Maemo vs. Android
discuss.gdgt.com
discuss.gdgt.com
I don't see much support for that in the marketplace for consumer and non-IT department mandated products. The overall user experience is way more important than anything else, even backwards compatibility, i.e. compare Windows Mobile with iPhone.
The competitor who will really square it off with the iPhone in the future will have to be really good at the integrated user experience IMHO.
I talked to some Maemo marketing guys at FOSS.in in Bangalore the other day and their key message was that "You can run multiple applications at the same time. You don't have to shut down one application to be able to run another, like on an iPhone."
But the handset they were showing (they called it a handheld computer, not a smartphone) was clumsy and unattractive. They were not even showing them turned on, so I couldn't really judge the user experience, but if you don't want to show it I don't believe it is a strong selling point.
The Android team seems to concentrate more on the user experience, something which I haven't seen the Nokia teams really do yet, so I think Android is better placed, for now.
Also, Nokia just seems a bit confused. Maemo? Symbian? Open source? Yes? No? Besides the iPhone, Android seems to be the only thing out there with a fairly clear "mandate" and direction.
Within the past two years, Nokia has acquired Symbian and Trolltech (now Nokia's Qt division), freeing the code to these formerly proprietary projects and opening up their development processes to community contributions and scrutiny.
That's an enormous "gift" to open source, at least by the traditional metrics of LOC and market value -- Symbian has something like 40 million lines of C++ code, and Nokia acquired it at a cost of several hundreds of millions of euros. (I'm not saying that these figures are an actual indication of its worth, but the bean counters at Nokia must have been pretty shocked by this plan...)
Also, 'getting it' doesn't just mean releasing a bunch of code under a nice license, it means having a sensible strategy that advances the goals of the company. For instance, Apple has a pretty good open source strategy even though they're not particularly generous with code (they basically release what they have to and not much more). It works for them and is consistent, though.
Apple is king of the (initial) user experience. But user-experience isn't everything. The dominance of windows should demonstrate that there /are/ other factors in play.
This is what they all are competing for, the hearts and minds of the app developers.
Android's strategy seems to be guaranteeing as many phone implementations as possible, to guarantee app developers the best bang for the dev time.
Maemo is carrying with it a complete unix platform that people have written software for a couple of decades now -- being able to run old desktop software doesn't do you that much, but there has been a lot of competent Maemo developers for way longer than the platform has existed. Also, there are very many different ways to develop software for it -- I believe Nokia is gunning for making PySide their "Visual Basic", a platform that is really easy and quick to develop qui apps on. On the other hand, if you have experience on developing qui stuff on windows, Qt/C++ is not that far from what you are used to.
And Apple, on the other hand, gives developers a closed-down app store, an esoteric language, ridiculous limitations on what the software is allowed to ship with and outright scary application rejection process -- what if I spend half a mil developing the next best thing since sliced bread for iPhone and Apple finds it recreates some of the functionality of the phone?
If writing phone apps was my day job I'd easily choose Android over maemo any day of the week. As a geek programming simply for my own enjoyment the Maemo platform is far more enticing, if for no other reason than the fact that I get to use tools like Qt4, C, python, and all the libraries available for Linux. The idea of having basically a slightly stripped down Debian on my phone is just really cool. Plus the new Maemo 5 seems to finally be a truly usable environment running on some nice hardware.
The multitude of useful apps that are already on the market and can be easily ported for maemo makes it a very strong player.
I know I'm not mainstream market, not even close, but KeePassX, Vim, Mplayer, VLC, Xmms, Abiword. Those are valuable open source projects that are already there for the maemo.