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Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

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Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#131

Post by sgloutnikov »

koiueo wrote: post #38

Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. To these days their gesture navigation implementation is the best. And they had Swype keyboard preinstalled. Speaking of apps: Here maps, SoundHound, amazing mail client and calendar... Gosh I miss that phone. I used mine for about 3 years, I think, and sold it for more than a half of its original price in literally a couple of hours (which means my price was too low). B…

Aw man the N9, good times. I still rock my glossy white N9 from time to time. Just realized that thing had 64GB of storage in 2011.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#132

Post by saidinesh5 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #76

Has any Nokia B9 user also tried Sailfish OS? Is it a proper successor to the Harmattan Meego distro the N9 had?

I ported it to a couple of Android devices and used it as a daily driver for a year or so.

It is technically a successor, but it just wasn't there. App story was worse than N9 (without considering alien dalvik/anbox/waydroid).

Some of the technical decisions they've made meant more headaches for developers (Old gcc version. Old Qt version. Repacking Fedora arm packages just to run on sfos wasn't fun). The browser was based on a very old and buggy Firefox version. At the end of the day, it wasn't even fully open source.. so you always had to play catch up with their updates just to keep your mods working.

Despite all that, the community was vibrant and very talented. Oddly enough, it was also smoother to use and feels more well designed than Android on the same device. Even little things like double tap to wake, being easier for one hand usage

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#133

Post by mrdatawolf »

LtWorf wrote: post #55
anthropodie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They thought they couldn't build hardware good enough to compete with other Android makers, But that is so wrong. Hardware was their strength. They could've sticked to what they knew best and over time do what's necessary.

It seems you never tried a windows phone. They were slow. Really slow. Typing was so slow. Opening the camera app even more so.

This is not true. In fact if you actually go back and read the articles on it, one of the strengths was how responsive it was on hardware that was much weaker then what android needed. It has its problems but you are literally taking it's strength and pretending it was a flaw 0_o

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#134

Post by oriolid »

KronisLV wrote: post #112
RajT88 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones. The hardware was always amazing. I owned a Communicator 9290, and have yet to have a phone that performed as well on speaker. Bar none. Noise cancelling and volume both. I had an e90, and although it was less amazing on that front, the build quality, and look at feel just was... Great! I'd pay iPhone Pro prices for (basically) an e90 running Android with a decent cam…

> Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones. I actually miss it, those were simpler times where your phone didn't spam you with ads or notifications or didn't get outdated every 2 years. No constant data collection or surveillance to the scales we deal with now. More so, I actually miss the feeling of how new everything was, in the sense that is you wanted to play some games you'd sometimes scour WAP sites fo…

The problem with Symbian was not the usability but the developer experience.

SDK available only for Windows and really awkward to install and use? Check. Pre-11 C++ but without exceptions and something called cleanup stack and ELeave macro instead? Check. Ok, a whole periodic table of string classes instead of std::string (which would still have been terrible because it was before C++11)? Check. GUI API that was designed for a Psion handheld (Uikon) and implementation for Psions (Eikon) and Series 60 UI implementation (Avkon) piled on top of that? Check. App architecture that doesn't really have a concept of standalone app but works on the idea that apps are views and controllers that handle files? Check. What about making every single phone model slightly different so that apps are not portable between Symbian phones by default but you have to actually test and port with every model? Check. And there was a lot more at deeper technical level that I never had to reach.

I understand that the developer experience was better for the last Symbian versions but at that point it was already late, iOS and Android were taking over and Symbian had a reputation to fix.

My definitive memory of Symbian development having a lunch at a Nokia cafeteria, a week after starting the job and all the dreams about having a computer in your pocket that could run anything as long at it didn't need huge amounts of CPU power, memory or screen area crushed, and complaining with a friend who was in similar situation. An older engineer had heard us, told us that we don't know anything about how bad S60 is and continued with a hour-long rant that as far as I know was all pure facts.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#135

Post by oriolid »

prox wrote: post #121
RajT88 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones. The hardware was always amazing. I owned a Communicator 9290, and have yet to have a phone that performed as well on speaker. Bar none. Noise cancelling and volume both. I had an e90, and although it was less amazing on that front, the build quality, and look at feel just was... Great! I'd pay iPhone Pro prices for (basically) an e90 running Android with a decent cam…

I wonder if we ever going to see anything other than Android or iOS. A third ecosystem wouldn’t be so bad.

