]. I imagine a lot of those changes were to fix interoperability with their products, but it still does show that they do contribute and play by the rules.
Re:Now there's a threesome /. doesn't see every da (Score:4, Informative)
Android is not FOSS. Android is a proprietary project that Google selectively makes open source.
Only the kernel is FOSS in Android, and I'll be the first to suggest that Google basically mooches off the efforts of the kernel community. But they DO act according to the statement you highlighted for the kernel, even if unhelpfully.
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Personally I think the patent system needs to be overhauled, SW patents should be invalidated. There are several enthusiasts trying to fight for this in Europe, but guess what: Neither Samsung, nor HTC, Google or whatever company supports them! They all want SW patents to stay valid the way they are. Therefore it is extremely simpleminded to call it extortion when they are paying due to the laws they appreciate that much themselves.
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You honestly believe that the patents they leverage to extort fees out of companies were the result of intensive, high cost R&D? I'd be surprised if they weren't scratched out in short order by lawyers told to pour through concepts and turn anything they could into a patent, regardless of merit.
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Bad argument (Score:2)
Your argument, as far as I can see it, is that great effort deserves reward. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work that way.
When MS actually publicizes the patents involved (which they haven't), I will stop relating to their behavior as extortion, and gladly review the patents to see if I believe they are actually valid (and in parallel, whether they are worthwhile --- one judgement being a legal one, and the second a moral one).
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So what? Can you prove that one cent went on the stuff they claim is in Android, Linux or anything else? No, and neither can they.
P.S. Referring to companies by their stock tickers makes you sound like a pretentious jerkwad.
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Explain the N97 then.
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I don't what your experience might be to say such a thing but in my case, I've found that Nokia phones extremely reliable in terms of durability. Enduring all kinds of hardships without much more than a scratch. I'm talking about falling on the pavement at 30 Km/h and uncountable 1/1.5 mts falls in different surfaces.
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Sony Ericsson is known to put out quality hardware, Nokia is known for just putting out.
SE makes good hardware? Since when? I've had 3 SE phones and they all sucked on the hardware level (software as well -- eg. worst T9 ever).
I'd go so far saying that any hardware related to post-1990 Sony sucks.
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Mine, a basic Nokia 3100, is only 6 years old, but still working fine with the original battery.
And it is well supported by free software such as Gammu [wammu.eu].
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They've made a really good choice of a partner, then.
I'd love to see the ribbon interface of a phone. I guess they could market it to old folks, as it's be able to double as a walking stick.
Re:Now there's a threesome /. doesn't see every da (Score:5, Interesting)
Their MeeGo/QT work, now orphaned, was largely aimed at higher end smartphones, the same ones that are now going to be WP7 devices. None of the linux-with-custom-stuff-on-top phone OSes(MeeGo, Android, WebOS) work particularly well on sub-smartphone hardware. They are powerful, have some nice features, and don't suffer from some of the horrid, idiosyncratic development environments of the old dumbphone and featurephone OSes; but they don't actually scale down very far before you are looking at some seriously dire performance, RAM so limited that multitasking is largely a theoretical benefit, and a screen so lousy that your decent browser is nearly useless for anything that isn't a deeply spartan 'mobile' website that a 1997 WAP phone could have rendered....
That's what I don't understand: Linux-based systems definitely have their points on more powerful hardware, and Nokia has access to one of their own(in addition to doing an adroid hostile-fork, as Amazon did); but they aren't so hot on weaker hardware(Exercise: grab a copy of the debian m68k port and replicate the features of, say, a Palm III, in 2MB of ROM, 2MB of RAM, and a 16MHz processor....). Nokia also has a number of eccentric and crufty; but eminently suited to very-low-spec phones OSes available. Why would they possibly be spinning Yet Another Linux WIth Something Weird On Top Of It OS?
