Nokia Releasing First Android Phone | Hacker News Reader

Nokia Releasing First Android Phone

online.wsj.com

73 pointstomh-79 comments

I'll never understand why Nokia thought that going with WP was a better strategy than forking android like amazon did.

Think about it: it would have the openness and stability of Linux with the single hardware configuration and quality of the iPhone, total win-win.

Now they are going to android as the cheap option which means only crappy hardware that only "looks" like a lumia.

Had Nokia gone the other way it would be in an even better position than Samsung Mobile is in now, mostly thanks to it's vastly superior software resources.

Then again the exact same thing could be said about RIM.

It was all about Stephen Elop's career trajectory, which was supposed to land him where Satya Nadella is now.

Or going full steam ahead with their Maemo / MeeGo which Elop killed. It was an excellent product: http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review.

In fact, N9s still retail for pretty high amounts despite being unsupported and outdated hardware.

Thank god none of you are in charge. Just kidding or am I?

Elop played the game straight forward. Forking is a half baked option and when you are leveraging your company, forking is not an option. You need full scale OS support and that means, Nokia could have either gone with MS or Google. Google apparently refused to make space for Nokia's competing service suite (Read-Business Week) and as such, the option was only MS. I know the hate is strong for MS in this community but it's way too illogical to think one man alone could have played his tactics and strategies to influence Nokia to switch to a MS OS for his career progression.

Meego was ruled out as an option as well. A tech-pretty thing may not always work out. WebOS taught us that lesson. So conspiracy theories are pretty meaningless.

MeeGo works fine. I use it everyday. It would have given Nokia independence. The Windows choice was simply a trojan horse strategy.

>You need full scale OS support and that means, Nokia could have either gone with MS or Google.

I don't know what this means.

http://neo900.org/ is costing me a fortune. Nokia really did something right smoothly moving their pre-iPhone mini-tablets forward into the new all-screen smartphone world. Too bad they didn't keep it going.

One of my favorite phones along with the N95. The overall design of the whole product is pure genius in my opinion. Sad what happened to it. I own two of them, and use the N9 from time to time when I feel nostalgic.

I think they could have kept working on it on the side, and released a phone every 1-2 years. Even with the minimal size MeeGo team at Nokia, they released 3 major updates.

> In fact, N9s still retail for pretty high amounts despite being unsupported and outdated hardware.

So do Neo-Geos. Nobody cares how high you can price products that'll only be purchased by a few fanboys.

Nokia can't compete with Samsung, because the latter's vertical integration means it can make money at prices other vendors cannot. Software is totally secondary to that. Nobody is going to pay more for a Nokia Android phone than a Samsung one. Apple and Samsung have set the price ceiling for the market, and at a level that is ruthlessly weeding out competitors who don't have their supply chain advantages.

Nokia's only hope was to make their phones non-fungible with Android phones, and get access to Microsoft's capital stash. If that doesn't play out, they're in the same boat as RIM, HTC, etc.

Nokia was hemorrhaging market share and needed cash. MSFT brought the cash with certain strings. Elop being there probably moved that decision along.

If Nokia had "stayed the course", they probably would have suffered a similar fate of RIM (though having the lower end market share/phones to help them limp along a bit longer...)

at the time when WP was offered to Nokia it was a good option. first of all it came with a nice cash bonus, offered them customization options, offered them a possible new market and differentiation from the various android manufacturers and the promise of a huge marketing boost that they'd otherwise have to do on their own if they went with android. bottomline though WP didn't take off the way they would have hoped and the rest is history.

They got a cash injection and it set them up for an acquisition.

The alternative was being another Android manufacturer when HTC & Samsung were leaders in that area, and it looked like Google might take the oxygen out with the Nexus line and Motorola. (not sure whether those all line up perfectly chronologically, but none of them are critical to the point of Nokia not wanting to be "another Android manufacturer")

Being an Android manufacturer isn't exactly a bunch of roses either. At the last count only Samsung were making serious money through it - everyone else seems to be struggling along.

Well, there's Xiaomi. But the truth is pretty much everyone else is making shit phones.

