Ex-Nokia Staff To Build MeeGo-based Smartphones 200
Snirt writes "A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for 'dinghy'), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of directors and core professionals from Nokia's MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities."
Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's too late due to the developer network effect (same goes for Firefox OS and even Windows Phone). But I'd like to be wrong about that.
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
If it is open, count on me to buy a device. Even if the only things running on this device are a text editor and a mail client. Hell, even if I need to write the mail client myself.
Re: (Score:2)
+1 will buy any new open phone with a keyboard to succeed my N900. There's always so much suspense between buying new phones for me, and it gets more severe every time.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Funny)
And with the rest of the Slashdot posters who chime in they could sell several dozen. Probably even enough to give Windows Phone a run for it's money.
Re: (Score:3)
I have no idea which particular manager was behind the 'developer device only' decision for the N950, but I hope his crack is cut with something nasty.
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Insightful)
The late Steve declared keyboards were bad, so every second-rate Jobs wannabe declared keyboards had to go.
Nokia's last horizontal slider phone, I believe, was the E7 released in Feb 2011.
RIM, for the time being, offers vertical sliders.
Re: (Score:2)
Agree completely.
Re: (Score:3)
Then again, most people I knew who wanted to have old-school mail just ran SSH in a terminal to a remote 'screen' session on their home machines, where they were running mutt locally.
We (in the kernel development team) often used to[*] joke about booting to a shell. There could be a binary called 'call', and if that was too much to type, set up a bleedin' alias for it! Want to hang up? Simple - that's Control-C! And what could be simpler than:
$ sms anna '
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Interesting)
While N900 is the best smartphone currently existing, it is a terrible phone exactly due to the telephony interface. If it rings while in a bag, there's a ~50% chance some random button on the touchscreen will press itself (and an incoming call unlocks the screen!). It can drop calls entirely due to a "turn the phone face down" gesture which must have taken some serious drugs to invent. The interface for calling someone is not any better.
So really, if there's a way to initiate (and perhaps even receive!) calls from the command line, it would actually be better than current shit. After beating some sense into the keyboard code, the terminal is more convenient to use than most laptops, I'd sure take having to type "accept" or an alias over randomly rejecting calls.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd love that.
--Posted from my N900.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Informative)
Finns pre-ordered at that same price by the thousand. I know _dozens_ of people with the N900, more than of any other phone I know. And I'm not just thinking of my colleagues who used the prototypes as our daily device while working on the project (that would be hundreds, not dozens), I'm thinking of non-Nokians who paid cold hard cash for the thing.
However, you're right, this would be a niche thing. The market is going through a catastrophic collapse towards a duoculture or even monoculture, the chance of anything new (or old but recycled) making it big now are absolutely minimal. They've got to fight over the scraps now. Achieving critical mass is not for domination - it's for staying alive.
Downer? Hah! You're barely making a dent compared with what Elop did to me! (By joining the company 2 years back...)
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
Partnering with microsoft was a terrible idea. Unless windows 8 phone is some total game changer, its all lost.
They were much better sticking with maemo, because at least when you have GNU/linux, you have the monopoly on a solid niche. All of which are rabid fanatics who both shell out 10x money for a phone, only to turn around and do free work on it. When you have windows, you really don't have a base. The techies don't want it. The average user is comfortable with android, and the newbsauces, trendies have apple. Even corporate is going to apple, and there is nothing that windows phone does the iphone doesn't to counter this trend.
As for microsoft, "windows" is a toxic brand. If I were any other company, I'd be hesitant in selling "windows" anything. If I were microsoft, I would call "windows phone" "xbox phone", as the xbox brand is far less hated. In fact, I'd discontinue the windows brand alltogether except for corporate, and just use the xbox name.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Informative)
the company was not bleeding money. they had a profit instead and it was also growing. However it was expected that the symbian based revenue and profits (it made profits) would be down some time around next year (2013). Elop could have delayed the current crash by two years at the very least by just doing nothing.
So yes, something needed to be done, but there was no hurry, and surely no need to actively kill symbian and all phones that were already being produced and focus only on something that came several months later.
The in house OSes are currently the only chance Nokia has of not being dismantled. If Elop took the time to evaluate the strategy maybe he could have had a backup plan. It seems instead that he wanted to put Nokia in a place where it was either success with windows or bankruptcy with windows, and the "staying alive with our own OS" was not really an option for him. Now it is clear that the path will be bankruptcy with windows.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Interesting)
the n9 sold more phones with no support than the overhyped windows phone in the same time peroid.