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Re:Now there's a threesome /. doesn't see every da (Score:4, Informative)
Cheap low end hardware has changed since the Palm III
They are probably thinking about an 600-800MHz ARM9/11 cpu with 128-256MB of RAM, with a GPU that can still draw 30 million triangles per second and play 1080p videos (like say the 25$ raspberry pi coming out this november). Also Nokia is moving upcoming Qt 5 rendering to run almost entirely on OpenGL (ES). This will probably make the UI on such devices (GPU with a cpu tacked on) smoother than on a high end Android 2.x phone.
Then again, they could just as well do this on existing Symbian devices.
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Within a few months, Cortex-A8 based processors are going to be low end.
It is cheaper to utilize components that are getting outside development than ones requiring you do all the work internally. That's why they merged Maemo into MeeGo (long term planning, really) and why they seem to be transitioning the low end to Linux.
Only question is if they'll drag Aegis over to the low end and cripple the systems even more severely than iOS and Android.
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The Nokia Linux phones I saw so far (N900, N9 and N950) where quite accessible. You can either boot in secure mode or switch to development mode; the user is free to decide, he doesn't even need to hack the device or anything - just use the well documented setting. In secure mode each app has its own secure data area, cryptographically protected; something I wouldn't want to miss for some sensitive information. In development mode you can access anything you like - even the encrypted secure storage of the
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The N900 has a 600MHz Cortex-A8 based processor and 256MB of RAM. The GPU in the processor on the Raspberry Pi is an ARM11 (ARMv6) core, which while decent (same as the early Android devices and first two iPhones) it's behind the N900.
Re:Now there's a threesome /. doesn't see every da (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably more than just a rumour, at least that's the impression I got from the Finnish media, which tends to be fairly well informed. Meaning that the OS exist and there are products planned, but of course no guarantees that a product will ship.
As to how the Meltemi-stuff make any sense:
At the level that Nokia makes decisions, the smartphone segment of mobile business isn't about hardware anymore, it's applications and services, or probably more to the point, it's about attracting developers. Nokia ditched their own OSes because they knew that by themselves they could not attract enough developers to build a fourth "ecosystem" (iOS, Android and WP being the there current ones). Nokia said that they chose between Android and WP, and, while we can speculate why they chose WP, one of the stated reasons was the fully-fledged and mature tool-chain that WP has.
Meltemi itself may be about many things: hedging their bets, getting something out of the Linux experience they have, or maybe they just feel that the segment suits a Linux-based OS. The next generation of sub-$100 phones will be much more powerful then previous ones and it would be misleading to think them as having very low specs, but it will still be a distinct segment, separate from the smartphone segment, especially it will not be driven by third-party applications and services. That means that Nokia can still, by themselves, make a competitive phone to that segemnt without having to build an ecosystem.
In summary, Nokia ditched Linux (MeeGo) on smartphones because they had to, and they are using Linux (Meltemi) on feature phones because they can.
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When I showed news of this to my boss. He just replied "yeah my old buddy who's still at Nokia works on this". My boss used to work at Nokia himself.
Anyway, the rumour began to sound more plausible after hearing his comment.
It could be an escape route (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft doesn't have a good history of playing nice with partners. They tend to die painful deaths and their history in the mobile space is that of spectacular failure.
Scaling Linux from Meltemi up from a low spec to a high spec smartphone would be relatively easy. If the MS "partnership" goes the way all the previous ones have gone, Nokia would be dead, full stop. This way they may have an escape route.
Oh and "feature phone" these days is 100MHz with 32Mb RAM, 2Gb storage. That sounds like a 30 user system to me.
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Damn. I need a new desktop.
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The kernel isn't the problem, it's the application (Score:2)
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What you are possibly missing is that Linux doesn't use much hardware in todays terms. OpenWrt will happily run Linux plus a user space in 16M. That 16M gives you real time multitasking, IPv4, IPv6 and CIFS network stack, firewall, QOS, flash, HDD and fat, file systems, ACL's, 80211 stack, bluetooth stack, USB drivers, memory management, a mature development environment with every language known to man.
