Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

aaplinvestors.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 314 posts

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#291

Post by panick21_ »

cycomanic wrote: post #104
majormajor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and it's not like Nokia was riding a winning streak in the pre-iPhone market. Nokia hadn't had a ubiquitous hit for several years - before the Razr, before the LG Chocolate, before the Blackberry, etc. They could have probably produced better hardware than the other Android makers - the N9 and first Lumias were very nice devices to hold and use - but they weren't exactly coming in with a ton of momentum in the…

I think you speak from a US perspective. Nokia phones were absolutely ubiquitous in other parts of the world, way into the time of the Razr etc.. Even at the time this memo was written it Nokia still had around 25-30% market share IIRC. Regarding the N9, it was released essentially without any marketing push, with very little availability (I think they didn't even get it into live stores, you had to order online). It…

And the follow up to the N9 was already ready. The N9 was delayed for reasons, but the next phone was already up and both of those phones were positive margin and would have made money.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#292

Post by panick21_ »

samatman wrote: post #166
8ytecoder wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android was a choice. Not the obvious one. Seriously how many Android manufacturers are really successful? Samsung? Google? Pretty much everyone else is completely interchangeable in the crowd of low cost devices. LG, HTC, Sony …etc have all but disappeared and they all chose Android. Sony especially had some solid hits back in the day. Microsoft utterly failed Nokia but I don’t consider the decision at the time to b…

Sony still has ten percent of the Japanese mobile market. Granted they'd be happier to be in the winners circle, but you've seen Sony's product strategy, selling a handful of phones to 10 million people is a business they're comfortable staying in. They'll sell you five different audio recorders, after all. Edit to add: the most popular vendor, by far, is Apple, with more than 60% of the market. Steve Jobs studied So…

Nokia could likely still have 5-15% in the European market. I know many people who liked Nokia and would have very much considered just getting Nokias.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#293

Post by panick21_ »

bborud wrote: post #161
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.

As a software engineer I'd have to disagree. In 2011 Windows on handheld devices was a consistently low quality product that had at least a decade of Microsoft failing at it behind it. Believing that Microsoft would suddenly be capable of producing a quality product after more than a decade of not being able to was a highly irrational view. And this isn't something you'd have to particularly clever to see back then.…

I mean these early tablets that ran windows XP were bad in so many ways

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#294

Post by panick21_ »

oriolid wrote: post #241
seba_dos1 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the sentiment of my comment as well, I guess I weren't clear enough - Nokia N9 was made to work great on what technically was still Maemo, but since they were supposed to go with MeeGo afterwards it would still require a lot of work to actually do that.

Ok, I misunderstood. I thought it was clear at that point that Meego was a dead end, but Harmattan was missing things like app sandboxing and some app store and payment related features, the package management was a mess, etc.

Its funny that things like running videos while sliding window out of screen and live task switch all worked. But somehow package management was the problem. When I developed for iOS I was shocked how non of that existed.

Seems to me they had something really nice to go forward with.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#295

Post by panick21_ »

asveikau wrote: post #252
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…

> MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. I had an n900 in 2009. I think they theoretically had a winner there. But they never prioritized it above Symbian. Then between the n900 and the n9, they totally rewrote the UI on a new toolkit, wasting resources and making it clear that if you write an app for it they may completely discard 95% of the app platform from release to release. If they…

Didn't Blackberry go with WebOS?

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#296

Post by asveikau »

panick21_ wrote: post #295
asveikau wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. I had an n900 in 2009. I think they theoretically had a winner there. But they never prioritized it above Symbian. Then between the n900 and the n9, they totally rewrote the UI on a new toolkit, wasting resources and making it clear that if you write an app for it they may completely discard 95% of the app platform from release to release. If they…

Didn't Blackberry go with WebOS?

They bought QNX and they had a qt based development platform.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#297

Post by jayelbe »

nextos wrote: post #243
jarkkom wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N9 was not "proper" MeeGo, internally it was still mostly Maemo Harmattan, followup to N900, though they had few canceled hardware projects between N9 and N900. MeeGo was suppposed to be co-developed with Intel, but it was never going to go anywhere, because neither Nokia or Intel had no idea what they were doing. Nokia wasn't built to be a software company and Intel has given up on x86 in phones. Only reason why N9…

I know, but despite being a weird hybrid between Maemo and MeeGo, it was really capable. I used a N9 as my daily driver for 7 years. The card-based UI was incredibly elegant and easy to use with one hand. I prefer it to current iOS or Android. Besides, gestures blended really well with the curved screen edges. It had a great dark mode which also blended well with the AMOLED screen. Offline GPS navigation was a pleasu…

I bought an N9 and had a very similar experience, and still look back on it warmly. It was an absolute joy to use, and I think the sleekest and most pleasant UX I've ever used.

Elop really robbed Nokia of what could have been an incredible product.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#298

Post by jayelbe »

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.

This is exactly what Nokia were working on; the N9 ran Meego, a Linux-based OS Nokia had been developing for years. There had been a string of "internet tablets" (eg N800, N810) and phones (N900) running Maemo, a precursor to Meego. They even bought QT as part of the development!

Meego, running on the N9, was an absolutely wonderful experience. It was smooth, fast, beautifully designed, and had simple elegant swipe-based navigation system, it had multiprocess app switching (AFAIK before iPhone OS did) and a brilliant newsfeed/notification system. It felt like it really had extraordinary potential. And Elop ditched it.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#299

Post by seba_dos1 »

zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #244
mlajtos wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N9 (and N950) were Qt-based, not Gtk.

Glib, Gtk+ and various Gnome components were still running in Maemo and MeeGo. N9 was released in 2011, by that time Nokia was already dead. Trolltech was acquired in 2008. Nokia could have have a modern alternative to iOS and Android from day 1 but they made the terrible mistake of reinventing the wheel and trusting Gnome.

Maemo 5 (N900) and earlier were Gtk based, although PR1.2 update of Maemo 5 made Qt a first-class citizen, so you could use it to develop for N900. The UI (Hildon) stayed Gtk and worked pretty well.

Harmattan (Maemo 6 branded as MeeGo that shipped with N9) was Qt based from the start. Gtk wasn't officially supported at all there, although some support has been brought over by the community.

Also, I guess you have never actually used Qtopia? I did. It wasn't really a great base to build a smartphone platform on. It made a great feature phone though, and was a pretty nice demonstration platform for Qt Embedded. Nokia didn't have Qtopia until they brought Trolltech, which happened after several versions of Maemo were already shipped in working products.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#300

Post by prox »

jayelbe wrote: post #298
prox wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is exactly what Nokia were working on; the N9 ran Meego, a Linux-based OS Nokia had been developing for years. There had been a string of "internet tablets" (eg N800, N810) and phones (N900) running Maemo, a precursor to Meego. They even bought QT as part of the development! Meego, running on the N9, was an absolutely wonderful experience. It was smooth, fast, beautifully designed, and had simple elegant swipe-b…

It really sounds it should have been given a chance. Did they ever open source it to give other Linux OS’ a chance?
Post reply on HN