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IIRC N9 was banned from being sold in US/UK/Germany etc., all major markets in order to justify killing off Meego later in favor of WP. I remember Germans had to order it in Switzerland. It was clear Elop was playing politics by doing gradual phase out of everything that was Nokia in favor of MS, i.e. first restrict Meego to an unwanted child (yet they still sold more N9s than Lumias with WP7 so that part didn't work out), stop future development, make own factories redundant and later justifying selling off Qt as the only internal platform capable of challenging MS. Please remove your rose tinted glasses, this was a pre-mediated and carefully executed destruction of Nokia.

The N9 was one of the best designed phones I've ever seen [1]. It's really frustrating Nokia did not follow the Maemo/Meego path. As a developer I'm not so fond of smartphones because they are not little computers, but locked down devices. Nokia's view was aligned with mine, as the first device of the series was an "Internet Tablet" (N770, released Q2 2005!)

Why they followed an erratic path instead of going full steam ahead with their Maemo/Meego platform is quite well described by the article, but does not sound less stupid to an outsider. They had a device that was in some fronts superior to iPhone much earlier, but they got stuck with Symbian first and Microsoft afterwards.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review

Well, the last Symbian devices weren't supposed to be locked down. Heck, there's even the Delight fork.

http://n8delight.blogspot.co.uk/

At the time of PW 808 the OS was on the level of iOS, but nobody cared then, not even Nokia (the 808 wasn't really advertised, and was hard to get...).

Have you followed Jolla? Jolla's phone is a true N9 successor, and far from being locked down.

They have done awesome job but the Jolla Phone is old (and was low-end even when it was published compared to its price) and their tablet crowdsourcing project suffered quite badly as they lost some other funding for a moment and their device manufacturers sold the devices elsewhere as Android devices.

Basically Jolla has promised to refund the crowdsourcing funds within this year, but still it was big setback for the project. I've tested the tablet and it was surprisingly solid in H/W and S/W sense. Just hoping they'll survive and can get meaningful market share somehow. Kudos to them anyway.

> Of course creating first Maemo on top of GTK and after that switching to QT sounded weird and with Meego there was other parties like Samsung and Intel meddling around so they lost lot of steam in that transition too.

From my perspective one of the problems was that there wasn't just one major transition, but instead there were two. First was the GTK->Qt transition, and then just as that was stabilizing came new transition from Maemo to Meego which never really succeeded. I think the reason for the latters failure was that while there was a lot of reasons to be exited about Qt (over GTK), there was very little to be exited in Meego (over Maemo).

From the end-user perspective both Maemo and Meego phones felt really good but the Meego seemed to have a bit more innovative and more fluid UX. Liked both of them and would've gladly bought them if there would've been any promise of continuity.

The whole Meego thing was a mess.

Maemo had from the early days been Debian based.

Then came Intel's Moblin in an attempt at pushing Atom for mobile devices (reason being that Intel had opted to forgo PCI on that variant to save power, and Microsoft balked at doing Windows on a x86 chip without PCI). Mobilin 1.0 was also Debian based.

So at that point it seemed sensible for Nokia and Intel to combine their efforts and create Meego.

But just as the jointed project was unveiled, Intel finalized Moblin 2.0. And it was RPM based. And Intel was heavily pushing for Meego to be that as well.

Never mind that the N9 was really a last gen Maemo with some additions to make it Meego compatible.

It's hilarious because the problem for Nokia here was that they focused too much on technology and not enough on business. The reverse of what their earlier problem was.

By the team Meego was announced, Apple and Android (Google et al) were already pouring their wealth of engineering talent into their platforms. And the strength of iOS' link with OSX and Android's access to Google services meant they were never going to compete.

The smart business strategy would've been very early on to switch to Android around the same time Samsung did.

As a former trolltech engineer, I am obliged to comment that it is Qt and not QT :)

> Meego still feels more Linuxy than Android.

...is that supposed to be a good thing?

Edit: snark aside, I'm not sure how this would be a factor in what makes a mobile platform successful. It feels like the sort of comment that would be made right after saying "year of desktop linux!"

Definitely.

Is androids java mess a good thing?

Good enough to get it into the duopoly with iOS, beating everything else.

Isnt it because Google is pumping millions of dollars into it?

Possibly, making any sense of 'linuxy' or quality of Java irrelevant.

Or because it's the only iOS alternative left?

It's the only one left now, but there's plenty of other dead platforms that just didn't make it along the way.

Well it was build on top of normal Linux tool chain instead of Java, but it was really easy to use, responsive and had all the smart phone features of that day. Much better than Android 2.2 which was the hot thing then. Quite close to iPhone in terms of responsiveness and ease of use.