On today's hardware 16M is nothing, even Nokia's current S40 phones have 16M. In fact they (eg a Nokia
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It's half of a really smart strategy.
The other half involves inventing a time machine and doing it in 2007.
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Wow! So MS is getting $146 Billion a year from Android. Neat, that's more than their entire yearly revenue. How do they do it?
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Corporations use existing ones like Google toke Linux
So when Google say they get a buzz off Linux, it's not just vapid marketing hype?!
WTF??! (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there any level on which this decision makes sense in light of Nokia's direction?
Any phone smart enough to run Linux us smart enough to run WP7.
And Nokia? Embracing Linux? After jettisoning MeeGo?
And Stephen Elop? Linux?! HUH?!
Consistency? What's that?
Does Nokia have any strategic direction at all?!
Re:WTF??! (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there any level on which this decision makes sense in light of Nokia's direction?
Looks like different factions within Nokia competing/fighting against each other.
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They've been working on Linux for phones for a long time, mostly as a fallback plan if symbian didn't take off.
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You pretty much hit the nail on the head. (Score:3)
Though this isn't true:
Any phone smart enough to run Linux us smart enough to run WP7.
You can strip Linux down to sweet fuck all. Windows OTOH isn't Windows unless it has windows.
But yeah... WTF?
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While your statement is both true and vulgar it lacks details.
Linux can run on ARMv4 for sure and maybe even lower versions while WP7 requires at ARMv7 aka Cortex CPUs I believe they use the Tegra as their target.
Take a look at the Raspberry Pi as an example. Combine that with a touch screen and a phone chip and you have a smartphone that can run Linux.
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Any phone smart enough to run Linux us smart enough to run WP7.
Not true. Lots of embedded devices use Linux, it can have a very small footprint.
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And Stephen Elop? Linux?! HUH?!
Apparently, Linux is only good for the dumbphones, while the smart ones run Windows. Makes sense from a general Microsoftie point of view.
Re:WTF??! (Score:5, Informative)
According to rumors I've heard, this isn't Linux as we know it. They're going to run Qt as close to the hardware as possible with everything else stripped away. And we'd better hope it works, because it's the last chance we have of a Desktop Linux-compatible toolkit getting significant phone market share. I don't want to develop in Java, goddamnit.
Already could work but need more (Score:2)
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You don't *have* to use java/davik with Android.
Yes, yes you do. The NDK lets you use C or C++ on the back end (or presumably, if you build support for them within the NDK, other languages) but your interface has to be Java.
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"I don't want to develop in Java, goddamnit."
Can I ask why not? Java is a pretty good language, the tools are all free, it have lots and lots free open source libraries, and it runs pretty sweet on millions of Android phones.
The only down site is JavaME, so it would be good to chose Android, the DalvikVM, Harmony, or OpenJDK. Nokia is big enough to make patent deals with Oracle, but if I were a shop in every other country but the USA, I would chose one of the 4 for my smartphone.
Because GP post specifically mentioned "a Desktop Linux-compatible toolkit", FYI: Android does not use any of the Java Desktop GUI toolkits, and I believe there's no actual support for making desktop applications with Android's GUI toolkit.
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Is there any level on which this decision makes sense in light of Nokia's direction?
Any phone smart enough to run Linux us smart enough to run WP7.
And Nokia? Embracing Linux? After jettisoning MeeGo?
And Stephen Elop? Linux?! HUH?!
Consistency? What's that?
Does Nokia have any strategic direction at all?!
My guess is mass engineer dissapointment with corporate decisions or some other internal war burning in Nokia.
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Any phone smart enough to run Linux us smart enough to run WP7.
Yes, but they were probably talking about embedded Linux, not what you currently think of when you think of the Linux stack, or even the x86 Linux kernel.