Not a lot of of this makes sense. First, stability. Are you comparing Linux to a ten year old version of Windows? The modern Windows kernel is just as stable as Linux. Sadly, the same can't be said for third party drivers written by Android manufacturers. As for the full system stack. I'm primarily an Android user but I find Windows Phone seems to be a lot more stable from a user perspective.

Second, opennes. The Linux kernel is open, but most of Android is not (and with each Android release this gets worse). Forking would mean rewriting all the closed parts. A lot of Google Play apps don't even work on the Kindle Fire because of the closed parts being different. The only reason forking worked for Amazon in the first place, was that they were selling based on their already existing Kindle ecosystem, not based on Android, Android was just the enabler.

Shifting gears to Android that late in the game would not have suddenly allowed Nokia to catch up to Samsung. Samsung had been organising themselves for years to reap the advantages that come with Android. They didn't just release an Android phone and become an industry leader overnight.

I still think Windows Phone was the better option for Nokia given how immature Maemo/Meego still was (which was primarily Nokia's fault for not anticipating the market and not prioritising it higher). At the end of the day, even a smart decision won't help you if you make it too late.

Linus Torvalds once said: "If Microsoft ever starts developing apps for Linux, it means I won."

Is this close enough?

Already happened with Skype.

While it's true that they didn't drop support for Skype when they acquired it, and even continued to update it, what are the chances they'd have said "Hey, let's port skype to qt and put it on linux!" on their own?

I think the spirit of Linus's quote was that Microsoft wouldn't necessarily set out to do so, but eventually be forced to develop for Linux in some way whether they wanted to or not.

Won what? Besides Nokia is not really Microsoft and Android is not really a Linux, so the answer is probably "not really".

How is Android "not really a Linux ? It runs the Linux kernel. That means it's Linux. No, it's not a distribution of GNU/Linux, but it's a Linux kernel. It's really using Linux. It's as Linux as Ubuntu, as Ubuntu also runs on a Linux kernel.

Why would anybody have cared about Linux except as an academic exercise if not for GNU? If there had been another properly licensed kernel before Linux, we would all be using GNU bolted on top of that.

Linux has been great and Linus is a great steward, but Linux without GNU is a base for creating an OS, not an OS.

I really like GNU, but are you sure that it is GNU that has succeeded and not Linux?

Linux + GNU = small marketshare

Linux + Android = big marketshare

So maybe without GNU, Linux would have gotten some other userland quicker and taken off faster? I don't think it's entirely fair to credit Linux's success to GNU at this point.

What other userland? Without GNU, Linux might never have even gotten written.

Apples to oranges. Those markets have different dynamics, gatekeepers, legacy costs, etc.

> If there had been another properly licensed kernel before Linux, we would all be using GNU bolted on top of that.

BSD?

BSD was is a legal limbo between 1992–1994, and by then Linux had gained more popularity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi

If uname(2) says it’s Linux, it has to be Linux.

    cat >/bin/uname <<EOF
    #!/bin/sh
    echo Linux
    EOF
    chmod +x /bin/uname

I see your point; that being said, I was talking about the system call uname(2), not the command line utility uname(1). It's somewhat more difficult to fake that, you need to know your way around C the very least.

>not really a linux

I lol'd

But what if we mostly just want to feel smug?

Microsoft have been submitting kernel patches for years now, you know.

kernel patches that directly benefit their own products, like making it easier to run virtual machines, etc. Not from the goodness and kindness of their wonderful, generous hearts.

So? The criteria wasn't "when Microsoft love Linux" the criteria was "when Microsoft feel compelled to support Linux."

Well, the quote does say "apps"

Well then he already won 17 years ago when MSFT released NetShow player for Linux and some flavours of Unix.

http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/apps/netshow_linux.html

I predict this will last 5 minutes after the Nokia deal closes. This is a thumb in the eye to Microsoft by people who will also leave that part of Nokia immediately after the deal closes. They will leave with the knowledge and experience of how to integrate an Android based product with Nokia (maps, multimedia, app store) and Microsoft (Bing search, Skype) ecosystem elements.

