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Nokia cash for Symbian

Nokia has borrowed €500 million from the European Investment Bank to fund development of Symbian handsets and technology, as the competition heats up to see whom is most open. The money is a five-year loan, and intended to fund research and development at Nokia. The company reckons that's going to trickle down to the Symbian …

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The Badger
Flame

Gravy Train

"The Symbian Foundation can't open up quite yet: the OS still has huge chunks of licensed code in it"

By this, the author presumably means "huge chunks of proprietary code in it" given that open source (or Free Software) code has a licence, too.

And given that the EIB is an arm of the EU, how about lending (or just giving) money to new initiatives which might actually benefit from an injection of cash? That instead of pouring cash into a member of a cartel whose aim is to exclude competition by waving patents at newcomers and lobbying for extended "intellectual property" regulations, all in order to shore up the market positions of its members.

I can't see how bailing Nokia out is "furthering EU policy objectives" (from the EIB's "about" page), unless those objectives were written on the back of brown envelopes. There are plenty of other ways a large corporation can raise capital even in today's financial climate.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Nokia simply doesn't understand community development

It's taken over 3 years for Nokia to open source all of the software components in their Nokia Internet Tablet Maemo software, and Nokia are still nowhere near close to completing that task, and judging by various official comments never will.

I really don't hold out much hope for Symbian which will always be a Nokia effort from now on, and since the quality of Nokia software development is utterly attrocious (as evidenced by much of the crash-happy software running on my S60 FP2 Nokia phone, or on Nokia servers, or that has been produced by Nokia for their tablets) I really don't think Nokia have much chance in future of producing a product that will match the quality of a well developed community software project. Or anything from Apple.

Nokia and software simply don't go well together, but the do make nice hardware however. Perhaps Nokia should give up software development entirely and become a hardware OEM and let others more gifted do the software development... Or maybe that's the point of open sourcing Symbian? They'll have to shoot the corporate Nokia lawyers first though.

Andy Moore
Paris Hilton

Hey Good Looking

How true, I finally took the plunge to break away from Palm, I could not face Apple so plumped for the HTC Touch HD. I say to myself that it has great battery life, great screen etc etc but at the end of the day it is also a lovely looking piece of kit (so is the iphone) and that swung it.

The G1 was one of the ugliest phones I have seen in ages, the new Palm Pre looks nice but I have given up waiting for them.

Like partners you know you should look for the hidden depths, the intellect and so on but if the outward appearance does not attract you in the first place how will you find out the other answers :-)

Paris as I am sure she may have hidden depths but who will find them.

Tim Bates

I don't think Google stopped the Agora...

I'm fairly sure Mr Kogan aborted the Agora to prevent issues for end users. The screen was very low res, and dialogs would have fallen off the bottom (if not in the release version, a later release would have done so).

He could have sold them all and then told users too bad, but they would never have bought a Kogan product again then.

Tim Schomer
Boffin

Phone/PDA O/S

"For while the industry argues the benefits of different OSs punters don't give a toss - they are still buying phones on the basis of good-looking hardware"

Hmmm, Nope. I specifically look for the O/S before I go for a phone/etc.. since I have a toolbox of applications that have taken me a while to put together via various sources, and that I use on a day to day basis.

New (or different) O/S means that I need to find these apps again (and mosylt have to pay for them again) and that's just for the device, there's all the host (PC etc) communications and connectivity software to re-install.

This is why a LOT of businesses stick with a particular flavour of phones (very often Nokia) as it vastly reduces re-training time and cost, and most business people know how to fly a Nokia phone.

Admittedly this decision might mean that you don't have the newest features or the flashiest interface but at least it's not confusing the users all the time with changes - this means everyone wins. Individuals however can make their own choices.

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