MeeGo has a good chance of making Nokia a lot of money and they really don't want to talk about why.
Nokia has been losing wealthy customers for years, but they dominate the market in Africa and Asia. Symbian seems hopelessly out of date, but it's also very frugal, which allows Nokia to cram a lot of functionality onto very cheap hardware.
If you look at the market from the bottom up rather than the top down, you see what MeeGo is for. It's not there to take on the likes of Android and iOS, that's why Nokia have gone WP7 for that market. It's designed as an aspirational upgrade for S60 users. That's prime territory, for a number of reasons.
Nokia are the only non-Shanzai manufacturer to really understand developing markets. The Nokia 1100 isn't just the biggest selling mobile phone ever, it's the biggest selling consumer electronics device, having sold over 250m units. The killer features of that handset are a really bright torch, a dustproof keypad and 400 hours of battery life.
The N9 hardware is outdated by design. The Cortex A8 that powers it is a relatively very cheap part. The N9 is a high-end handset in other respects, but that is entirely consistent with Nokia's model. Expect to see a feature-stripped version of the N9 shortly, with a plastic chassis, cheap LCD, basic camera and so on. The early adopters pay for the R&D, allowing Nokia to launch the cheap version at a killer price. Look at the E71 and E63 for an example of this in action.
Nokia are playing a much cleverer long game than anyone gives them credit for. They have more brand equity than all other handset manufacturers combined, albeit mainly amongst very poor customers. Nokia's future success won't be found by beating Apple, it will be found by beating the Shanzai boys.
I often read on HN that Nokia has an edge in developing markets.
But guess what was voted the "coolest brand" in a May 2011 survey of South African youth? Blackberry[1]! Any self respecting geek could have/should have bought an Android handset, or an iPhone. But the vast majority of my friends family are on BBM, so I got one. It is the new Facebook, or Mxit[2]. After getting BBM, I was amazed by how many people have Blackberrys. My sister traded her new iPhone for a BB, after realising how isolated she was. My granny, and my maid[3] both have Blackberrys. If Nokia had a special insight into developing markets, they would have realised that they are vulnerable in the messaging space and launched a messaging app long ago.
Which is why I pointed out that my maid has a Blackberry as well. And the kids who voted for Blackberry as the coolest brand are probably largely in a similar demographic to my maid.
> The Nokia 1100 isn't just the biggest selling mobile phone ever, it's the biggest selling consumer electronics device, having sold over 250m units.
It was also the most sturdy phone I've ever had. As anecdotal evidence, it survived being dropped into a swimming pool. My 1100 died some years ago, and I still miss it.
As for Nokia surviving the deluge of cheap Chinese knockoffs, I dunno. A large number of similar manufacturers have managed to appear in India over the last few years, and they seem to be eating up Nokia's marketshare in the really low-end phones
I've always thought that Meego would be a much better 3rd platform than WP7. Meego is a much better competitor to Android than WP7 is. Meego can go in the same places Android can go because of its opensource and free nature. It can be on everything and built by "anyone" just like Android. WP7 on the other hand can only be used on mobile phones, and even then only by manufacturers that either want to pay the license fee, or are "allowed" by Microsoft to use it (see the case of Microsoft allowing only certain manufacturers to use Windows 8).
It's a shame that Nokia won't give their best to make Meego succeed, because that would mean it could hurt WP7's adoption. Also, I'd rather see 2 of the top 3 platforms being open source, than 2 proprietary ones. I think it would be for the best for all of us.
Actually I think just the opposite. Meego is a poor competitor to Android, because of how similar they are. In fact Meego today looks too much like the Samsung skin on Android (it would be funny if Samsung sued Nokia over trade dress).
There's no reason to get a Meego device over an Android device. But plenty of reason to get Android over Meego, at least today.
Whereas with Windows Phone, it is fundamentally different than Android. There's a lot of reason to pick WP over Android (and vice-versa). Nokia can exploit that space for at least a few years -- at which point Meego might be ready to really differentiate itself.
Agreed. Windows Phone does offer differences to Android, and honestly, there was very little chance Nokia was going to push Meego to the 3rd platform position.
