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Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

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Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

#121

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

antimagic wrote: post #36
quanticle wrote: post #13

Ars 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…

I wouldn't be so quick to discount this move. It could be a classic Microsoft embrace/extend/extinguish move. They lost the first round on mobile phone platforms, but this would allow them to very quickly create a platform that has developer support - after all, porting your apps from standard Android to an AOSP fork is easier than than porting it to Windows Phone. Especially as Microsoft/Nokia is pretty much the onl…

> after all, porting your apps from standard Android to an AOSP fork is easier than than porting it to Windows Phone

So is this REALLY Android if you need to port your applications to run on it? How much of what makes an Android phone Android is AOSP and how much is the Google services that sit on top of it?

Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

#122

Post by Oletros »

mhaymo wrote: post #104
Oletros wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone has already changed it.

I'm still seeing it saying 4.4.1, with this as the source: http://www.nokiapoweruser.com/2014/01/08/nokia-normandy-show...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X

Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

#123

Post by akumen »

Aoyagi wrote: post #27
akumen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I counted four. Feature phone OS (ODM), Asha, Windows Phone and Nokia X Platform as they are calling it.

The "featurephone" OS is S40 and it's in both "classic" phones (e.g. 515) and Ashas.... unless there is something I've missed completely. And come to think of it, I haven't heard any confirmation of closing the production of S40 phones, so I guess that'd make it 3.

The classic feature phones is an older Symbian variant and Asha Platform OS is S40 from what I can tell. Symbian is still king in a lot of countries so Nokia will have to support it for a long time.

Struggle to see how this helps Nokia. Nokia Xs are smart phones at a price of a feature phone. Great! Welcome to an already very crowded low-margin market of cheap Androids in India, Brazil, China and Africa, the same market MS will enter with cheap 8.1 devices and where Firefox OS devices are heading. Yet, Nokia Xs have little extra to offer to the consumers that would significantly differentiate themselves from the competition.

Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

#124

Post by CalRobert »

beagle3 wrote: post #114
spiritplumber wrote: post #60

Installing Google Play on this should be trivial anyway, what's the big deal? The problem is that it's another iphone lookalike. I WANT A DAMN KEYBOARD!

> Installing Google Play on this should be trivial anyway, what's the big deal? How do you install Google Play on a non-google certified phone? e.g. CM? (honest question - iPhone user here planning to jump ship)

You can download the google apps (including Play) by simply downloading them from http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Google_Apps. From there just open play and install Maps, Earth, etc. as usual. Works like a charm!

Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

#125

Post by Zigurd »

I used to think it was a 100% lock that this project would get squished like bug the moment the Microsoft acquisition closes. Microsoft probably has a SWAT team of HR drones and lawyers sitting in vans outside Nokia offices to ensure that they do not incur any Apache license patent obligations, and that this project team gets sent to the Siberia customer support office.

But now I think there are two other possibilities. Not high probability, but possible:

1. Satya Nadella thinks differently about Windows Phone, and Microsoft embraces an Android-based product, much in the way that Amazon has. Not because Windows Phone is a turkey, but because Windows Phone is actually quite similar to Android technologically, and it makes sense to create applications that run on both, equally well, with equal features, in order to help Microsoft products penetrate the mobile market faster. The Nokia product becomes the most efficient way for Windows users to get a Microsoft app suite on an Android device, but any Android user will have access to the same app suite. Maybe Windows Phone prospers. Maybe not. But Microsoft wins either way.

2. Microsoft backs out of the Nokia deal. Satya Nadella thinks Ballmer was high when he bought a troubled OEM, including factories that make Series 30 handsets, especially now that Google got rid of Motorola. So all the lawyers that are not worrying about those Apache license patent clause issues are worrying about how to back out of the deal while minimizing penalty obligations. This would be a momentary embarassment, with many years of serenity as a reward.

Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

#126

Post by JunkDNA »

igravious wrote: post #44
m0nastic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

>It'd be equivalent to Oracle releasing their DB server for Linux way back in the day

I think Microsoft should look less to Apple and Google for inspiration and more to Oracle. There are a lot of similarities between the two companies: enterprise focus, pure software company, lots of legacy applications to support, etc...

Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

#127

Post by Zigurd »

akumen wrote: post #123
Aoyagi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "featurephone" OS is S40 and it's in both "classic" phones (e.g. 515) and Ashas.... unless there is something I've missed completely. And come to think of it, I haven't heard any confirmation of closing the production of S40 phones, so I guess that'd make it 3.

The classic feature phones is an older Symbian variant and Asha Platform OS is S40 from what I can tell. Symbian is still king in a lot of countries so Nokia will have to support it for a long time. Struggle to see how this helps Nokia. Nokia Xs are smart phones at a price of a feature phone. Great! Welcome to an already very crowded low-margin market of cheap Androids in India, Brazil, China and Africa, the same mar…

Asha did well in developing markets, and Nokia has an attractive app/ecosystem suite for low-end phones. But Series 40 OS is not competitive with Android. Nokia X goes straight at that problem. If you are careful about the apps, especially the browser, Android will run well on VERY cheap hardware.

Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

#128

Post by dandrews »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #100
bbx wrote: post #62

I remember when Nokia phones were crushing their opponents in terms of user experience, despite the incredible amount of devices they offered. The one-in-all blue button was remarkable. There were no OS, just different brands. Nokia failed to make the leap to smartphones though. I still believe they were the only company capable of competing with the iPhone by delivering a hardware/software combo, but sadly failed to…

Have you not seen the high-end Nokia Lumias?

Parent was talking about all-Nokia product.

Re: Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

#130

Post by JaakkoP »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #97
antimagic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be so quick to discount this move. It could be a classic Microsoft embrace/extend/extinguish move. They lost the first round on mobile phone platforms, but this would allow them to very quickly create a platform that has developer support - after all, porting your apps from standard Android to an AOSP fork is easier than than porting it to Windows Phone. Especially as Microsoft/Nokia is pretty much the onl…

> ... which would solve the app problem for the otherwise fantastic Nokia hardware ... The number of app on Windows Phone is no longer a problem. There are more than 240,000 Windows Phone apps as we speak.

It's not just about the quantity, but quality as well. Many of the major apps such as Uber, Lyft and Venmo are still missing, and the app store is still largely a joke with the hottest apps arriving significantly late - if ever.

As a Finn and a Nokia phone owner, I'd love the company to succeed. I'm just puzzled about the level of arrogance they still showcase, as if they know best what customers "should" want. For example, I visited Nokia offices past spring and a very senior level executive told to a group of developers and I how he doesn't understand why people even need apps like Instagram and "Chat Snap App" [sic] when the Nokia apps work just as fine or better.

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