The teams that did Maemo stuff etc. weren't allowed to ship any features before the Symbian side (which had more political and monetary power) had achieved feature parity...
I never understood this memo. All they had to do was to switch to MeeGo. There was no burning platform.
Hardware was great and software was great, but needed a bit more polish. MeeGo was more advanced than iOS in many ways at the time of this memo, and Maemo had been released way before the iPhone. The 770 was released in late 2005 and it was totally futuristic.
However, Elop had no interest in going this route. When MeeGo was released they dumped the project publicly shortly afterwards and then N9 was sold with no advertising. Despite this, it had a phenomenal demand.
I totally understood it as soon as it was leaked. MicroSoft exec joined a phone company as a CEO back when MS was trying to convince manufacturers to adopt Windows Phone. Double bonus: they could kill and incipient Linux competitor in one stroke.
If you've read the Halloween Documents or docs from the Comes case, it's quite clear: classic "love them to death."
An interesting point is that Nokia managed to sell its phone business to MS for a good amount. It was a sinking ship and MS phones never really took off, so who stooged whom is a good question.
I mean, given the potential the price wasn't that amazing. And had they manged to continue to finance MeGoo development with their phone line that could have also result in sale of tablets, laptops and potentially other devices.
Even if Nokia market share would have dropped to less then 10%, that would still have been profitable business for them, and would have made them a major player.
Going from being the dominate player in a major growing market to getting a few billion for it, is not really a success.
N9 was not "proper" MeeGo, internally it was still mostly Maemo Harmattan, followup to N900, though they had few canceled hardware projects between N9 and N900. MeeGo was suppposed to be co-developed with Intel, but it was never going to go anywhere, because neither Nokia or Intel had no idea what they were doing. Nokia wasn't built to be a software company and Intel has given up on x86 in phones.
Only reason why N9 ever was released is because they simply brutally cut down the scope of the project, e.g. dropping Qualcomm-based variant for US/CDMA markets (that one was repurposed to be their first Windows Phone).
I know, but despite being a weird hybrid between Maemo and MeeGo, it was really capable.
I used a N9 as my daily driver for 7 years. The card-based UI was incredibly elegant and easy to use with one hand. I prefer it to current iOS or Android. Besides, gestures blended really well with the curved screen edges. It had a great dark mode which also blended well with the AMOLED screen.
Offline GPS navigation was a pleasure to use, and unmatched till date. It had a terminal, which let me SSH anywhere to do quick jobs. I handled lots of tasks this way. For example, I used a remote Mutt instance running on my workstation to read email. The terminal was a real terminal running on the N9. For example, ifconfig could work on all network devices, including the mobile radio.
Messaging was highly integrated. Different services (e.g. XMPP, Skype, etc) were just addons. All contact management, chat and calls were performed from the same application irrespective of the protocol used to handle transport.
And lastly, it was an open device. You could install anything you wanted. It was truly Linux on your pocket.
I bought an N9 and had a very similar experience, and still look back on it warmly. It was an absolute joy to use, and I think the sleekest and most pleasant UX I've ever used.
Elop really robbed Nokia of what could have been an incredible product.
Have you tried SailfishOS? After some initial difficulties the project seems to be getting quite nice and the UX is heavily inspired by the N9. Same developers actually.
Intel gave up on x86 in phones right before Microsoft gave their Windows Mobile 10 Continuum demo, which was almost an eternity after the N9.
If N9 had been widely released and marketted and successful (it did well in small release, but who knows), that may have changed Intel's course. If Nokia hadn't abandoned it before release, it would have gotten application support; I joined WhatsApp around all this, and there were plans to support it as Symbian users were a large part of user base, so the next thing from Nokia was highly likely to be used, but not when Nokia drops it. Third party WA client development for the N9 was somewhat successful and became the start for a lot of other third party clients.
Similarly it seemed obvious early on, to me, that RIM should switch blackberry to Android with some customization aand port some apps over. They could still be a major player if they had done so. Instead they doubled down and buried their heads in the sand.
Maemo and MeeGo were sandbagged from the beginning because of Gnome and Gtk+, which were simply not fit for the job.
IMHO what Nokia should have done was release Qtopia phones from day 1, as an alternative to Symbian, and prepare the migration from Symbian to Qtopia after that. But they did it in reverse: first Symbian, then Symbian to whatever will be new (Maemo, MeeGo, who cares: something new to be developed, so a disadvantage of years), etc. It was stupid.
Glib, Gtk+ and various Gnome components were still running in Maemo and MeeGo.
N9 was released in 2011, by that time Nokia was already dead.
Trolltech was acquired in 2008. Nokia could have have a modern alternative to iOS and Android from day 1 but they made the terrible mistake of reinventing the wheel and trusting Gnome.