Sailfish has been around for years and somehow still under active development.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#136

Post by simonh »

prox wrote: post #121
RajT88 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones. The hardware was always amazing. I owned a Communicator 9290, and have yet to have a phone that performed as well on speaker. Bar none. Noise cancelling and volume both. I had an e90, and although it was less amazing on that front, the build quality, and look at feel just was... Great! I'd pay iPhone Pro prices for (basically) an e90 running Android with a decent cam…

I wonder if we ever going to see anything other than Android or iOS. A third ecosystem wouldn’t be so bad.

I don’t see how it can happen, on the same way we’ve been stuck with the Mac and DOS/Windows duopoly since the 80s. The problem is a new platform isn’t just competing with the established OSes themselves, it’s also competing with the associated peripheral, software and services ecosystems. Those consist of thousands of companies providing thousands of products and services worth trillions of dollars. There’s just no way to get traction against that from a standing start.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#137

Post by yywwbbn »

microtonal wrote: post #74
skavi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s simple enough to see why Nokia thought Windows would be the right choice. It was far more polished than Android at the time. It ran well on cheap hardware. And they would have Microsoft backing them.

They brought in a trojan horse with Elop. Any sensible company at the time would have bet on both horses. E.g. Samsung and HTC had both Android and Windows Phone devices. IIRC there was even one Samsung model (I think a Samsung ATIV) that you could install both Android and Windows Phone 8 on.

I don’t think there is or was a lot of money to be made just being yet another Android OEM.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#138

Post by oriolid »

varajelle wrote: post #73
majormajor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like that discussion was before Windows Phone was announced as the replacement. E.g. " The idea of a Nokia device running Android is pretty appealing. They've always had good hardware, but Symbian has become a develpment dead-end, and Meego isn't yet here. " Symbian definitely wasn't the way forward. MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. Elop was right about needing to change horse…

> Elop was right about needing to change horses. What was wrong with MeeGo? The memo just states: > at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market. But that's not soo bad considering that they started the platform in 2010. It's not like changing to a different platformbat this point would make things faster anyway.

> What was wrong with MeeGo?

The way I remember it was that at the time the management-forced merge of Maemo and Moblin to Meego and the sudden switch from Gtk to Qt were thought to be risky moves and it was well known that Symbian supporters are doing anything they can to sabotage other platforms. Later I was told that N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required massive rewrites if development had continued (which isn't that different from stories about early iOS).

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#139

Post by testrun »

oriolid wrote: post #134
KronisLV wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones. I actually miss it, those were simpler times where your phone didn't spam you with ads or notifications or didn't get outdated every 2 years. No constant data collection or surveillance to the scales we deal with now. More so, I actually miss the feeling of how new everything was, in the sense that is you wanted to play some games you'd sometimes scour WAP sites fo…

The problem with Symbian was not the usability but the developer experience. SDK available only for Windows and really awkward to install and use? Check. Pre-11 C++ but without exceptions and something called cleanup stack and ELeave macro instead? Check. Ok, a whole periodic table of string classes instead of std::string (which would still have been terrible because it was before C++11)? Check. GUI API that was desi…

All true, and then there was also the schizophrenic S40 or S60 development too.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#140

Post by alfiedotwtf »

cycomanic wrote: post #118
pluijzer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The N900 was my favorite phone by far. Most of the reason come as a programmer, not all users might value them. First of all ot was a true Linux phone. Running a derivative of Debian, complete with apt etc. Most of the apps on it, even the app to make a phone call where preexisting open source Linux applications with a nice mobile UI. An UI that was clean and consistent without the need off branding that other platfo…

But all this points also apply to the N9, it was a fully fleshed Linux system and arguably qt for writing apps was significantly more comfortable for developers than the custom framework based on gtk. I even recall that it was quite straight forward to port desktop apps, with very minor adjustments. On top of that it was actually usable for normal users which the n900 failed at, largely due to not being usable in man…

> I don't understand how you would prefer the N900 (except for the keyboard)

The keyboard made it. It was very usable too. I took it once to a hackathon and was able to follow along nicely.

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