And in that sense, no, embedded Linux can have a much smaller footprint than WP7. Have you even seen the minimum requirements [gsmarena.com] for WP7? They're not super high by today's standards, but they're not super low either. I think Microsoft even stated it as a benefit that they were not going to start their phone with low end hardware.
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That means: MS wants to first harvest good revenue market segments and not spoil things by selling anything too cheap to early. I see WP7-Starter editions coming after the fat cows have been milked.
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No, no, and no.
WP7 runs only on a certain processor (it's called a "chassis"). Right now it's a specific Qualcomm SoC. This ensures the WP7 experience is relatively consistent across all WP7 phones.
Linux can run on many more processors, and on processors far lower-end. You know, the ones that give Android a really bad name because they run it on sub-400MHz processors that can't keep up.
So a lightweight Linux phone OS is still useful - something
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I believe it'll be a "Qt phone" more than a Linux phone. It could just about as well use Windows kernel, except it'd cost money, and there probably even isn't suitable Windows kernel for the purpose, I doubt Win8 kernel without Metro would make much sense really, since those two have been more or less designed to go together, and also I believe Windows kernel hackers are in somewhat more short supply than Linux kernel hackers...
Another thing is, with Qt-based solution, Nokia has complete control over SDK, w
Elop can't fire all linux developers at once (Score:2)
It makes a perfect sense because Elop can't fire all linux developers at once. It's just impossible under the law. So he has to find them a useless work for an year or two.
Consistency? What's that?
Everything is consistent. They are going to kill linux devlopment, just can't do it in one month.
Does Nokia have any strategic direction at all?!
Yes. Microsoft.
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Probably not. Unlike the versions of Windows Mobile before it, Microsoft is attempting to control the hardware that is released with their OS. This means there is a large low end smartphone market that is almost exclusively there for Android, since Microsoft and Apple are not interested.
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Nice one (Score:2)
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Well, that's what they publicly claim. Believe it if you want to. But to do that you've got to close your eyes to their actions.
I think I'll wait another decade or so before trusting MS again. Then I'll see what their track record is. Their current one is decidedly rancid, based on their actions as reported in the news media, rather than just their PR announcements. (Yes, the news media does include their PR announcements. And only occasionally identifies them as such. But one can also find reports b
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Really? Like who?
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Apple, of course.
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In related news ..... (Score:2)
Sounds like an episode of Jerry Springer's show.
Maybe they are Command Line Interface only? (Score:2)
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Windows Phone 7 is kinda text-based.
Nokia could use a command-line interface with cloud-based voice recognition and create a really cheap phone - no keyboard, no touchscree, plus bonuses from AT&T for making people pay for traffic even when they're not actively using the internet.
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To make it sound cool?
Android phone under $100 (Score:3)
Even here, in Finland (one of the most expensive countries in Europe), you can find decent Android phones for under $100. I don't see how Nokia can compete, after Elop's brand suicide.
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Could you name me some of those decent Android phones? I'd like one for that money but I have no idea what to look for. There is so much on the market!
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For Androids the cheapest Huaweis sell here for about 110e and you get a ton of options around 150e.
There are a lot of Nokians that sell between 50e and 100e, but I doubt that Nokia could sell anything they can jam linux into below 100e. Those cheap ass phones are all series40 with virtually zero sw costs and a line of phones they've been making for ten years now so no wonder they can make them cheap. Nokia always had good hardware manufacturing and logistics, it's what they did and didn't do with software
under $100 without subsidies? (Score:2)
Re:under $100 without subsidies? YES, look around. (Score:2)
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LoB
so Nokia is Microsoft's bitch but still must use L (Score:3)
LoB
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IIRC there was a public statement to this: He was not allowed for some legal reasons to sale his MS stocks right after leaving MS. And he invested in Nokia stocks nearly immediately. So now, holding Nokia stocks and having sold MS stocks, your theory does not make much sense anymore.
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It's not enough to convince me! Any former Micro$oft exec has sold his soul and is marked by the Windows logo-shaped seal of evil!