People will ask for it by name, and the people who want it are usually willing to pay, as its more than just a phone, as the rest of them are to other people.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Interesting)
They don't need to make a device targeted at Linux hackers. They can add those capabilities on whatever device they make. What they need to do is take the territory that Nokia lost when they abandoned Symbian, and deliver on support in ways that Android vendors fail utterly at. If they can do that, catering to us nerds is something they'll do anyway because they'll want that capability themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
and I guess there's options here for the OS to be picked up by a big electronics corporate (say, LG or Sony perhaps) who wants to have a "presence" in the smartphone market without having to be another me-too Android manufacturer.
There's marketplaces that can be tapped - especially the featurephone marketplace, if the OS can be trimmed down to fit on a supercheap phone, it has a place. Even if it can't, it can be positioned as a computer-in-your-pocket with a desktop/TV dock that is the holy grail of smartp
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would a manufacturer that presently is depending on Google to update Android not be tempted by something much more common?
The price is in large parts of the world not an issue, most people I know do like me and buy their phone outright and then get a service with it.
The US market is important but not exactly the standard of things mobile.
Re: (Score:2)
>(so basically like the true-Maemo n900 was, rather than the fake-MeeGo-broken-Maemo n9)
I haven't heard this (n900 user, haven't seen or used the n9), please elaborate.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Informative)
The N9's Harmattan is basically Maemo 6, only without GTK and the "Aegis" security system in place. It was "MeeGo-compatible" due to sharing a number of platform APIs and including Qt, but not MeeGo due to lacking some APIs MeeGo had as well as being DEB based and not RPM based.
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Interesting)
Aegis prevents messing with some of the system files, but it's not too hard to circumverent/disable Aegis alltogether. Install open kernel or use Inception. [endno.de]
./configure && make and scp resulting binaries to your phone. For extra points you can ofcourse roll it into debian package and kindly ask at #harmattan IRC channel for your package to be added to the community repository so that everyone can install it on their phones with apt-get.
Though I haven't bothered with either. Aegis hasn't (yet) come into my way when porting software to the phone or installing stuff from community repository with apt-get. Much of stuff in community repos are just stock debian armel packages, with slight modifications in control files.
If you know how to compile programs in Linux, then that's the only thing you need to know to port stuff to Harmattan. Install Scratchbox to your computer, log in to it, download sources, apt-get necessary -dev packages,
N9 is just awesome. Swipe UI wipes the floor with Android and IOS + it really feels like a true Linux computer. Elop has made sure it's hard to get, but IMO it's easily worth all the money you throw for it.
Just build Android support (Score:2)
Just build support for Android app on it !!!
Maemo/MeeGo has already had a small but dedicated following in europe. A small segment of the population appreciated a full equipped internet device running a full GNU/Linux stack.
Now, the Android-specific kernel stuff have been backported into the main kernel tree, so it's possible to run android runtimes over a default kernel, so therefore including maemo if its copy of the kernel is a recent enough.
So it should be possible to make a "GNU+Android"/Linux phone. T
Re: (Score:2)
porting android kernel patches to mainstream linux, means using a mainstream kernel on android phones, or even running GNU on android.
They already have! Meet Alien Dalvik (Score:2)
It's called Alien Dalvik, and the video I remember seeing about it (a year or so ago, on Engadget, I think) showed it running Google apps like Google maps on N900.
Sadly it was proprietary, and not for sale to ordinary customers (more to OEMs, I think)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Their strongest arguments are native execution speed and full QT power. It might be enough to get them somewhere.
Something tells me... (Score:3, Insightful)
... they would rather see you translate Jolla as "Lifeboat," rather than "Dinghy."
Re: (Score:2)
... they would rather see you translate Jolla as "Lifeboat," rather than "Dinghy."
"Lifeboat" tells me that your project is the Titanic and the ship is sinking.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Lifeboat" tells me that your project is the Titanic and the ship is sinking.
Actually it's the the Lusitania [wikipedia.org], and it got torpedoed by Microsoft.
Re: (Score:2)
What, I thought it was a burning platform? At least once Elop got done with his thermite plans.