If anything, Nokia probably learnt from WebOS. A great OS is not enough to save your company. You have to have the developer support, and you have to be able to push enough devices. Meego would have been limited to just Nokia handhelds, and the chicken/egg developer problem was very, very unlikely to resolve itself.
No longer having to bleed money on a software division, spending time on getting Nokia's core hardware competency and riding Microsoft's coattails to a 3rd place in the smartphone space sounds like a much better proposition. Nokia can go all-in on WP7 in a way HTC and Samsung haven't, and quickly become the flagship device provider.
There's no reason to get a Meego device over an Android
device. But plenty of reason to get Android over Meego,
at least today.
I'll be the first to admit I'm a highly atypical case, but this certainly isn't true for me. I want a UNIX userland on my phone, and for that Maemo/MeeGo is pretty much the only game in town.
I'm with you all the way, though I'm neither your typical user. I'm most definitely getting the N9 as soon as I can, and I really hope Meego survives. If nothing else I hope the community steps up and keeps it alive, while Nokia (or somebody else) if nothing else continues to provide hardware.I had nothing but Nokia phones from 1997-2010, but my last phone was an HTC, and unless Nokia keeps Meego alive, I'm pretty sure the N9 when I get it will be my last Nokia. It's been some enjoyable 13 years...
The issue with Meego isn't it's technical merits, it's adoption by Nokia's best customers. WP7 is designed to integrate vertically into the enterprise technology stack - just as Android is designed to facilitate integration with Google's services in order to allow data mining and iOS is designed to sell Apple hardware. WP7 facilitates B2B sales for Nokia in a way which Meego probably never could.
For Nokia, WP7 almost certainly offers better potential globally in the high margin corporate smartphone market than the alternatives. Because of it's .NET capability one can implement some of the same objects on the phone the enterprise implements elsewhere, e.g. it's servers. While this is also possible with other approaches, there are not the same incentives for development tool providers to invest in the level of cross platform compatibility as the incentives which Microsoft has to do so.
Based on the evidence, it looks like Nokia evaluated the WP7 roadmap to be better than those created internally for Meego and Symbian, and given the IP uncertainty surrounding the JVM their reluctance to become just another Android phone manufacturer does make some sense.
Because of it's .NET capability one can implement...
Quite the contrary; considering how on WP7 you're forbidden to run native code, while on Meego/Maemo you're not, it's actually easier to port anything you can think of to Meego/Maemo.
Also, AFAIK Intel was working in cooperation with Microsoft to port Silverlight to Meego. There's also Mono which has excellent characteristics for smartphones.
given the IP uncertainty surrounding the JVM
Nokia has the biggest and most relevant portfolio of patents related to mobile phones. Apple is paying them royalties already.
No, Android does not make sense for Nokia. Considering their expertise and size, they can do better. And WP7 will be their doom.
I think you conclusion is right but the way you get there isn't quite. It's not so much about some special property of Android or Meego, it's about control. WP7 might work great on tablets but Nokia can't just decide to make it run on tablets. That's Microsoft's decision. Nokia doesn't control their destiny. If they settle on WP7 the best case scenario for them is to become a company like HTC only with even less control over their software.
The hardware seems excellent but the UI feels like another icon based copy-cat of the desktop UI metaphor like iOS and Android. Even WebOS had some new things going for it.
For the sake of UI variety, I would pick WP7 to be in the top 3, atleast it offers an alternative form of UI radically different from the same old icon based desktop UI metaphor seen from almost 3 decades now in iOS/Android/Meego/WebOS. http://img.zdnet.com/techDirectory/_PROGMAN.GIF
In February, Tomi Ahonen compared dropping MeeGo for WP7 to Microsoft in the 80s dropping the first version of Windows a few months before release, and going for Mac OS. Now I think he was right. I guess I'll just hold on to my 2330.
You're right [0], but I think it's too much to expect the tech press to make this distinction. Does it really matter if the N9 uses MeeGo or a version of Maemo that is compatible with the MeeGo APIs? The bottom line is that Nokia has a compelling smartphone platform other than WP7.
As they transition into their first act as handset hired guns, Nokia produce a sexy piece of industrial design featuring the OS which caused them to finally throw in the towel, in a form so simple they couldn't screw it up.
And they didn't.
And they may have accidentally produced the second most interesting phone of the year? ...which also happens to be a dead end.
