Lots of comments & speculations but no good explanation of - Why?
Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
41–50 of 190 posts
Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
#42From business point of view i am bit curious to know why microsoft is started using Android OS? Android owned by Google and the biggest competitor of Microsoft. Despite of having nice operating system like Windows mobile, they are trying Android ! This gives good sign of co-operation between giants. Share your thoughts !
The Nokia/Microsoft deal hasn't completely gone through yet. Until it does, Microsoft is not legally allowed to have any say in Nokia's product decisions
Microsoft has been known to do a lot of things that they aren't legally allowed. In this case, I doubt they would not interfere if they didn't want to.
Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
#43Why call it X when they could call it X11?
Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
#44So Microsoft has a Linux distro. Interesting. Anybody care to hazard a guess what the future holds? My take is that this was well in development before the MS/Nokia deal went through (it has gone through, hasn't it?) and Microsoft were not (have not been) able to get it canned. Or, shock, horror, maybe Microsoft are testing the waters - they already make a bunch from Linux patents, maybe they want to see how much the…
How will Microsoft not be able to develop Mobile Office for Android? By most reporting[1], the office team has already had versions of office for iOS (and presumably Android) ready for quite some time. Their lack of release has been an internal political battle at Microsoft based on whether to postpone them until after the equivalent office apps are ready for RT. This is one of the biggest examples of decision making…
Office has a huge amount of legacy. I get that porting it to iOS had to be done. Microsoft provides Office for the Mac desktop. But porting to Android is a whole other story. Porting it to Android validates Android as a platform like nothing else. It'd be equivalent to Oracle releasing their DB server for Linux way back in the day, it gave the platform instant enterprise-cred whereas before it really only had hacker-cred and FOSS evangelist support despite the knowledge that IBM was spending a whole bunch of money on it internally.
You're right that Nokia has a track record of supporting and developing across multiple OSs but how has this turned out for them in the long run?
Samsung are right to keep their options open but I think they should go the Amazon/Nokia route and differentiate on top of Android. Having said that Samsung is probably more than large enough and has a large enough R&D budget to pursue multiple strategies.
It's really hard to see how this plays out. I thought we'd never ever see the day when Microsoft developed for Linux or Android unless as a bridge to their own world. I thought past history, pride, lack of trust, wrong momentum, or whatever would stymie them from making the transition. If I were a beige box manufacturer I would be extremely concerned that the Microsoft may move on from phones and tablets to laptops or even PCs, now that hell has frozen over you never know what they might do.
Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
#45Ars Technica [1] put it best. These phones are dead on arrival. This is not the first time Nokia has done something like this. It released a Meego version of the N9, its long-in-development Symbian successor, before immediately abandoning the platform and switching to Windows Phone. This isn't a sign of some deep strategy. It's just standard Nokia platform craziness. 1: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/02/nokia-to…
Well the idea was good the implementation sucks as usual. Android without the play store is not as useful or flexible and you can't compete with other budget phones which do have the play store so you're shooting yourself in the foot. As log as there's an easy way for end users to put it on it shouldn't be such a big deal though. What I suspect they are attempting to do is get back into the low budget phone market wh…
They have no option here - using Google's app store comes with severe attachments that Microsoft is not likely to accept.
My guess is that they are aiming at lower end of market where the price is important, and betting on developers to port their apps. Which could actually happen if porting is not a big issue.
OTOH, Google is putting more and more stuff in closed source part of OS, so the platforms will inevitably diverge. It might be a bit late for Nokia to do this... we'll see.
Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
#46For others like me, the press release says: "a family of smartphones that run Android(TM) apps". Yes, other app stores can be sideloaded, and they even mention a few, but not Google's Play Store.
Personally, I doubt getting Play Store on it would be as simple as sideloading (sideloading itself isn't much different from what other app stores do) because of Google's Play Services.
Hopefully root (or a ROM, if necessary) could help with that.
Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft (and their staff individually) actually contribute to the Linux kernel so this isn't that crazy. You can already get office 365 for iOS. Not sure about android but it's logical. This appears to be the budget/developing world side of things. I'd prefer to see WinPhone on low end devices to be honest - it's really good even on low spec handsets. I see this as that much marketed "devices and services offering"…
Nobody I know uses Microsoft's lockin. Some prefer google's or apple's, but increasing numbers are trying to escape from being a data source for advertising and the NSA and ditching google, apple, and MS.
I agree that this is the next hurdle. To just from Microsoft's desktop embrace to Google's cloud embrace is to switch one master for another even though Google has shown itself to be an excellent open-source champion in terms of their Summer of Code effort and the amount of client (and server?) software they develop in the open. But lock-in is lock-in no matter how comfy the handcuffs.
Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
#48spec: http://conversations.nokia.com/2014/02/24/nokia-x-family/ Looks rather poor. 800x480px on a 5-inch screen would be painful.
The Lumia 820 was 800x480 on a 4.3" screen, and I found it perfectly pleasant to use. 5" would be adequate for that end of the market.
It was less pleasant when I dropped it a foot and a half onto a carpeted floor and the screen cracked irreparably.
Maybe the idea is to recapture that market they used to dominate, of low-cost, robust phones with the very basics. (And snake.) Nowadays, of course, the 'very basics' includes web, email and suchlike. But not everybody wants the latest fad phone-game; they want their phones to, shock horror, communicate with people. Maybe they'll find a market that would otherwise go to the most rock-bottom terrible android handsets; pretty sure it'll be a better product than those.
Maybe they'll fail. Given it's where they excelled in the past, though, you can't blame them for trying.
Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
#49I can't find any hint of Home or Menu buttons, even soft.
Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
#50 If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.