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Comment by vtail | Hacker News Reader

The author of this rumor (Eldar Murtazin) is notoriously known in Russia for his low-quality journalism. I'm actually quite surprised to see him even being quoted by an English-language media.

For those who can read Russian, check out his blog at http://eldarmurtazin.livejournal.com/ or even http://lurkmore.ru/%D0%9C%D1%83%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B....

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But wasn't he one of the first people to say that Elop was joining Nokia and later that they'd be dropping Symbian and moving to WP7.

This is a quote from Engadget: "We're inclined to believe there's at least some semblance of truth to Eldar's words because of his track record. Way back in December of last year, when nobody believed Nokia would deviate from its Symbian strategy, Eldar reported the similarly incredible-sounding news that Microsoft and Nokia were in discussions about the latter using Windows Phone as its main smartphone OS. That turned into reality this February, and more recently, the Russian mobile spy managed to also accurately predict Nokia killing off the Ovi brand in favor of an eponymous naming scheme for its services. And that's all on top of Eldar's knack for obtaining Nokia prototypes way ahead of release."

These two data points are impressive predictions indeed.

Still, to me his track record also includes numerous cases where he was plain wrong and/or heavily biased - e.g. he was well known for trashing iPhone/iPad and praising Nokia until some time ago when he suddenly changed camps and now does the complete opposite thing.

To clarify: the fact that his prediction about iPhone future were wrong doesn't tell much - many industry observers were predicting that it's going to fail.

What matters to me is good vs bad journalism - ability to acknowledge one's mistakes, checking one's sources, not trashing one's opponents, etc. etc.

But being a fairweather fanboy and knowing insider info aren't mutually exclusive. In fact they quite often go together -- think Gruber.

Surely a "fairweather fanboy" implies you stop being a fan when things aren't going well. Does that apply to Gruber?

I'd give Gruber the benefit of the doubt and call him an all-weather fanboy.

Isn't it possible that Gruber, you know, actually has a mind, and that he uses it? In my experience there are more knee-jerk haters of companies or even ideas that there are unthinking "fanboys." While Gruber can be very hard on people who have a solid track record of irrationality or intellectual dishonesty, he doesn't write off anyone who disagrees with him as Android sheeple. And there are times when he's quite critical of Apple. Basically, he's a nuanced thinker who doesn't hide the fact that he has an affinity for Apple. It's not like he's one of our fellow Philadelphians who think's Michael Vick is evil…until he starts winning games for "us."

So chill out a litte with the hating. (Of course, given that I've owned and used almost exclusively Apple computers for the last thirty years, everything I write may very well be just as subject to the same "fanboy" well-poisoning gambit.)

Indeed. I'd suggest that, to paraphrase Colbert, "reality has a pro-Apple bias". The smarter Mac "fanboys" -- I would consider myself one -- are fanboys precisely because Apple has generally made good products for an awfully long time. Even its turkeys are generally made with good intentions, not as a way of screwing its customers.

At least since Jobs has been back. There was some fairly ill-conceived if not exactly malevolently-designed stuff coming out of Cupertino during the interregnum.

A recent linked piece nailed Apple's strengths and weaknesses: If Steve uses it, it generally rocks. If it doesn't, it could very well blow e.g. Ping.

I think things would actually need to go poorly for Apple in order for that to happen...

Maybe he's in touch with a Nokia insider that has knowledge of their intentions, and this is way he is so good at predicting Nokia-related news, but not other news.

> These two data points are impressive predictions indeed.

One of them is not. It's been long obvious Symbian was a dead end. Phones are getting more powerful and Symbian was targeted to very simple chips. As processors got more powerful, it became comparatively harder to scale Symbian up than to simply use Linux or other Unix like kernel that would be perfectly at home on a 32-bit, multi-megabyte RISC machine (more or less like the first Unix workstation I had on my desk).

FWIW, his mobile phone review is fairly stellar in depth of review coverage (at least for all Nokia phones), and I've followed it for many many years now. I'm surprised that someone would call his work 'low quality', but then again I wouldn't know too much about his 'journalism'.

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