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Comment by TwoSheds | Hacker News Reader

Why does everyone think Droid is the only hope? Nokia's Maemo-based N900 looks promising as well.

Their latest Symbian/series60 phones (e.g. E71, E75) are also pretty decent nowadays, although I would compare those to Blackberry rather than the iPhone.

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The N900 is full of cool hardware but it's 2cm thick, will cost $700+, and is unlikely to ever be available subsidized in the US.

Edit: http://gigaom.com/2009/10/19/nokia-n900/ - An early review

Nokia is doing a full rewrite of Maemo for the upteenth time after buying Qt — the software platform is constantly going in different directions. They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt? Don't they also maintain multiple Webkit ports for their other platforms? The mind boggles...

They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt?

I don't see the contradiction there. Mozilla and Qt are at different levels in the GUI stack. (KDE is a Qt-based desktop, yet it runs Firefox just fine.)

You have 256mb of RAM to work with, most of which you would like to use for rendering webpages. Do you really want to blow a huge chunk of it on something that just gets you an inconsistent look-and-feel? A handheld device is the last place you want two completely different file-picker dialogs, and you can't cover that shit up with theming.

Do you really want to be shipping second-party Gecko in the when Webkit is better and you're already paying people to work on it?

A handheld device is the last place you want two completely different file-picker dialogs, and you can't cover that shit up with theming.

What does Mozilla have to do with file picker dialogs? Firefox uses native dialogs on the platforms it runs on, and so does Nokia's Gecko-based browser on Maemo.

Do you really want to be shipping second-party Gecko in the when Webkit is better and you're already paying people to work on it?

What's preventing them from switching to a WebKit-based browser when it's ready for production? Why should they have tried to squeeze that into the Maemo 5 dev cycle, when they already have a fine browser?

I don't understand your argument at all, because OS and device vendors switch browsers all the time as new alternatives become available. Mac OS X 10.2 still shipped with Internet Explorer 5 as the default browser...

Firefox uses native dialogs on the platforms it runs on

All three of them -- Win32, Carbon, and GTK+

What's preventing them from switching to a WebKit-based browser when it's ready for production?

Inertia is a bitch

They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt?

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/08/nokia-helps-...

Says that they did the easy thing, mostly, and wrote a Qt backend for Cairo.

It also states that Firefox/Qt was usable over a year ago, but needed some more work on stability before it would be ready.

I don't see it as being a major obstacle to them at this point...

N900 is a great platform, free as everyone is asking. The point is that is not for US because of the subsiding US people is looking to have. 700$ is the same price of an iPhone, the two are on the same league (more or less depending on the feature) but it seems that the marketing of 199$ + n hundreds $ in 2 years contract wins. The only reason I can imagine (not being in US) for this being reasonable is that there is no reasonable dataplan without phone "embedded in". S60 is OK from the user point of view (barring the UI from 1990), phones are cheap given the features, but programming for it is a nightmare...

Yes, I agree totally that S60 as a programming platform is horrible. I hope Nokia has learned the lesson with Maemo. Because it's based on a Linux distribution which is not that far from your standard desktop Linux, maybe they just aren't able screw that up too badly. To Nokia's credit they are not the open software development freedom-haters that Apple and maybe Palm now too have become.

OTOH, I don't think that Nokia really get open source in the same way that Google does. Doubtless, they have people that do, and their circumstances are quite different: Android can't be doing anything but losing money for Google, and is not really their core business anyway, whereas for Nokia, opening up their crown jewels cannot be an easy process. And Nokia has always been a bit ambivalent about open source. Google seems much clearer about what is and what is not going to be open source, which makes it a little bit easier to predict what they'll do and how they'll do it.

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