Comment by devx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devx | Hacker News Reader

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It's too bad they didn't continue things with Meego. I would've preferred another open source OS to be the 3rd platform instead of another closed source one.

Windows Phone owes the vast majority of its success to Nokia anyway, because most of the early adopters bought Nokia phones because of the hardware and despite Windows Phone, which is why Nokia has like 90 percent market share of the WP market.

If this wasn't the case, the market would've been more decentralized. You could also test the theory another way - if Nokia would've quit WP for Android this year (if Microsoft wouldn't have bought them), Windows Phone would be dead almost immediately.

Plus, Nokia's phones actually looked nicer with Meego:

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/06/nokia-...

http://cdn.theunlockr.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Android...

> It's too bad they didn't continue things with Meego. I would've preferred another open source OS to be the 3rd platform instead of another closed source one.

I really don't want to come across as a shill (I've just made two concurrent posts about this), but have you heard of Sailfish/Jolla? They're basically ex-Nokia engineers trying to reboot Meego/N9-era Nokia smartphones.

That looks almost exactly like Windows Phone with an iPhone or Android style apple launcher.

Well the UI is much more than a launcher. The N9 / MeeGo had the most redefined and brilliantly designed user interface on smartphones, both visually and functionally. Miles ahead of current-gen Android, for example. IMO It's the only interface that had the same 'magic' of iOS through simplicity, yet it was way more powerful. Here's couple of nice animated examples to get a glimpse of it:

http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/docs/ux/pages/PB_Opening_and_... http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/docs/ux/pages/PB_Backstack_an...

That looks like yet another icon based UI [1]. Not sure what I am missing, but almost all mobile OSes except WP seem to be based off [1].

[1] http://images.yourdictionary.com/images/computer/_PROGMAN.GI...

Honeslty, Windows Phone's UI is a neat concept and very modern and stylish, but I've been using a WP7 phone for over two years now and I have to say - the silhouette icon approach sucks.

Merging icons and widgets? Brillian, Google should've though of that. Simple, modern, flat styling? Fantastic. Monochrome 2-color icons? Do not want.

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