Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

They should have also stayed with Maemo. A dual Android and Maemo strategy could have been very successful. IMHO the Nokia 770-900 series is the best mobile saga in history.

I would still carry out that strategy. Android for the masses, and a real Linux as a different product aimed at enthusiasts, privacy aware and governments. That market is growing. Even Apple is focusing on privacy-aware people.

My Nokia N9, which is inferior to the N900 in some ways, is still ahead of many smartphones of 2018 in a few key aspects. The UI is incredibly elegant. Furthermore, its a real Linux machine, with a real terminal and a regular userland. And offline navigation is amazing.

I still use it often. The hardware is beautiful in a way very few products are.

View on HN

Every competitor that has tried to kickstart their own OS has failed (Microsoft, Palm, Mozilla, Ubuntu, etc.)

Maemo might have been a great OS, but Android and iOS have sucked the oxygen out of the room. There’s no way Nokia could build and support an alternative OS just for enthusiasts.

The successor of Meego, Sailfish OS is still alive when Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS and Windows Phone have been discontinued.

Exactly. And there's still no mobile platform that gives one the same experience as a PC does in terms of separation of OS and hardware, plus the possibility of running a fully open source stack. That's why Sailfish (not fully open, though), Mer, Librem, PostmarketOS, Pyra, Neo900 and many other projects keep trying.

Yes, and one should recall that Android is just a Linux usermode abstraction layer. You can have Android apps within a traditional Linux distro, and Sailfish are already doing that. My understanding is it can be technically made work pretty flawlessly, but bundling the proprietary Google Play libraries is a legal hurdle. So you are stuck with an Amazon Fire OS type "Android-clone".

And this is why we see Google shift more and more development resource out of AOSP and onto the Play platform.

The OS you get out of the repo today is very stale and bare bones compared to the early days, before Amazon Fire and like.

Ubuntu Touch is alive thanks to the community [0].

Nokia doesn't need to "build and support an alternative OS just for enthusiasts", they just need to give some support to the Halium project [1].

[0] https://ubports.com/

[1] https://halium.org/

Yes, Maemo was just a Debian-based distro. They introduced a few changes, but it was largely just another Linux distro. And that's why it was so good.

It doesn't require big efforts, just a bit of sanity choosing components and perhaps mainlining drivers.

Yeah, I still use N9, it didn't lose anything from its elegance. I wish they still had Meego, but MS' change agent made sure all internal competition to WP was obliterated, first indirectly then directly.

The Nokia N9 I had way back in 2012 was one of the best phones I've ever used.

It was fast, well built, good battery life, the gesture based UI was awesome to use (the iPhone X UI, while alright is inferior to the N9's IMO). If only it could have survived through to today. :(

> They should have also stayed with Maemo. A dual Android and Maemo strategy could have been very successful.

This is just silly, one company with two mobile OS is just such a waste of resources.

Really? First, Linux at Nokia was drawing very little resources. Second, have you heard about barbell strategies? Third, do you know that Nokia was running several mobile OSes for most of its time? Symbian and Maemo, Symbian and Windows, etc.

I've seriously thought about buying an N9 again just so I can whip it out every now and then to show to folks for how far ahead of it's time it was.

I would pay serious money for a modern version of the N9.

That OS was seriously so good. Put it in some modern hardware (Nokia 8/Nokia 9 body??) and update the OS (said like it's some small task) and I would buy that day 1.

Maemo/MeeGo is also based on X11 for a graphics layer -- and still provided a smooth, fesponsive user experience.

And real multitasking, apps open on the overview screen were just shrunk X windows that continued to animate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com