back to article Why doesn't Nokia buy Palm?

Nokia has endured a painful two years - a kind of corporate Lost Weekend. Instead of alcoholism, Nokia found itself distracted by completely avoidable, self-inflicted corporate restructuring and IP issues, and so technologies we saw two years ago will only start to appear in phones next year. This was very bad timing. Instead …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.

Page:

      1. LTE
        WTF?

        Clueless

        Easy to be an armchair quarteback Andrew... So lets look ahead.

        -2010 product roadmaps for all major carriers are set, with the exception of filling some volume gaps where the demand exceeds the supply estimate.

        -Nokia has said they will gain value share & smartphone share in 2010. On 4/22 you can listen again.

        -Adoption of Symbian ^3 will be rapid in 2 half 2010. Carries have already committed globally.

        -2011 product roadmaps will be negotiated in earnest Q3 & Q4 2010, with Meego & Symbian ^4 capturing a significant slice of it.

        -There is not one global operator outside of NA interested in the niche WebOS for 2011 & beyond.

        1. Andrew Orlowski (Written by Reg staff)

          Re: Clueless

          You missed a few out: Nokia helping to broker a lasting Middle East peace agreement (Q3), Nokia Research proving room temperature cold fusion (Q4) then commercialising it (1H 2011).

  1. Levente Szileszky
    Stop

    RE: Neil7 - "Oh dear, even more stupid PoV"...

    ...please, PLEASE STOP with your inane, illogical NONSENSE....

    "If you think WebOS is easier to develop for then it really shows you know very little about Qt and where Nokia/Intel/MeeGo are headed."

    Oh no... yeah, how much better to develop like that than, say, IN MY BROWSER - see http://ares.palm.com/Ares/index.html -, ad absurdum even on my phone...?

    MeeGo... to pee...

    Gosh... did I mention I hate these tech evangelists high on company Kool-Aid...? ;)

  2. Chris Beach

    Not Nokia, one of the others though?

    I can't see Nokia wanting the 3 OS's. I think they'd much rather push Symbian ^3/^4 out, and keep that push concentrated. People arguing about the difficulties of development, seem to forget that its been around for the longest and has the largest install base...so developers will never be hard to find.

    However Samsung:, ditch the stupid and unproven bada crap, hopefully they haven't pissed to much money on it. They can make the phones, and have the size to support both Android and WebOS devices. The only issue I can see is can they scale either os down to the dumb phone range?

    HTC does sound good, but it could alienate them from their current core of winmo and android, so unless they came out with a set of outstanding webos devices.

    The other option would be one of the more Japan/Asia corps like Panasonic, Toshiba etc that want more of an eu/us presence.

  3. Christian Berger

    Why not an open bootloader?

    Why not just have an open bootloader so I can install any OS I want?

  4. Sander van der Wal
    Jobs Halo

    Is WebOS good for a "software-and-services" company.

    There is no doubt that Nokia will alienate their remaining developers ("both of them", as they say) if they would buy Palm. But that isn't important, the question is whether Nokia will be able to sell more devices and more software and services if they would buy Palm for WebOS.

    It might be true that WebOS is better for writing third party apps, I have not looked at it. But will it enable Nokia itself to write better software and services? I don't think so. Let us look at the other attempts to create a software economy based upon web apps on mobile.

    1) Apple did it in the first year of iPhone OS. Failure, the apps craze happened after Apple released their native SDK and put a proper App Store in iTunes.

    2) Nokia and their widsets. Failure. Ovi Store however, which is a kind of App Store, is catching on and making more and more money for participatring developers.

    3) Palm and WebOS widgets. Failure. Palm released a native SDK, but after alienating their old developers en not having lots of phones out, going native did not work anymore.

    Also, Nokia's first Ovi client was a widset, AFAIK, and it was not very good at all. That means that widgets are not mature enough to write software that can compete with native software.

    Conclusion: you cannot write compelling software on a smartphone using widgets. And that is bad news for a software and services company.

    There is also of course the in-company wars that will start when Nokia starts using WebOS. Nokia has been gearing up to dump Symbian and start using Linux and Qt for a long time, I don't think it will manage another internal OS war.

    The exact OS won't matter much at this time for device sales. That might change if people have spend a lot of cash on software for a certain platform, so they will tend to stay with that platform. And that is good for device sales. Nokia is at a disadvantage here, buying a Nokia does not guarantee that your software will move to the next device you buy from Nokia. Adding another platform (WebOS) to the mix (S40, Symbian, Meego) makes this worse.

