Dear Nokia, are you serious?
Translation of the article by Vlad Savov (Vlad Savov) from the blog Engadget . This is his author's column and implies a personal opinion of the journalist.
At first glance, the Nokia N9 is all I ever wanted to get from this company: a smartphone with competitive hardware, sophisticated industrial design and a distinctive touch interface. Excellent in terms of speed and appearance, the Harmattan interface for MeeGo is a crushing blow to all skeptics (including me) who doubted the ability of Nokia to shake off the Symbian legacy and show a decent operating system for touchscreen devices. The only thing left from Symbian in MeeGo 1.2 is a pair of traces in iconography, where Symbian inherited rounded icons, and support for Qt. Otherwise, this is a completely new system (far reaching even from its roots in Maemo 5), which caused me a wide range of emotions, including delight, lust and ... bitterness. You must be wondering why I am depressed, despite the fact that I enjoyed the sea for my short acquaintance with the N9? The answer is below.
')
Outside is February 9th of 2011, an ordinary Wednesday, just like today, and I am composing my part to the Engadget column about what to expect from the Nokia announcement on February 11th. Being fed up with unrestrained promises of Symbian transformation and the release of Maemo6 / Meego, with which Nokia has fed us for the past eighteen months, I was sure that they had lost the course and they really needed a “compass” and stability in the form of a modern OS its way to the future. The newly appointed CEO Stephen Elop enthusiastically shared this point of view, and a few days later announced that Nokia was terminating the engagement with all previous strategies and putting all its future and state on the Windows Phone horse.
It seemed right, even certainly logical. Up to this day. Then, I wrote that MeeGo should either go on stage and stun everyone, or leave to gather dust in the archive of projects that failed to “take off”. I'm disappointed that despite the fact that now MeeGo has shown itself as serious and worthy of the operating system,Microsoft Nokia still treat MeeGo as an unsuccessful experiment, as it seemed then. It is clear that it is easy to judge looking back and having already twisted the N9 apparatus in a couple of hours, but on the other hand, Stephen Elop knew very well where MeeGo was going while, a couple of months ago, most of us had no idea. So why turned away from her?
Returning to the past, I remember my impressions almost a year ago from one of the first prototypes of the Nokia N8. Symbian was braking, buggy, and before the then favorites of the iOS and Android shows, it was like the moon. It was really easy to convince the world that this OS is a dead-end branch, but convincing us that the beautiful, polished N9 system with MeeGo has no future will be much more difficult. In Harmattan, Nokia has brought all user interaction to three pillars - notifications, applications and multitasking, which are the basis of a functional, fast and convenient interface capable of competing with the best competitors on the market. If even a small part of this vision was available to Elop, when he decided to rush into Balmer’s arms, could he show courage and stand up for the brainchild of Nokia? The foundation on which N9 costs is perfectly executed, and if there is not enough of the additional functionality now, it may well appear later - and this is almost a mirror image of the situation with the pre-Mangov Windows Phone as it was at the time of the signing of the agreement in February.
Thus, the question remains: why did Nokia decide to abandon such a promising platform? Maybe we would like the answer to include insane conspiracy theories about Trojan horses and dirty machinations, but a much more plausible explanation comes from an article in Bloomberg published earlier this month. She talks about the January meeting of Stephen Elop and Nokia Development Director Kai Oistämö (Kai Oistämö), who launched a series of events that included a detailed review of the development plan of MeeGo, meetings with leading engineers, exchange of unflattering statements, etc. All these events were milestones on the road to the realization that the company's desire to continue working with the operating system that they had been cultivating for so long was financially unviable. The king, as Oistamo said, "was naked."
The triumphant arrival of N9 inevitably undermines this argument, but let's not forget that supply and sales have not yet begun. So the idea that MeeGo will not be ready in time to leave the company competitive is not yet completely discredited, although it does not take into account a small detail about what exactly the new smartphone represents. The biggest attraction of the N9 is the notorious user experience as a whole, which is much less sensitive to time than, say, the latest superphone relying mainly on the iron specs on Android. Even if the device starts selling only after a couple of months, the N9 will not look outdated (by the way, its OMAP3630 processor is outdated, which only shows how soft and hardware is licked) and will give users a unique experience that no one else has. This, in combination with the expected ability to run applications written for Android with the help of Myriad Alien Dalvik, will happen even if Nokia does not throw all its resources on MeeGo. But in this case, it is unlikely that they abandon their resources, so necessary, in our days, of third-party developers who are needed to create a functioning ecosystem. If Nokia does not want to invest in MeeGo and Qt, do you want to?
That is, dear friends, the reason why I feel disheartened. This amazing phone naturally caused me excitement, but its future is foggy because of the creators who invest their time and money in a completely different OS. MeeGo and his subspecies Harmatten seem doomed to become victims in the fierce battle for leadership that prevails in the world of smartphones. And it will be a hell of a pity, considering all the wonderful concepts that he preaches.