The N9 would be underpowered if it were released today; the trick where videos continue playing as they're swiped into the multitasking ether is cute, but time will tell how well it can perform those tricks when it's been piloted for a few days (or months) by a careless human without so much as a reboot, especially as compared to the dual-core, spec'd-out superphones it will have to compete against this Fall/Holiday.
Also, something something apps. Even if you only need 10 of them. I'm in the "you need the ecosystem to draw the developers to make the two or more third-party apps you give a damn about" camp.
All that notwithstanding, aesthetically and (to the extent that I can infer anything of value from the video demos up now) in terms of ui/ux execution, this thing looks really good.
Physically, it somehow looks as just I would expect of an object which, when slid across the surface of another, would cause music (or anything else) to come out of the second object. Even if it's an unexpected hit, in 5 years it'll still probably look like a 3303. But for now I think it looks more like the future than any computer we've carried in our pockets to date.
Regardless of the quality of the software experience, the hardware execution makes me feel like Nokia is positioned well in the role they're assuming. It actually makes me wish they'd compete directly against HTC/Samsung on Android as well, although admittedly I have no idea when, if ever, their agreement with msft would allow them to do such a thing.
If I could ignore the part of me which is fairly confident they'll release a slight variation on this running WP7 within the same general timescale that the N9 is on the market and shift most of their resources/support in that direction, I may actually have considered purchasing a Nokia in 2011 or 2012, something I would not have assumed at any point in the last 3 or 4 years.
Have Nokia actually committed to dumping MeeGo? It seems like if it achieves unexpected success there should be room to course correct.
For example, OS/2 was supposed to be Microsoft's future in the late 80s, and Windows was a stopgap. It wasn't even clear there would be a Windows 3.0 at all, until a couple of developers secretly took on the task of getting Windows running in protected mode (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/02/02/365...) .
No, they never said they would dump MeeGo. They said they would be dumping Symbian, and left MeeGo as a research project for "future disruption". Of course, they have stated to fully commit to Windows Phone.
Recently they have been backtracking a bit and promised to keep updating/supporting Symbian until 2016, but the plans for MeeGo are unclear. However, they have stated that they will continue providing OTA updates for the N9, but that doesn't really mean anything.
I'm sure they don't really know the place for MeeGo right now, especially with the pressure from MS and the current success of N9.
I don't think it's necessarily incoherent to keep both around as this might give them a way to more easily try out ideas without whatever overhead of having to fit into the MS platform. In the future there might be some degree of convergence, e.g. Microsoft will probably eventually open up the marketplace to native code (maybe at the same time they move to an NT Windows kernel) and Nokia could port Qt.
Does anyone really believe Nokia's actual product will look like that demo?
I kinda recall this not happening quite a few times in the past.. (n97 anyone?)
Nokia has been losing wealthy customers for years, but they dominate the market in Africa and Asia. Symbian seems hopelessly out of date, but it's also very frugal, which allows Nokia to cram a lot of functionality onto very cheap hardware.
If you look at the market from the bottom up rather than the top down, you see what MeeGo is for. It's not there to take on the likes of Android and iOS, that's why Nokia have gone WP7 for that market. It's designed as an aspirational upgrade for S60 users. That's prime territory, for a number of reasons.
Nokia are the only non-Shanzai manufacturer to really understand developing markets. The Nokia 1100 isn't just the biggest selling mobile phone ever, it's the biggest selling consumer electronics device, having sold over 250m units. The killer features of that handset are a really bright torch, a dustproof keypad and 400 hours of battery life.
The N9 hardware is outdated by design. The Cortex A8 that powers it is a relatively very cheap part. The N9 is a high-end handset in other respects, but that is entirely consistent with Nokia's model. Expect to see a feature-stripped version of the N9 shortly, with a plastic chassis, cheap LCD, basic camera and so on. The early adopters pay for the R&D, allowing Nokia to launch the cheap version at a killer price. Look at the E71 and E63 for an example of this in action.
Nokia are playing a much cleverer long game than anyone gives them credit for. They have more brand equity than all other handset manufacturers combined, albeit mainly amongst very poor customers. Nokia's future success won't be found by beating Apple, it will be found by beating the Shanzai boys.