I wear my tinfoil hat every time I drive by Nokia HQ in Espoo.
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Don't! Tinfoil hats are the product of a large multi-government conspiracy theory. While they are supposed to protect you from intrusive satellite rays, they in fact provide a nearly perfect parabolic antenna directed towards the communication- and electricity wires located in the pedestrian lanes! It's common knowledge that current brain-readers and brainwave-manipulation techniques require a proximity of 3 meters or less. At least do yourself a favor and use aluminum shoe soles as well, and maybe change t
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The solution to mismanaged projects is to ditch the project. Not the management responsible.
The management has mostly departed as well.
Not to mention that said mismanaged project has recived raving reviews pretty much universally,
Which project are you talking about? Certainly not MeeGo, the shared effort by Intel and Nokia announced in early 2010. That never released anything worth mentioning for smartphones, and it has recently been morphed into something else again. The N9 is a product-driven wrap up of pre-MeeGo development, marketed as "kinda MeeGo, but not quite". This schizophrenia made no sense, wasted precious resources, so there was in effect no credible platform to go to market wi
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That they had their own plan, one based around Qt, and which was just about to bear fruit
They had three: 1) build a Debian-based distro, and a home-grown UI framework based around Qt; 2) build MeeGo, switching the Moblin legacy software from Gtk onto the said home-grown framework; 3) introduce QML and Qt Components to both of the above. They executed all these plans at once. Only the first one was "just about" to bear fruit (7 months, as you can count now, or more, considering that the decision was made before February). If it does not make sense to you, think if it would make sense to a CEO wi
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No, you are making an unwarranted assumption: that you are the only one here who can pull authority claiming inside knowledge :)
low cost phones don't matter (Score:2)
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I think this might be a positive development. Show them how your $100 Linux "dumbphone" can actually do twice as much as the $499 Windows "smartphone", twice as fast.
There won't be Web 2.0 on a $100 phone, but I guess you can write quite nice integrated solutions if you know a bit of UNIX and C.
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It's definitely positive, if only they will go and make such phones.
Just having top and powertop on my N900 allows me to identify battery-draining apps in minutes, unlike my friend with Android that wasted a week to do this. You don't have to write them in C. I'm sure python will be ported... QT is C++ only.
Re:First they ignore you... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Android Market has a Terminal Emulator app which will give you a command prompt that will let you run (a bare-bones version of) top, which is already part of the Android OS. Or you get PowerTutor from the Market for a more fancy graphical user interface. Or you go to Settings/About Phone/Battery/Battery Use.
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Maybe MS plan on making these phones really shitty to hurt Linux's image (considering Android is helping to boost it).
Re:First they ignore you... (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe that Microsoft can do whatever they want with Nokia.
The board chose a CEO who did nothing visible, then forced Nokia into dependence on Microsoft. The shareholders reacted by selling madly. I don't know what Nokia's goals are aside from selling phones, but they don't seem to be reacting fast enough (especially with Elop pulling a multi-Osborne at the start of the year.)
So yeah, I expect that if MS tells Nokia to marginalize or kill something off, they'll try as hard as they can to do so. Elop has to stay on good terms with them or he'll ride Nokia into the gutter.
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You are of course free to believe whatever you want, but what if you would for once try to consider the possibility that Elop was *not* an MS trojan. Symbian was no viable option for the long future. Android neither. If you read e.g. http://thisismynext.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/ [thisismynext.com] you can conclude that opting for Android would have meant to abandon the whole location based services, navigation software and ultimately Navteq. Meego was a good idea, but for the mass market
Re:First they ignore you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, it is best left unspoken lest regulators have evidence later on.
Yet Nokia, a company with some management issues, gets an ex-Microsoft CEO and suddenly burns down everything they had invested in, in exchange for a dependency on a company known to destroy "partners."
A CEO and pocket change compared to what it would cost to actually buy Nokia.