Did Elop hurry to jump off the “burning platform” ? Having enjoyed spending some time with the N9, I would probably say that yes, I hurried.
At first glance, the Nokia N9 is all I ever wanted to get from this company: a smartphone with competitive hardware, sophisticated industrial design and a distinctive touch interface. Excellent in terms of speed and appearance, the Harmattan interface for MeeGo is a crushing blow to all skeptics (including me) who doubted the ability of Nokia to shake off the Symbian legacy and show a decent operating system for touchscreen devices. The only thing left from Symbian in MeeGo 1.2 is a pair of traces in iconography, where Symbian inherited rounded icons, and support for Qt. Otherwise, this is a completely new system (far reaching even from its roots in Maemo 5), which caused me a wide range of emotions, including delight, lust and ... bitterness. You must be wondering why I am depressed, despite the fact that I enjoyed the sea for my short acquaintance with the N9? The answer is below.
')
Outside is February 9th of 2011, an ordinary Wednesday, just like today, and I am composing my part to the Engadget column about what to expect from the Nokia announcement on February 11th. Being fed up with unrestrained promises of Symbian transformation and the release of Maemo6 / Meego, with which Nokia has fed us for the past eighteen months, I was sure that they had lost the course and they really needed a “compass” and stability in the form of a modern OS its way to the future. The newly appointed CEO Stephen Elop enthusiastically shared this point of view, and a few days later announced that Nokia was terminating the engagement with all previous strategies and putting all its future and state on the Windows Phone horse.
It seemed right, even certainly logical. Up to this day. Then, I wrote that MeeGo should either go on stage and stun everyone, or leave to gather dust in the archive of projects that failed to “take off”. I'm disappointed that despite the fact that now MeeGo has shown itself as serious and worthy of the operating system,
Returning to the past, I remember my impressions almost a year ago from one of the first prototypes of the Nokia N8. Symbian was braking, buggy, and before the then favorites of the iOS and Android shows, it was like the moon. It was really easy to convince the world that this OS is a dead-end branch, but convincing us that the beautiful, polished N9 system with MeeGo has no future will be much more difficult. In Harmattan, Nokia has brought all user interaction to three pillars - notifications, applications and multitasking, which are the basis of a functional, fast and convenient interface capable of competing with the best competitors on the market. If even a small part of this vision was available to Elop, when he decided to rush into Balmer’s arms, could he show courage and stand up for the brainchild of Nokia? The foundation on which N9 costs is perfectly executed, and if there is not enough of the additional functionality now, it may well appear later - and this is almost a mirror image of the situation with the pre-Mangov Windows Phone as it was at the time of the signing of the agreement in February.
Thus, the question remains: why did Nokia decide to abandon such a promising platform? Maybe we would like the answer to include insane conspiracy theories about Trojan horses and dirty machinations, but a much more plausible explanation comes from an article in Bloomberg published earlier this month. She talks about the January meeting of Stephen Elop and Nokia Development Director Kai Oistämö (Kai Oistämö), who launched a series of events that included a detailed review of the development plan of MeeGo, meetings with leading engineers, exchange of unflattering statements, etc. All these events were milestones on the road to the realization that the company's desire to continue working with the operating system that they had been cultivating for so long was financially unviable. The king, as Oistamo said, "was naked."
The triumphant arrival of N9 inevitably undermines this argument, but let's not forget that supply and sales have not yet begun. So the idea that MeeGo will not be ready in time to leave the company competitive is not yet completely discredited, although it does not take into account a small detail about what exactly the new smartphone represents. The biggest attraction of the N9 is the notorious user experience as a whole, which is much less sensitive to time than, say, the latest superphone relying mainly on the iron specs on Android. Even if the device starts selling only after a couple of months, the N9 will not look outdated (by the way, its OMAP3630 processor is outdated, which only shows how soft and hardware is licked) and will give users a unique experience that no one else has. This, in combination with the expected ability to run applications written for Android with the help of Myriad Alien Dalvik, will happen even if Nokia does not throw all its resources on MeeGo. But in this case, it is unlikely that they abandon their resources, so necessary, in our days, of third-party developers who are needed to create a functioning ecosystem. If Nokia does not want to invest in MeeGo and Qt, do you want to?
That is, dear friends, the reason why I feel disheartened. This amazing phone naturally caused me excitement, but its future is foggy because of the creators who invest their time and money in a completely different OS. MeeGo and his subspecies Harmatten seem doomed to become victims in the fierce battle for leadership that prevails in the world of smartphones. And it will be a hell of a pity, considering all the wonderful concepts that he preaches.
Did Elop hurry to jump off the “burning platform” ? Having enjoyed spending some time with the N9, I would probably say that yes, I hurried.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/122488/
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