Maemo 5 (N900) and earlier were Gtk based, although PR1.2 update of Maemo 5 made Qt a first-class citizen, so you could use it to develop for N900. The UI (Hildon) stayed Gtk and worked pretty well.
Harmattan (Maemo 6 branded as MeeGo that shipped with N9) was Qt based from the start. Gtk wasn't officially supported at all there, although some support has been brought over by the community.
Also, I guess you have never actually used Qtopia? I did. It wasn't really a great base to build a smartphone platform on. It made a great feature phone though, and was a pretty nice demonstration platform for Qt Embedded. Nokia didn't have Qtopia until they brought Trolltech, which happened after several versions of Maemo were already shipped in working products.
I did use Qtopia. I found it a lot better than Symbian, and it was available. Nokia should have scrapped Maemo the moment they acquired Trolltech and rebase it on top of Qtopia. E. g. by adding X11 compatibility, if that's what they wanted to make ports of Linux applications easier. Nokia was essentially crawling with Maemo while Android and iOS where already walking. By the time Nokia walked with the N9, Android and iOS where running.
The burning platform memo was the worst of all: lots and lots of mobile app developers intended to develop for Maemo as the third platform because Nokia was still a huge leader and they trusted Nokia. The moment Elop announced Nokia was shifting to Windows Phone, with phones months away, and no possibility of reusing any code from another platform (only .NET allowed, no way to reuse any C/C++ base they were sharing on Android and iOS), that was the moment everybody dropped Nokia. Suicide.
Gnome and Gtk+ were not fit for phones: not prepared for small screen sizes, lack of adequate widgets, slow, difficult to develop for (types in Gtk+ were and still are a joke), etc. And first and foremost there was the attitude of those Gnome developers: entitled, reinventing the wheel all the time, arguing stupid arguments on purity... To this day, Gnome and Gtk+ are not fit or mobile (or Windows or Mac) yet.
That sounds a bit like a Gtk+ vs QT mud throwing contest.
The N900 had pretty good reviews and 2 more years of work could likely have made it even better. And Nokia had the developers and control to do what they wanted however arogant Gnome developers were.
I have developed for neither, so I can't really say.
That said, I have been using Gnome based desktop for 10 years now, so I'm bias towards it.
Let's compare the Nokia N900 (Nov 2009) to the Motorola Droid (Oct 2009).
They arrived at about the same time. They used the same CPU. They both had (approximately) 800x480 screens, which at the time was flagship class. They both used slide-out keyboards, removable batteries, a 5MP camera, 256MB of RAM, and some on-board storage plus a microSD slot. They weighed within 20g of each other.
The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative. Both had an official price of $600-650, but would actually be sold for $200-250 when bought with a 2 year carrier plan (that was the norm back then).
Maemo had a small developer community. Android had a medium-sized dev community. Android had marketing -- for about 2 years, people were calling all Android phones "Droids". Maemo had none.
> The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative.
N900 touchscreen was great. Not only was it perfectly readable in direct sunlight, it was also much more accurate than capacitive screens and not anywhere close to cheap resistive screens' clunkiness people usually imagine when hearing the term. The only issue I had with it was that they tend to develop issues after years of use, so my Nokia N900 does some very annoying ghosting these days.
True but the UI did often require the stylus to be pulled out. Compared to the capacitive screens it was pain to use. I did try and I used the N900 as a daily driver for a good couple of years but that UI wasn't designed for use without the stylus.
I still however miss Windows Phone, there were some major mis-steps by Microsoft (the intial side load / developer story) forcing a software break with the move to Windows Phone 8. However as a user provided you could live with the pre-installed apps it was a great phone.
> True but the UI did often require the stylus to be pulled out.
Interesting, I have used N900 for almost a decade and I found its stylus completely unnecessary, never used it. As mentioned earlier, the touchscreen started to be annoying to use in its final years once it started to misbehave, but before that I absolutely preferred it to capacitive screens as it was harder to trigger accidental touches with it.
The N900 was as close to a pure Linux phone as you could get at the time.
People ran IRC clients directly on the console on it. A few friends of mine ran them as IRC hosts on their home network well into the 2010s - it was basically a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard and display =)
The N900 had 32 GB of storage, which was absurdly huge at the moment. That phone could have seen sold at $300-400 with 2-4 GB of storage, which was more than enough at the time. My first Android phone, in 2010, had 0.5 GB of storage.
My company back then did some NDA'd research prototype work for Nokia about Linux and touchscreens. My personal conspiracy theory always was that they had tied the company so strongly to Symbian that they just couldn't announce anything else. I hypothesized that they only got some big companies on board Symbian by promising to be "exclusively Symbian for X years" -- and the X ended up being too long, the industry moved on before they could move off of Symbian. Or they were just too afraid of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
They had everything they needed to run Linux on (some of) their phones quite early on. Battery life might not have been great, but they had plenty of Linux-running mobile hardware around, kept in bags outside of the building.