Re: (Score:2)
More like the Costa Concordia, skippered by the intrepid Captain Ballmer.
Re: (Score:2)
"Jolla" means "dinghy" in Finnish? (Score:2, Funny)
What does "Nokia" mean - "lie back and think of Finland"?
Re:"Jolla" means "dinghy" in Finnish? (Score:4, Informative)
The company started as a pulp mill in 1865 in the city of Nokia, whose name might be from the word for sable, marten or beaver.
Re: (Score:3)
The town's emblem is this black creature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nokia.vaakuna.svg
If you're a Finn, or in Finland, then you might be interested in an exhibition in Vapriikki museum in Tampere which documents the history of Nokia very thoroughly. It's either just started, or will start soon. (Disclosure - I am not connected to it apart from the fact that they are
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The company started as a pulp mill in 1865 in the city of Nokia...
And pretty soon it will have to go back to being a pulp mill. It's just too bad nobody reads newspapers any more.
Joking aside... (Score:2)
Nokia is the name of the city where the company was incorporated in 1871.
As for the story... I've been waiting for this to happen. I'd love to see them succeed but I have very hard time imagining that it'll actually happen. I guess their best bet is staying afloat a while and hoping that Nokia decides to buy them back.
Re: (Score:2)
There is no plural form for noki in the Finnish language.
Why not? I believe the plural base form is "noet".
Chairs (Score:3, Funny)
Over in Redmond, Washington, millions of chairs cried out in terror as a sweaty monkey realised that all that money he's spend was in vain.
It is actually a good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
If they start selling some phones, who else better than Nokia to buy the company?
Re: (Score:2)
At this point? Nearly anyone.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How long until their market share exceeds Nokia's? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
By the time they get their MeeGo phones to market? Probably as soon as the first phone sells.
Re: (Score:2)
long live the n900! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
The N900's only real stellar point is the slide mechanism for the keyboard. Mine's probably been opened and closed more than a thousand times in the last 2.5 years and it's still rock solid.
The rest could be readily re-done, possibly thinner and better (see the N950.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think they chose not to market it directly to the public for other reasons. It was rejected by the carriers as being too flimsy, but I haven't heard anything about that despite knowing a lot of people with N950s who use them on a daily basis in lieu of their N900s.
Moot point though. The problem there was the hinge. It was still thinner and larger.
Re: (Score:3)
With Nokia abandoning both the hardware (see n950 as the new direction) and software, I was resigned to something less when my n900 gave out. But I still have hope!
Re: (Score:2)
As an N900 user, I say they should NOT release another N900, they should release something that's like an N900 but BETTER.
Re-design the USB port so it cant come loose and render the phone as good as dead. Improve the battery life. Give it an up-to-date browser and rendering engine. Have less closed-source software on the device (especially in the lower level libraries).
Add a maps app with better (and more up-to-date) maps and better features (e.g. easy way to search for specific streets/landmarks/etc and ge
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That way all connections are on the side and work perfectly well.
You've got until... (Score:5, Insightful)
...my unreplaceable one-of-a-kind Nokia N900 becomes irreparable, to come up with a phone worthy as its successor. It seems pretty solid, so I'll give you a few years. (fingers crossed)
The mobile market definitely needs a full gnu/linux phone. In fact, the N900 follows on from a privileged few mobile devices with desktop-like capability - the psion 3a, psion 5mx, Nokia 9500 communicator, Nokia E90 (only just). And it was only really the Psions that didn't shy from giving you the full OS experience just because it was a mobile device. Why can't my mobile device have a full fledged file-manager with drag-and-drop capability or a desktop where I can place regularly used files as well as applications?
But maybe I'm mad - apparently you don't need these things on the desktop either.
Re: (Score:2)
"my unreplaceable one-of-a-kind Nokia N900 becomes irreparable"
It's a tool. Buy spare(s)?
Directors and core professionals believe in MeeGo (Score:2, Interesting)
Those great people believe in bright future for MeeGo based phones. Microsoft also believed in bright future of MeeGo, so they spent billions of dollars to kill it. Windows phones are disaster: non-existant or buggy software (I can not download more than a dosen books on my new Windows phone - if I do that I have to reinstall Kindle App to get access to my books).