The utter insanity of decisions coming out of that company now just suggest to me that there's a ton of politics, back and forth, and infighting, and that there's no unified leadership in the company. After all, suddenly this when Elop showed slides basically saying "within a few years anything not Microsoft will be gone."
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Speaking as a shareholder, I hate it when companies do something stupid shortsighted to please traders who are come-today-gone-tomorrow. To have a drop as severe as they did earlier this year, long term investors had to have been annoyed and dumped their stock.
Carriers would still have to acquiesce (Score:2)
It would not be a bad thing to sink the carrier centred model
I agree. But for that to happen in the real world, the carriers would first have to be willing to allow phones designed for a non-carrier-centered model onto their respective networks. Right now, the United States market is split between two cellular technologies: GSM and CDMA2000. There are four nationwide carriers, soon to be three: Verizon Wireless (CDMA2000), Sprint (CDMA2000), AT&T (GSM), and a smaller GSM carrier that AT&T will soon acquire. Of these, only the GSM carrie
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USA is hardly the 8% of the total mobile phone market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use [wikipedia.org]
And thats data from the CIA WFB 2007, guess numbers are even higher nowadays. My bet is that mobile manufacturers create products for the sane-mobile-rest-of-the-world-market first, and then they devote some time to pamper the American mobile industry.
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Actually I think that there will be a good market for WP7 devices. What most people expect from a smartphone is different from what I would expect. Most people seem to expect lots of blinking, shiny, irrelevant apps, integration of their social network and email, more like a communication central. And this is something WP7 could do at least as good as Apple or Google, since they currently still have the largest desktop installation base. (Ok, Google might be considered equally strong / stronger if they get
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What, and create yet another external dependency on the efforts of some other corporation? No, it's much more sane to contribute to existing open source development efforts that exist largely independently of the goals of some other company.
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they could easily make earlier android version work on "low end" smartphones.
That's a fine technical solution. I think this is more seller's remorse (their soul to Microsoft).
Nokia: we'd like to pay $5 per phone for a Windows license.
Microsoft: no, $15.
Nokia: fine, we'll just go build Android phones then
Microsoft: no, we own patents on Android. See our list of licensees.
Nokia: OK, we'll use Meltemi
Microsoft: WTF?
Nokia: our in-house lightweight linux
Microsoft: oh, um, we have a basket of patents against
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> they could easily make earlier android version work on "low end" smartphones.
In fact other companies do exactly that. A 600 MHz Arm, 256 MB RAM, 512 MB Flash and a half decent display make a very nice and surprisingly capable Android phone. ZTE does it, Huawei does it, and even Sony. Sure, it is not going to be the fastest, it will not allow you to install you every game in existence, but it is very flexible, and IMHO beats a feature phone any day.
I can see the patent issue as a potential problem fo
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If you read e.g. http://thisismynext.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/ [thisismynext.com] you can conclude that opting for Android would have meant they probably won't be allowed to preinstall their own maps application and location based services. Location based services is a business unit of Nokia which highly depends on reach / number of units where it is installed. For devices with price tags below 100$, the market is *huge*. Do you really think it would be clever for Nokia to donate this who
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LoB
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LoB
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Just three points:
1. According to an earlier leaked internal document (April 2011), it was said that an internal Meltemi project might serve as a lifeboat for the displaced MeeGo developers.
2. Nokia was doing quite a lot to keep the Qt development community at bay as well. (Ok, this would fit with the S40/Qt theory)
3. There are no, none at all, native apps available to install on S40 phones. Why is this? Could it be that the Nokia OS used on those phones does by design not allow for installation of any nati
Re: (Score:2)
afaig the other manufacturers don't pay for Linux, not even for plain Android, but for some add-ons like Active Sync, vfat32 for smartcards and maybe mass storage mode and whatnot. I guess that Nokia pays already for such licenses, or maybe has a cross-license agreement with MS. I would not expect that this was part of any MS/Nokia deal.