I would bet they know at least 5 OEMs in China who would like a similar product.

Honestly, it sounds like a bad proposition overall. What is Windows Phone lacking? Apps. What will the Nokia Android phone lack? The Google Play store. Hmm.

Amazon is doing quite well, and making some very sweet hardware running an Android-based OS. I think that with Nokia's ecosystem elements plus a selection of the dozens of Android apps Microsoft makes, plus some China-specific apps, you could have a workable front end to your own ecosystem.

Other Android based phone are being sold without the Google Play Store, and still sell very well. Disclaimer: those are mostly phone developed for the Chinese market where the Google Play Store is not allowed to be bundle with the phone. See Xiaomi for an example.

    >What is Windows Phone lacking? Apps.

What is the current perceived gap in the Windows Phone app store?

Quality is very low. Apps are there, but features are usually lacking and incomplete, and curation is awful. NB: I have a Lumia.

Microsoft aggressively targeted college students offering $100 for every app published. It's really easy to crank out an RSS app and pocket $100.

When I tried one (and admittedly, this was the WP7 era) the biggest problem wasn't missing brands, it was awful experiences. Spotify were on there - the app didn't play music 50% of the time. Foursquare was on there, but it barely worked. And so on.

I haven't checked back since because, well, why would I?

Because things have improved? I own a Nokia Lumia 925 and have barely anything to complain about. The thing is I've never been crazy for searching through a ton of crap apps every day like some of my friends. WP8 delivers what I need in a consistent way. I'm glad I moved away from the Android phones I owned in the past 2-3 years.

Well I guess my point was that I have no reason to move away from Android now. A few years ago the experience was terrible and I saw WP as a clean escape from that. Since then Android has come along leaps and bounds.

There may be interesting implications if Nokia ever ships Bionic and Dalvik, both, IIRC, under an Apache license with explicit patent clauses. Every Nokia patent infringed by Android risks being excluded of future litigation by whoever acquires Nokia.

Elop must be very pissed with the Nadella thing...

It's pretty odd.

I think it's fair to say that the only handset makers profiting off of Android today are...Samsung...and...that's about it really. Meager pickings for the rest of them.

I don't see this succeeding at all. And in any case it's dead in the water once the Microsoft deal goes through because it just muddies the waters. A person that buys one of these cheap Nokia/Android phones would reasonably expect that "upgrading" to Nokias "premium" Lumia handsets will mean his apps/features carry over too.

Oops.

Samsung, Xiamo, Huawei, Lenovo all appear to be making good profits off of Android. There are a few other smaller players also making good profits, although note that Huawei and Lenovo are pretty big players, easily bigger than RIM/Nokia/etc.

So I don't think that argument holds much water - if Nokia made an Android phone that people wanted, they could very easily charge a premium (Sony does after all, but they just barely break even on massive staffing costs) and potentially make profits too.

Lenovo made less than $500m net profit across the entire company last year, on $30b in revenue. These are margins you can sustain only if you're a Chinese ODM or a company like Samsung that makes money from all the parts in everyone else's phones too. It's certainly not the kind of money that supports expensive R&D. Apple can throw a billion at developing sapphire glass or a new tooling method, and beat their competitors over the head with it with phones that are lighter, stronger, etc. You can't play that game being a low-margin company like Lenovo.

Ah, so that's where we've moved the goal post.

Sorry it might take me a little while to get there, it's looking like I better grab a golf cart.

Confusing. How is gross margin a shift of goalposts in a thread about profits?

Fair, but this discussion is a continuation of the Android vs iOS debate which has been raging for half a decade.

My memory is horrible but I remember it going: 1. Android has no apps 2. Android has no market share 3. Apple's market share is larger 4. iPhone is always the best selling phone 5. iPhone has the only responsive interface 6. No single manufacturer is making big profits 7. Only Samsung is making large profits.

Now I should admit my bias, I never considered iOS comptetitve since it is not open source. With that said it is nice to see Android becoming competitive even if you don't exclude the proprietary systems. In the end I just find the idea that we should be happy Apple is making profits as silly.

