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Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

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Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#301

Post by nextos »

jayelbe wrote: post #297
nextos wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried SailfishOS? After some initial difficulties the project seems to be getting quite nice and the UX is heavily inspired by the N9. Same developers actually.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#302

Post by zxspectrum1982 »

panick21_ wrote: post #284
zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The N900 had 32 GB of storage, which was absurdly huge at the moment. That phone could have seen sold at $300-400 with 2-4 GB of storage, which was more than enough at the time. My first Android phone, in 2010, had 0.5 GB of storage.

I think partly this was because they wanted only the highest end phones not using Symbian.

Highest end with resistive screen? Brrrr

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#303

Post by zxspectrum1982 »

panick21_ wrote: post #283
zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you send some links of what you are talking about? And what the problems were with gnome? In 2009, the N900 was based on GTK and was a solid base to build on.

Gnome and Gtk+ were not fit for phones: not prepared for small screen sizes, lack of adequate widgets, slow, difficult to develop for (types in Gtk+ were and still are a joke), etc. And first and foremost there was the attitude of those Gnome developers: entitled, reinventing the wheel all the time, arguing stupid arguments on purity... To this day, Gnome and Gtk+ are not fit or mobile (or Windows or Mac) yet.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#304

Post by zxspectrum1982 »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #299
zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nev…

I did use Qtopia. I found it a lot better than Symbian, and it was available. Nokia should have scrapped Maemo the moment they acquired Trolltech and rebase it on top of Qtopia. E. g. by adding X11 compatibility, if that's what they wanted to make ports of Linux applications easier. Nokia was essentially crawling with Maemo while Android and iOS where already walking. By the time Nokia walked with the N9, Android and iOS where running.

The burning platform memo was the worst of all: lots and lots of mobile app developers intended to develop for Maemo as the third platform because Nokia was still a huge leader and they trusted Nokia. The moment Elop announced Nokia was shifting to Windows Phone, with phones months away, and no possibility of reusing any code from another platform (only .NET allowed, no way to reuse any C/C++ base they were sharing on Android and iOS), that was the moment everybody dropped Nokia. Suicide.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#307

Post by panick21_ »

zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #303
panick21_ wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you send some links of what you are talking about? And what the problems were with gnome? In 2009, the N900 was based on GTK and was a solid base to build on.

Gnome and Gtk+ were not fit for phones: not prepared for small screen sizes, lack of adequate widgets, slow, difficult to develop for (types in Gtk+ were and still are a joke), etc. And first and foremost there was the attitude of those Gnome developers: entitled, reinventing the wheel all the time, arguing stupid arguments on purity... To this day, Gnome and Gtk+ are not fit or mobile (or Windows or Mac) yet.

That sounds a bit like a Gtk+ vs QT mud throwing contest.

The N900 had pretty good reviews and 2 more years of work could likely have made it even better. And Nokia had the developers and control to do what they wanted however arogant Gnome developers were.

I have developed for neither, so I can't really say.

That said, I have been using Gnome based desktop for 10 years now, so I'm bias towards it.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#308

Post by seba_dos1 »

zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #304
seba_dos1 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nev…

I did use Qtopia. I found it a lot better than Symbian, and it was available. Nokia should have scrapped Maemo the moment they acquired Trolltech and rebase it on top of Qtopia. E. g. by adding X11 compatibility, if that's what they wanted to make ports of Linux applications easier. Nokia was essentially crawling with Maemo while Android and iOS where already walking. By the time Nokia walked with the N9, Android and…

> E. g. by adding X11 compatibility,

You mean, what Om2008 tried to do? ;]

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#309

Post by yencabulator »

theshrike79 wrote: post #183
Nokinside wrote: post #167

Nokia's made institutional mistakes that doomed Nokia phones before hiring Elop. (I was there). In a sense Nokia was (organizationally) victim of its own success. During the dumb phone and feature phone era Nokia did everything better than others. Everything from the supply chain management, to the phone design and manufacturing worked so well. Why would you sideline leaders and organizations who build all that and w…

The teams that did Maemo stuff etc. weren't allowed to ship any features before the Symbian side (which had more political and monetary power) had achieved feature parity...

My company back then did some NDA'd research prototype work for Nokia about Linux and touchscreens. My personal conspiracy theory always was that they had tied the company so strongly to Symbian that they just couldn't announce anything else. I hypothesized that they only got some big companies on board Symbian by promising to be "exclusively Symbian for X years" -- and the X ended up being too long, the industry moved on before they could move off of Symbian. Or they were just too afraid of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

They had everything they needed to run Linux on (some of) their phones quite early on. Battery life might not have been great, but they had plenty of Linux-running mobile hardware around, kept in bags outside of the building.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#310

Post by oriolid »

panick21_ wrote: post #294
oriolid wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Priorities tend to shift when your whole team has already been laid off, the product line cancelled and you still have the ability to make something flashy to put on your CV (again, I wasn't there myself). And probably there were a few demosceners in the team. But to be honest, the smoothness of the UI was really impressive, and even more when you know how underpowered the CPU was compared to Android phones at the time.
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