Editorial: Dear Nokia, you cannot be serious

MeeGo has a good chance of making Nokia a lot of money and they really don't want to talk about why.

Nokia has been losing wealthy customers for years, but they dominate the market in Africa and Asia. Symbian seems hopelessly out of date, but it's also very frugal, which allows Nokia to cram a lot of functionality onto very cheap hardware.

If you look at the market from the bottom up rather than the top down, you see what MeeGo is for. It's not there to take on the likes of Android and iOS, that's why Nokia have gone WP7 for that market. It's designed as an aspirational upgrade for S60 users. That's prime territory, for a number of reasons.

Nokia are the only non-Shanzai manufacturer to really understand developing markets. The Nokia 1100 isn't just the biggest selling mobile phone ever, it's the biggest selling consumer electronics device, having sold over 250m units. The killer features of that handset are a really bright torch, a dustproof keypad and 400 hours of battery life.

The N9 hardware is outdated by design. The Cortex A8 that powers it is a relatively very cheap part. The N9 is a high-end handset in other respects, but that is entirely consistent with Nokia's model. Expect to see a feature-stripped version of the N9 shortly, with a plastic chassis, cheap LCD, basic camera and so on. The early adopters pay for the R&D, allowing Nokia to launch the cheap version at a killer price. Look at the E71 and E63 for an example of this in action.

Nokia are playing a much cleverer long game than anyone gives them credit for. They have more brand equity than all other handset manufacturers combined, albeit mainly amongst very poor customers. Nokia's future success won't be found by beating Apple, it will be found by beating the Shanzai boys.

I've always thought that Meego would be a much better 3rd platform than WP7. Meego is a much better competitor to Android than WP7 is. Meego can go in the same places Android can go because of its opensource and free nature. It can be on everything and built by "anyone" just like Android. WP7 on the other hand can only be used on mobile phones, and even then only by manufacturers that either want to pay the license fee, or are "allowed" by Microsoft to use it (see the case of Microsoft allowing only certain manufacturers to use Windows 8).

It's a shame that Nokia won't give their best to make Meego succeed, because that would mean it could hurt WP7's adoption. Also, I'd rather see 2 of the top 3 platforms being open source, than 2 proprietary ones. I think it would be for the best for all of us.

As they transition into their first act as handset hired guns, Nokia produce a sexy piece of industrial design featuring the OS which caused them to finally throw in the towel, in a form so simple they couldn't screw it up.

And they didn't.

And they may have accidentally produced the second most interesting phone of the year? ...which also happens to be a dead end.

The N9 would be underpowered if it were released today; the trick where videos continue playing as they're swiped into the multitasking ether is cute, but time will tell how well it can perform those tricks when it's been piloted for a few days (or months) by a careless human without so much as a reboot, especially as compared to the dual-core, spec'd-out superphones it will have to compete against this Fall/Holiday.

Also, something something apps. Even if you only need 10 of them. I'm in the "you need the ecosystem to draw the developers to make the two or more third-party apps you give a damn about" camp.

All that notwithstanding, aesthetically and (to the extent that I can infer anything of value from the video demos up now) in terms of ui/ux execution, this thing looks really good.

Physically, it somehow looks as just I would expect of an object which, when slid across the surface of another, would cause music (or anything else) to come out of the second object. Even if it's an unexpected hit, in 5 years it'll still probably look like a 3303. But for now I think it looks more like the future than any computer we've carried in our pockets to date.

Regardless of the quality of the software experience, the hardware execution makes me feel like Nokia is positioned well in the role they're assuming. It actually makes me wish they'd compete directly against HTC/Samsung on Android as well, although admittedly I have no idea when, if ever, their agreement with msft would allow them to do such a thing.

If I could ignore the part of me which is fairly confident they'll release a slight variation on this running WP7 within the same general timescale that the N9 is on the market and shift most of their resources/support in that direction, I may actually have considered purchasing a Nokia in 2011 or 2012, something I would not have assumed at any point in the last 3 or 4 years.

In February, Tomi Ahonen compared dropping MeeGo for WP7 to Microsoft in the 80s dropping the first version of Windows a few months before release, and going for Mac OS. Now I think he was right. I guess I'll just hold on to my 2330.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/02/first-a...

Have Nokia actually committed to dumping MeeGo? It seems like if it achieves unexpected success there should be room to course correct.

For example, OS/2 was supposed to be Microsoft's future in the late 80s, and Windows was a stopgap. It wasn't even clear there would be a Windows 3.0 at all, until a couple of developers secretly took on the task of getting Windows running in protected mode (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/02/02/365...) .

Except the N9 doesn't use MeeGo, it uses Maemo. Harmattan is just the release that begins the transition to MeeGo.

How much of the software on the N9 is open source?

They even have a version with a keyboard: The N950

But they refuse to sell it. This looks like Stephen Elop tries to ruin it for us to help Microsoft.

Isn't the fact that they're using Meego for this phone and instant admission of the inferiority of the WP7 platform?

Does anyone really believe Nokia's actual product will look like that demo? I kinda recall this not happening quite a few times in the past.. (n97 anyone?)

Isn't Samsung still holding on to Meego?