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Comment by juanefren | Hacker News Reader

I (and also a lot of people) think they ought to ship Android phones, How bad could be for them that option? my limited vision says it is an excellent choice.

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Shipping Android isn't an option for Nokia. They will be late to the party to the tune of two years. It's not a politics thing - they have a huge market and mindshare in smartphones. Actively commoditizing smartphones on the Android platform would be suicide.

If you like Macs you don't get a new computer, you get a new Mac. If you like Windows/Linux, you just get a new computer. It might be a Dell, a HP or a ThinkPad, you might have a preference, but in the end the specs matter much more than the brand.

If Nokia starts shipping Androids, they'll likely be the ThinkPads of smartphones. Rock-solid, reliable, great hardware, all boxes ticked, something of a following, but if you're in a pinch, there's an HTC that does the same for $100 less.

The only option for Nokia is figuring out how they can pivot their current smartphone market leadership into a niche that can compete with Android, the iPhone and BlackBerry.

I don't have the recipe, but it's going to require some very clear and bold leadership, that's for sure. Also, shipping three or four competing platforms isn't part of the solution, either (Symbian S60, Symbian 3rd gen, Maemo and MeeGo).

Symbian S60 and Symbian 3rd gen is the same (or actually 3rd gen is subset of S60); Maemo and MeeGo is the same. That makes it down to two platfoms.

They actually have also S40, but that is for feature phones. I believe that they want to get rid of S40, put S60 on low end and MeeGo on high end phones.

OK, I've got my facts backwards... Good for them on Maemo/MeeGo, I though they'd completely lost it there.

But Symbian 3rd gen (aka. Symbian^3) is indeed different from S60 (which has 4 editions: 1, 2, 3 and 5), with 5th edition becoming Symbian^1. As a matter of fact, Symbian^4 (in which the current UI is replaced by the Nokia Qt SDK) is positioned for a 2011 launch according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_platform

It's the Qt SDK that I counted as a new platform in itself.

Long story short: Focus. Nokia can't have two promising and incompatible smartphone platforms.

Yes, I agree with you, they lost focus wrt their platforms. The first step for them is decide, what they want and then follow with steps to achieve that. And only that, no forking and dead ends.

They are aiming to have two completely different platforms (symbian&meego) that are source-level compatible because of Qt. Or thats my guess anyways

Shipping Android phones would be probably a smart move for Nokia but I don't think the company wants to be bound to Google that much. Instead of insisting on Symbian, they should have worked on developing a proper Linux-based OS. Maybe is not relevant, but Linus Torvalds is Finnish and the country, even if rather small, has the brain power to do that. Maybe now is too late and probably the Android move would be the smartest but I don't think it'll happen.

Nokia has shipped mobile Linux devices(770, N800, N810) long before no one even imagined Android. With touchscreens and all.

device, yes.

I want a cellphone that's also a computer. I don't need a small computer, I don't care that it has a touch screen.

If they'd launched the 770 with a cellphone+3G modem (or GPRS at least, don't remember when it was launched), Android might not have existed today. They really dropped the ball there.

They should ship Android phones now. This will buy them a year and a half in which to progress their own operating system to the point of it being competitive, at which point they can launch phones with that, and have it be a differentiating factor amongst the, by then, sea of Android phones. They have no viable product in the smart phone space now, and the feature phone market has increasingly limited profit margins, so Android is the best option.

Right now, the 400lb pound gorilla for all phone companies is Apple. Moving to Android is the best thing for Nokia to do because of the availability of applications, interests, etc. To build something to compete from the ground-up would be insane.

Nokia should take a page out of the HTC playbook: Implement Android but have it's own flavor through TouchFlo.

Not really, Apple, while it is the loud one, does not have the volume shipped Nokia has.

Remember, there are much more folks who want phone than those who want pocket computer or toy.

maemo?

And MeeGo.

This reminds me of the way that, in the late 90s, everyone was calling for Apple to dump Mac OS, switch to commodity hardware, spin off the OS division, or whatever, things that in retrospect would have meant Apple never got to where it is today. I suspect that Android would be a local maximum in Nokia's solution space, missing out on huge wins they could make if they took some radical steps as this article suggests.

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