Could be the next Intel (Score:2)
Hey, if a few former Fairchild Semiconductor employees can form Intel and go on to take over the world, I don't see any reason to doubt a bunch of former Nokia employees could have a big impact on the cell phone market. Of course the odds of any startup just avoiding liquidation are very slim, so I don't recomend sinking money into them, but this is a very fast moving, immature market, so there's huge potental there.
Re:Could be the next Intel (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, if a few former Fairchild Semiconductor employees can form Intel and go on to take over the world, I don't see any reason to doubt a bunch of former Nokia employees could have a big impact on the cell phone market. Of course the odds of any startup just avoiding liquidation are very slim, so I don't recomend sinking money into them, but this is a very fast moving, immature market, so there's huge potental there.
it's like the third offshoot from Nokia, that's aiming to make phones.
Benefon actually made a lot of phones too(they were the first with tetris on a phone, first with t9, had dual sim phone ages ago and so forth), but their heyday went a decade ago.
the question for this new venture is if they can scoop up enough money to actually produce the hw properly. there has been literally dozens of OS only producing companies which amounted to pretty much nothing.
Re: (Score:2)
The biggest problem they will face is getting the hardware to run their new OS on, especially things like cellular chipsets.
Wither the Nokia Microsoft deal? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Their market share was in free-fall well before the Microsoft deal.
That is actually Microsoft spin and has been debunked.
I will buy two (Score:2)
Jolla does not mean a rescue boat - too small (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a finn,so I know what "Jolla" means.
Jolla means a very small sailing boat - not meant for rescue, but meant for people who want to go sailing alone on a very small boat.
(who either cannot afford bigger boat or just likes very small boats)
Jollas cant be used as rescue boats, they are too small for that.
Just deliver something like the N900 (Score:2)
Wide screen and physical keyboard with max freqencies so it can go on all mobile networks.
And Debian underneath the interface.
The curious thing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Nokia's Linux effort was worth billions to Microsoft. Billions to have it dead.
MS sees Linux as threat and it's their tune that Nokia dances to. Elop has gone out of his way* to ensure that there's no return to Linux at Nokia.
* Firing MeeGo and Meltemi teams and killing both projects, shutting down Salo factory where N9 was being made
Re:Change the god damned name first... (Score:5, Informative)
No worries, I doubt there will be a product named MeeGo. In fact, it isn't even using MeeGo, but Mer [merproject.org], which spun off from MeeGo when it became obvious that Nokia was going to walk away and Intel was off to pursue other things.
Jolla will probably name it something else exclusive to them. All that matters is by going with Mer (or as they've been saying, MeeGo) you know one thing: Qt.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
They are actually already based on Mer: :)
https://twitter.com/JollaMobile/status/221688205672595456 [twitter.com]
I guess they are just using the MeeGo name for publicity.
Re:Change the god damned name first... (Score:4, Insightful)
I am starting to worry whether we can rely on less popular open source software? In recent few years many of the open source libraries and software I use were discontinued.
- a few of the developers decided to produce commercial versions and sell for money
- a few others thought they need money for living and started developing new commercial projects with functionalists similar to the open source one but better (this category includes myself)
- a few others just gave up on the project and left the source code somewhere hoping that someone else will continue developing it
The reason might be the hard fact that you cannot work for free and pay for your life.
This question comes to my mind: Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)? ... perhaps those which have a better business and sustaining plan ?
Re: (Score:3)
I used maemo, and I wish that meego could have stayed with the debian based and hildon desktop.
Hildon is free/open and will be included in Ubuntu Cellphone with 14.04
Re: (Score:3)
Hildon is being revived as a sub project of Mer.
Cordia Hildon-Desktop.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I am starting to worry whether we can rely on less popular open source software? In recent few years many of the open source libraries and software I use were discontinued.
Ultimately it's unwise to base your business upon something that your organization is unable or unwilling to maintain.
This question comes to my mind: Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)? ... perhaps those which have a better business and sustaining plan ?
I'm sure you've heard of the phrase 'there are no guarantees in life' which also applies to software. If you (or your company) are dependent upon something that is developed by a 3rd party, it's wise to get a support contract. As an example: Redhat offers support as well as other organizations which develop OSS. Consider licensing the code, or hiring the developer(s) outright, failing that f
Re: (Score:3)
Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)?
none? even if there's a business behind it, there's no guarantee that business will be around tomorrow, and if there is a business behind it, you will find your destiny under control of said business.
as long as you have the source, you can always staff up and take over the project. you'd be in no worse of a situation than if you had staffed up and wrote the code from scratch yourself.
if you have multiple open source projects to choose from, there are obvious things to look for: active community, consistent
Re: (Score:2)
Still using rpm. What a bad idea. Still, it's an interesting project.
