News - Nokia says Microsoft talks are on schedule

[HEXUS]

Talks between Nokia and Microsoft proceeding as planned, with phones expected next year.

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[aidanjt]

Is it a matter of irony or prophecy that Nokia is shorthand for this river?

[kingpotnoodle]

Read more.

Next year? They should have kept a lid on it until next year then, Symbian now just looks like an OS in the hospice waiting to die, Maemo/Meego won't be taken seriously as it's apparent it doesn't have full backing... what informed consumer would now buy a Nokia smartphone? Not me that's for certain...

[Brewster0101]

So in 2012 Nokia will probably release a phone that is a year late and out of date. By then Apple and google will have pretty much buried the Nokia name.

[aidanjt]

Next year? They should have kept a lid on it until next year then, Symbian now just looks like an OS in the hospice waiting to die, Maemo/Meego won't be taken seriously as it's apparent it doesn't have full backing... what informed consumer would now buy a Nokia smartphone? Not me that's for certain...

The N9x0 products still generate massive nerd appeal. Obviously they don't represent a market majority by any stretch of the imagination. But they are extremely well informed.

[.havoc]

So in 2012 Nokia will probably release a phone that is a year late and out of date. By then Apple and google will have pretty much buried the Nokia name.

Google only (currently) supplies the platform, not the phone. So they wont be burying anything other than other platforms. Ultimately leading to the long overdue death of Symbian.

And Apple's market share is holding steady but not expanding. But your forgetting something quite crucial that not everyone wants a smartphone, and there is still quite a substancial market for people who a simple phone. This being a tech site we tend to forget that not everyone thinks like us, and the vast consumer market aren't well informed. My parents for example like Nokias because they are easy to use.

If Nokia can get the balance right between performance/value/simplicity on a well recognised platform, with an average joe market, it could be thing that brings Nokia back into the game. The use of the Win7 platform could potentially have a halo effect on them...

You never know

[TheAnimus]

its also worth noting that the metro UI is leagues ahead of all of the competition in terms of crisp simple UI, exactly what someone who didn't want many smart phone options would want.

[chrestomanci]

The N9x0 products still generate massive nerd appeal. Obviously they don't represent a market majority by any stretch of the imagination. But they are extremely well informed.

Those Maemo/Meego products would have nerd appeal if there was the expectation that Nokia would continue to support them, or if they where sufficiently open that the community can support them despite Nokia abandoning them.

As it is, some of the software on those devices is closed source, and you can't re-flash the firmware unless the firmware is digitally signed by Nokia, so in their current state the Nokia Linux devices are only useful if Nokia is supporting them. For obvious reasons this is looking unlikely going forward.

Even in the past when Maemo was a Nokia supported platform, long term support was problematic. I have a Nokia N810 internet tablet. It does not have a Cellular interface but it does have WiFi, Bluetooth, a nice keyboard and a touch screen. It could be a great device (Perhaps running Meego, Android, or the new Ubuntu release for tablets), but Nokia cut off updates a couple of years ago, and there is no possibility of community taking up support because the device drivers for Audio and Graphics are closed source, and it can only be updated with digitally signed firmware images.

After having been stung by this, in the future, I would only buy a Nokia Meego device if it had a future after Nokia cuts off support. That means fully open source for everything except the baseband processor, and user-land apps which are not depended on by other parts of the system or needed for normal operation. (For example, If Nokia want to bundle a copy of Angry Birds, then I won't expect the source, because it is just a game, I don't need it to run the rest of my system, and nothing else will break if I have to remove it. But if Nokia don't give me the source of the graphics driver, then I can't apply a security update for X11 or the Kernel without Nokia's help). I would also want a way to flash the device with a self compiled image, so I am not dependent on Nokia for that.

Unfortunately I don't think Nokia is likely to understand this, so the Meego Nokia N9 (Or whatever they decide to call it) will probably not be popular, giving Nokia the Excuse they need to cancel the program, which is probably what Steve Ballmer want his puppet Elop to do anyway.

[aidanjt]

You don't need to 'reflash the firmware' because the whole OS is entirely writeable. Hence the nerd appeal.

[kingpotnoodle]

I have an N900. I am a nerd, and also paid to work with Linux on a daily basis, I understand very well what's going on under the UI and have customised the handset.

However I have not been pleased with my N900... for the earlier mentioned reasons of support basically, the platform has gone into a niche, sure there are a FEW good apps, but nothing like Android/iOS or even Symbian/Blackberry/WebOS. I had anticipated a quick move to Meego and a larger ecosystem (Nokia promised Maemo/Meego would be the future of the whole N series at one point), as it is now this probably won't happen. The official updates have been poor all along, never really fixed the missing features or noticeably fixed things like the dog slow browser (worst thing about all Nokia phones IMHO). When updates have come they have been problematic if certain modifications have been applied, making the process a colossal PITA.

I need my phone to work well it's not a toy I can break and live without for a while but I want more features than Maemo provides by default, considering how much the N900 cost it's been a huge disappointment, I'd have rather got another (cheaper) Symbian phone in hindsight (I had a string of Nokia, Symbian and Series 60 phones since the 90s, happy with them all, shame that platform ground to a halt as well).

So yeah, there is nerd appeal on paper... quickly reduced in practice. N900 makes a great device for Linux nerds to play with, not a great primary phone/tablet.

[aidanjt]

I never said it's a piece of shiny. Just an uber-nerd gadget.