    What might help is that Nokia replaces it's own widsets with WebOS'es high level layers, putting it on top of Symbian and MeeGo, as a Qt alternative.

    1. Andrew Orlowski (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Is WebOS good for a "software-and-services" company.

      +5

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    eh?

    What are these so called dynamite patents people are on about? Forgive me if I am being ignorant but isn't WebOS based on Webkit which was originally developed by Apple anyway (and open source)? How is that ammunition?

    1. Liam Proven Silver badge
      Thumb Down

      KHTML + Apple = Webkit

      Webkit is indeed open source & was developed by Apple, but it's a refinement of the KDE Project's KHTML renderer framework. It's not original to Apple at all.

      1. Levente Szileszky
        Thumb Up

        RE: KHTML + Apple = Webkit

        Pssst, don't confuse the Faithful - in their mind everything was developed by Apple...

        ...which is, as we know, literally never true, there's not a single case (hardware, software, feature, service, anything) when Apple developed (forget inventions) anything that did not exist before.

  6. Neil 7
    Go

    It's all about applications

    At the end of the day, the OS isn't that important anymore for Nokia - it's the application layer which is now their primary focus, hence the unification that will come through Qt (a recent Nokia aquisition).

    Linux, Symbian, whatever - as long as the OS supports the Qt environment and APIs, Nokia doesn't care.

    Since WebOS is based on Linux, it simply means that WebOS is just a user interface. Does WebOS support Qt and the associated APIs? No, and assuming that Qt support is ever added it would simply be turning WebOS into a Qt/Linux distribution, ie. MeeGo, which is well advanced within Nokia and has much broader support.

    And that's why Nokia buying Palm for WebOS is such a ridiculous concept - it's already heading in the right direction with MeeGo and Qt, so switching to or even being distracted by WebOS would be a very big mistake.

    The number of end user sales doesn't justify the continued existence of WebOS in any shape or form under Nokia - I wouldn't be surprised if the Nokia N900 has already sold more units than all WebOS devices put together.

    Nokia should buy Palm solely for whatever interesting IP they may have, at a bargain basement price, then close it down and consign it to history. And with a bit of luck Levente turns out to be a Palm employee... ;-)

    1. Giles Jones Gold badge

      Bah

      Since when have open source hobbyists ever produced a really brilliant UI? they may be good at the API and architectural side of things (although they get carried away and overcomplicate things), but Palm has produced a much better mobile interface than any of the other open source mobile projects.

      An attractive, usable interface that rivals even Apple.

  7. OMGeek
    Unhappy

    Sorry, another United States-ian perspective...

    I'd be sad about this only because that means I'll never see another WebOS phone on CDMA (please spare your CDMA vs GSM banter). The GSM providers here are gawd awful, and apparently hate Nokia, given the complete lack of devices available (or perhaps it's the other way around in this case, which is entirely believable)

    :(

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      CDMA providers aren't big fans either

      Verizon only lists 2 Nokia handsets, a 7705 and a 2705 (no smartphones) and Sprint doesn't offer ANY handsets from Nokia.

      I can only presume that the lack of decent Nokia handsets in the US is because of a failure of competition, so the providers are big enough to ignore their customers needs.

  8. This post has been deleted by its author

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Astute reporting... but more on perceptions..

    I think so too. This is a golden opportunity. North Americans are very partisan. One of the factors in the granny phone's success was the demise of Motorola as phone maker - similarly RIM v Palm earlier. NA insulars want 'local' brands. Locals don't much like Nokia because it's 'euro'

    A Palm in the portfolio would create that entirely false 'made in USA' feel that makes effete men and grannies go get an iProne.

    1. OMGeek
      Thumb Down

      ugh.

      I'm pretty sure HTC is not "local" and we're buying them up left and right. Same with Lg or Samsung or, hell, even Motorola. Apple is the only local phone "maker" besides Palm, and only one of them appear to be doing well... and their phones aren't even "made in USA" for that "made in USA feel". Try China.

      Take a look at any of the websites of any of the NA providers. There is practically no offering for anything Nokia. There's never any advertising for Nokia. Ever. Don't try to make the people on this side of the pond look snobbish when we don't even have a say in the matter. I'd buy Nokia in a heartbeat if we had ANY decent offerings.

      Thumbs down, though it's not the finger I'd prefer to show you.

Page:

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like