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The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

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Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#111

Post by zelos »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #63

I still have one in a drawer. I worked at Nokia at the time. These were awesome phones. But they were deliberately crippled by management that preferred other platforms they had. So, several devices originally earmarked for Maemo/Meego (the name changed at some point) actually shipped with Symbian instead. Some fun facts about Maemo: Shipped in 2006 with the N770. Had a tablet UI based on X and GTK, a mozilla based b…

> One of those unfortunate decisions was the decision to swap out GTK for QT;

That was kind of swings and roundabouts, though. The second version of the Maemo app I worked on ended up being a major rewrite Gtk->Qt thanks to the switch, but Qt was so much better.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#114

Post by z3t4 »

Nokia knew they where about to get eaten by iPhone and Android phones, so they made a exit plan and sold to Microsoft. Microsoft didn't like open source so they replaced the OS with their proprietary Windows OS - one OS/platform on all devices (phone,tablet,desktop) was a novel idea, windows 8 was great on phones and tablets, but everyone hated the UI on desktop.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#115

Post by sumtechguy »

Spooky23 wrote: post #25
rchaud wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largely the same thing happened at Blackberry. Because the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive in the US, Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device, the BB Storm. It was released as a Verizon exclusive in late 2008, and coincided with the release of HTC/Tmobile G1, the first Android phone. BB tried to argue that BBOS6 was a click trackball based OS and would not transition to touch w…

Verizon was pretty hilarious with denial early on. I recall them coming to talk about what a piece of garbage the iPhone was to our CIO, and how BlackBerry would bury them, etc. Then the CIO pulls out his iPhone and demos it. Lol. One of the reps flipped to AT&T a few weeks later. It’s really a shame actually, the BB was a great device and had an unbeatable security model for enterprises for a long time. iPhone is ju…

That verizon would do that is not surprising. They did not want to budge on those dataplan costs. Touting 'superior network' as their selling point. It was not until they tried to move into M2M that they realized no one was going to pay 45 bucks per MB and that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint would sell data and text at a much more reasonable rate. The original iPhone was neat but not much better than everything else out there in that category. Its one killer feature was that unlimited plan. That turned a remote device from something you did very little with because you did not want to get reamed on the data plans, to something you could hook the internet up to. It took verizon ages to realize it.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#116

Post by toyg »

simonh wrote: post #104
toyg wrote: post #33

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive to…

I cut my teeth on GUI development with PyQT back in the day. I couldn't afford an N900 at the time, but was sorely tempted. Ironically the best mobile platform for hacking GUI and mobile apps in Python now is, er, iOS. Pythonista gives access to almost the entire iOS API suite (and slightly hacky access to all of it), even has a GUI builder built-in, and is highly programmable directly on the device. Pyto is pretty c…

You still cannot ship the resulting apps though. One has to hack around with the likes of Kivy to get that. On Maemo you could just ship a Deb (at least outside the braindead Nokia store, which was restricted to C++).

The sad thing is, I remember attending a PyConUK about 10 years ago where this was a clear item in the keynote (by Van Lindberg, iirc): "the Python story on mobile is non-existent". Everybody agreed it was a priority.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#117

Post by [deleted] »

toyg wrote: post #33

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive to…

[deleted]

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#118

Post by gambler »

rchaud wrote: post #6
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #5

A family friend worked as an outside something at Nokia HQ around 2007(?) when the iPhone was announced. Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the company that every button on these phones was one of the executives. And so you had multiple buttons/ways of doing one thing because consensus. Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way that so many European companies were between 1990…

Largely the same thing happened at Blackberry. Because the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive in the US, Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device, the BB Storm. It was released as a Verizon exclusive in late 2008, and coincided with the release of HTC/Tmobile G1, the first Android phone. BB tried to argue that BBOS6 was a click trackball based OS and would not transition to touch w…

>Verizon pressured Blackberry to rush the release of their first touchscreen device

It's hilarious how higher-level managers always pretend that they do hyper-intelligent long-term planning, but in reality this is usually what they resort to when things go south. Just rush things. Make someone compromise engineering either via stupid features or working long hours or both.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#119

Post by jjkaczor »

toyg wrote: post #33

I remember building simple PyQT apps on the N900, and then C++/Qt. At one point I was very tempted to start my own business and become a real developer for the platform while it was still "young", but it became apparent very quickly that Nokia was not seriously invested in it, and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive to…

"and in any case they were not interested in small devs (getting an account for their joke of a store was a byzantine process, and expensive too iirc)"

I had the exact same experience with RIM/Blackberry 957-era... Great device, completely clueless company regarding an independent software ecosystem.

Say what you will about Apple, but they truly knocked down walls and opened the mobile floodgates to independent developers.

Re: The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t

#120

Post by [deleted] »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #5

A family friend worked as an outside something at Nokia HQ around 2007(?) when the iPhone was announced. Apparently there was an ongoing joke inside of the company that every button on these phones was one of the executives. And so you had multiple buttons/ways of doing one thing because consensus. Sounds like they were just bogged down and crippled in a corporate way that so many European companies were between 1990…

[deleted]
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