Nokia touted Meego to rivals, but nobody wanted to know

Maego on N900

There s a community effort to get meego to work on the N900. Last time I checked there was a developer edition for the brave/fool-hardy to try at their own risk.

Says the disinterested reporter

Who would trust anything Elop says when his agenda is so obvious?

I will long lament

.. N's decision to rip up what they were doing and just go to m$. I maintain the fact elop is a m$ stooge and does not have the Finnish company values at heart. Hard to innovate in the suffocating world of wp7.

Surely

... going with Maemo/Meego would have been following Apple's lead here: take an established platform and whip up a UI layer on top of it like Apple did with BSD. Failing that, gang up with Google for a similar outcome where the option of going your own way would have existed if for no other end but to keep the partnership equal. But no, instead, insist on being locked-in on a the newest incarnation of an unproven platform with a solid track record of fail.

I call this a marketing event

Nokia had Maemo longer than they were teamed to do Meego and even had Maemo on one of their phone lines. What kind of reality is Elop selling to think Nokia was out trying to sell vendors on Meego without even having it on their own phones?

It sounds more like Elop is making stuff up to create a new history so to curb the ongoing discussions of his tight ties with Microsoft.

Of course nobody wanted it

After seeing what Nokia did to symbian once they had control of it, of course no right minded mobile company would want to waste time on it.

Once more a nice idea taken by Nokia and systematically smothered.

Elop's appointment?

Soooo tempting to call it a "disappointment" instead. But anyway.

I don't know just what they were touting but recalling the analysis of the symbian offering, er, well, if I'd known that I'd stayed well away from both, were I executive of a rival phone maker. Yes, hindsight, but it's all I have to go on so it'll have to do.

I never could get all-abuzz about nokia's linux venture. I mean, sure, an open OS is a good thing to have, and I sorely miss this with my e52. But putting that Out There isn't enough in the face of several other big names doing the same. You have to have that something special that makes people pick your thing over the rest. That or you spin off the thing like nokia botched so monumentally with symbian. So it's no real surprise that nobody wants to run the risk of déjà vu all over again. That'll haunt nokia for a while to come.

Right now apple's iOS is hot, hot stuff but not available. google's android is also pretty hot with the crowd that cares for phones by os, and it is available. Then why bother with someone else's also-ran? If you're going to go that way it's just as easy to do it yourself. I'd guess that's where bada is coming from. And windows mobile^Wphone? Meh in a can. A pretty expensive can.

Is that going to help nokia shed the stain of a series of fsckups? I don't know, but I don't see much brilliance in what they're trying to do. I don't see any je ne sais quoi that would make people run to them. Instead they keep on repelling people, like by en passant redefining "open", handily pissing off a lot of people even more than they already have.

Reality check then. Nokia, still failing? Check.

Yes. This.

>IT'S MY PHONE, NOT APPLES, NOT GOOGLES, MINE ALL MINE MUUHAHAHAHAHA

As GregC observed above, the Desire Z seems to be the closest thing to a viable replacement... but I actually frickin' own my N900, and somehow, I don't get the impression that even a rooted Android phone is yours in the same way that a Maemo device is.

Maybe I'm wrong about that - I really really really really want to be. And certainly, the N900 and Maemo are rather lacking in many ways. But nonetheless, in the meantime, I, too, am going to nurse as much life out of this thing as I can.

Nokia

Nokia's potential of releasing this with Symbian for lower power devices (they share the same software layer and SDK) wasn't enough when they had a chance to release it for a couple of hundred million devices? Elop is just retarded. No other platform then Symbian/MeeGo was wide enough for Nokia to survive as a company. All other platform are quite bluntly for different companies, not even tiny Motorola could survive on the Windows Phone market share. The software framework was already there, it actually was Symbian driving it on. Losing that means losing the drive to develop the Qt/QtMobility toolkit. It definitively was more enterprise and consumer ready then WP7 is gonna be for quite some time. Since October we still haven't got much of a Exchange support, IPSec VPN, on-device encryption, sockets in .NET CF, Silverlight or Flash in the browser, native code, multitasking for third party apps or stuff like just god damn Spotify client. Even when they fix that, Nokia might be able to sell 20 million smarts phones a year on WP7 and that's just funny they sold about 110 million Symbiandevices last year.

A company that sold 460 million devices a year and made profit will probably sell something like 150 - 200 million phones in a couple of years and will have had to sell their manufacturing capacity to their competitors, given Microsoft and their WP7 phone competitors navigation software and data for nothing and have to get rid of more then half of it's 60 000 employees. Their will be nothing left like in any typical American downsizing, the odd thing is that it happens on a profitable company and kills all development of mobile operating systems in Europe.