We should be happy Apple is making profits. Because companies like Lenovo and Acer that eke out an existence playing in competitive markets where prices are driven to marginal cost don't have the money to pour into R&D. Look at what Apple is doing with Cyclone: the first mass market CPU to challenge Intel in IPC since Opteron a decade ago. Its a game they can only play because the generate a ton of cash to throw around.

A person buying a "premium" Lumia WP7 handset had a reasonable expectation that Microsoft would upgrade the OS when WP8 came out, but that didn't really work out either.

But your apps still worked.

Huge difference.

"Another reason for the Nokia Android phone is Microsoft's Windows Phone—currently the only operating system on Nokia's higher-end Lumia smartphones—doesn't work on low-cost phones because of the software's technical requirements."

I have to wonder about that statement, because WP created a smaller memory requirement version that was supposed to be run on lesser hardware phones.

Nokia has the hardware chops to produce good Android phones (in the same league as Samsung). At the same time, Nokia also has the software development chops to polish the Android platform to its liking. I doubt the phone will be a simple AOSP fork. Nokia will most likely try and play the same game Samsung is playing. Google will have to decide to what extent it will license Android to Nokia. Imagine that it cannot say no, since it will look really bad then.

From my perspective, this is a very good move by Nokia. Good hardware and nice software polish will make for nice phones. Don't forget, Nokia knows how to bring the phone at a good price point. They will actually put quite a bit of pressure on Samsung and Google. This is why Lenovo will take over Motorola. Lenovo also has solid hardware chops.

It will be very interesting and good for consumers.

This has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Due to anti-trust law, Microsoft can't have any influence over decisions Nokia makes before the acquisition[1]. Even if Microsoft hated the idea of Nokia building and Android phone (likely) it could do nothing about it. And, even more importantly, Nokia could NOT change its plans even if Microsoft wanted them to.

[1] http://hal2020.com/2013/10/16/how-much-influence-is-microsof...

I hope one day Nokia will release Windows Phone Bootcamp for those Nokia Android phone. Similar to how one bootcamp to Windows from Mac OS X. If MS has its own Android stores/platform, its a win-win.

Supposedly Nokia is only building Android phones because Windows Phone 8 won't fit on low-end hardware.

Are you kidding? WP8 fits much better on low-end hardware. Just look at the Lumia 520.

Paywall :/

the verge has a write up of the paywalled report... it seems to be the same shell/hardware as the current windows phones.

which is a huge let down. it will be yet another candy bar phone.

if you had hopes of a n900 successor as well, it may be the time to give up already :(

which is a huge let down.

Quite to the contrary. Nokia has been making some of the best smartphone hardware for a while now - I considered switching to WP just so that I could use the 1520 (or whatever the one with the great camera was). I didn't in the end - if it supported Android I wouldn't hesitate.

Unfortunately, this sounds like something quite different.

For all those who dream of running emacs on their phone, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

Hum, an emacs native port for Android has been out for quite a while now [1]. Android is just a Linux system with a weird libc and windowing system.

[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsOnAndroid

Unfortunately, this "port" is just running ordinary terminal Emacs inside of an Android terminal application. So it's pretty buggy and annoying to use; and you might as well just run it in a chroot.

I'm a vi guy, but I had to laugh at that. :-)

Google clickthroughs aren't blocked: https://www.google.com/search?q=+Nokia+Releasing+First+Andro...

I'd read all those 'Microsoft should fork Android' discussions that have been appearing on HN lately, but I never remotely saw it coming to fruition. Interesting development...

this isn't Microsoft. This was Nokia's thing and started before Microsoft bought them.

"The coming Nokia Android phone won't promote Google's Play application store, from which Google takes a percentage of profits. Instead, the phone will come installed with a suite of services created by Nokia and Microsoft"

It may have started before Microsoft bought them, but it looks like it's not the complete truth to say 'This isn't Microsoft.' It's a little bit Microsoft, at least.

alternate post: http://www.slashgear.com/nokia-android-phone-tipped-without-...

Possible WSJ link that works: http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304...

I wonder if this fork would be open-source?

Also, "Last Android Phone" :P

iOS Android.

We actually do need a third choice.

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