Re: (Score:3)
In fact, it isn't even using MeeGo, but Mer [merproject.org], which spun off from MeeGo when it became obvious that Nokia was going to walk away and Intel was off to pursue other things.
Mer was originally a community version of Maemo. I used Mer on my N800 before the N900 was launched. The current Mer is a natural continuation of this project, even if they relaunched it in some sense.
Re:Change the god damned name first... (Score:5, Informative)
There's only a few actual connections.
Intel: Moblin -> MeeGo -> (huge disconnect, much package shedding) -> Mer
Nokia: Maemo -> Harmattan
Samsung: Tizen
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yugo, MeeGo, WeAllGo
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably more of the blame for that should go on Intel than Nokia. I always felt (I was a Nokia dev.) that Intel was the dominant part of the "partnership". (And that the "partnership" was about as fake as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes'.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This "X means milf hunter in language Y (where Y is a dead language or X is no longer used as such)" is amazing... it's a catchy meme, but it's completely insane; there's always going to be that pesky village somewhere in the internets that thinks whatever you name a thing is hilarious.
Rick Santorum? No need to be AC here; /. has a fairly even political representation amongst its users.
Re: (Score:2)
Same thing that killed the Wii and the Kindle book reader, will then never learn?
Re:Change the god damned name first... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? its a gnu/linux cellphone. Nerds like gnu/liunx. This is slashdot. News for nerds. I'm pretty sure that to the average slashdot reader, that something this nerdy is a very big deal. Especially after the whole nokia/microsoft debacle. Again, nerds are smart people and aren't driven off by silly things like labels and driven towards marketing campaigns. They are driven because its going to be easy to modify with a great community, which makes it more of a hobby than a cellphone. Being nerds, modifying cellphones is a very legitimate hobby. Again this is slashdot.
Find your way back to gawker please.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't worry, the next version of Meego will be named Yugo.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Writing apps in C and GTK? No thank you, that is way to complex for many simplish apps. I've written a Qt Quick / QML app recently for the N9. I honestly couldn't remember when it was the last time I had so much fun writing a GUI as with Qt Quick. Very easy, excellent data binding and spot-on for the task. It truly is perfect for those quick, heavily animated, finger friendly and asynchronous GUIs we've com to expect on mobiles. For the harder bits or more low-level system access the bridge with Qt / C++ is
Re: (Score:2)
and in other words, maybe this is what the 'year of linux on the desktop' is going to be : linux on the (mobile) desktop. That would be awesome :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Developing in C++/QT kicks C/GTK to the far side of the moon. Speaking as a longtime C hack.
Re:Wrong OS... (Score:4, Insightful)
Since you're so familiar with the details, care explaining how? Some detail, if you would. I'm curious as to how Qt 5 and the rest of Mer (the MeeGo-type core Linux platform they're using) is deficient, API wise.
Or is this yet another empty implication?
So they should have gone with an OS they were totally unfamiliar with, rather than one they were familiar with... why?
Re:Wrong OS... (Score:5, Informative)
All of the mobile-specific stuff is going into Qt Mobility [nokia.com]. Anything missing will undoubtedly need to be added, I suspect that the team in question is aware of that.
No shit. Do keep in mind that this is the same team that developed the N9, I'm pretty sure they're aware of what deficiencies exist in the available APIs.
Your frequent "proclamations" or unsupported statements for or against things that, unless prompted, you never give reference to or back up. It's a very general thing that you have a habit of doing here on Slashdot.
No, I just find it highly annoying when people think others are supposed to just blindly believe what they say.
And jumping on board with a platform that is being shoveled out the door by HP, with no future development in sight, is a smart move to make? Who knows, they may adopt some of what's in webOS, maybe merge it into Qt. We don't have visibility into much more than what's been pointed out today. Odd that, given the sparse info, you're already making proclamations of their doom.
Then go back to your iOS development and let everyone else try to ensure there are more options than just Apple/Google, and maybe enjoy a niche. Not everyone needs to take on the two beasts out of the gate or serve every possible customer, they just need to be profitable.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)