This morning Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft, and a transition to Windows Phone 7 for their high end products. Why they were incapable of learning from Microsofts many successes in the mobile space, and quality mutually beneficial relationships with partners isn’t clear. The fact that Stephen Elop (current Nokia CEO) came from Microsoft last September could be related. The reason I care is that Meego (successor to maemo) was the only mobile platform I was in any way optimistic about fulfilling the promise of “Computer in your pocket,” and it just became a second-class citizen with a limited lifespan.
The only ones to blame for the maemo (later subsumed into Meego) ecosystem not taking off are Nokia – they have been shipping devices running it since 2005, and a great community formed around them, but Nokia has only managed to get four devices (with a couple variations) out the door in that time. The software was basically there years ago – I’d happily run another OS2008/Diablo release device with a basic maintenance patch set, but the constant desgin churn (We bought Trolltech, lets switch our core UI from GTK to QT! We joined forces with Intel, lets switch from dpkg to rpm!) means that they have been actively stalling their own ecosystem since 2009, and the fact that there have been more high-profile Android device releases in the last month than Maemo devices in the last 5 years. There was a good sign Meego was probably scuttled when Ari Jaaksi left in October, but until now one could hope that it was simply churn related to the transition from maemo to Meego. Personally, I think that if Nokia had jettisoned Symbian in 2008 and focused on Maemo, it would be in the same market state as Android by now, and the world would be better for it.
I responded to the news by ordering a new (cheap 3rd party) battery to replace the ailing one in my n810, because it might be a while before a suitable replacement appears. If there IS a suitable meego device during the transition, as stated, I may well go for it, especially since being a “learning platform” has served maemo reasonably well in the past, and it is a sufficiently open (and familiar) platform for the community to take care of itself software-wise.
Just for the record, the things I actually care about in a mobile device, in no particular order:
* At least 800×480 pixels
* Small enough to comfortably carry all the time.
* Physical keyboard (I still don’t understand why people are willing to squander half their tiny, expensive display on a keyboard large enough to operate while occluded with fingers)
* Runs Native code (Mobile devices are, due to power restrictions, starved for cycles and memory — sticking an abstraction layer in front of it doesn’t help)
* NOT a smartphone (The value of smartphone is still way less to me than the price of smartphone plans; WiFi is everywhere in urban areas)
* Running an open UNIX-like OS (This means USERLAND, not just kernel. I want a terminal, sh, and the rest of the coreutils. A X server is nice too, but not required, I’m not delusional enough to deny that X is a clusterfuck – That said, I do X forward programs running on something more powerful to the n810 from time to time)
* Able to get through a normal day on battery.
I’m not attached to much else. If some nameless company in China unceremoniously dumped suitable hardware onto the market with a bootloader and example OpenEmbedded image (or even better, plugbox, which would be just like home) I would be satisfied. The only thing that comes close right now is the pandora, which is a little bulky, gaming-focused and quickly becoming outdated but is suitably hackerly.
