June 24, 2011 at 06:24Dear Nokia, are you serious?
- Transfer
Translation of Vlad Savov's article from the Engadget blog . This is his author’s column and implies the personal opinion of the journalist.
At first glance, the Nokia N9 is all I ever wanted from this company: a smartphone with competitive hardware, sophisticated industrial design and a distinctive touch-screen interface. Excellent in terms of speed and appearance, the Harmattan interface for MeeGo is a crushing blow under the breath to all skeptics (including me) who doubted Nokia’s ability to shake off the Symbian legacy and show a decent operating system for devices with a touchscreen. The only thing left of Symbian in MeeGo 1.2 is a couple of traces in iconography, where the Symbian inherited rounded icons, and Qt support. Otherwise, this is a completely new system (far from even 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, even though that I enjoyed the sea for my short acquaintance with the N9? The answer is below.
In the courtyard on February 9, 2011, an ordinary Wednesday, just like today, and I compose my part to the column on Engadget about what to expect from the announcement of Nokia on February 11. Being fed up with inconsistent promises about the Symbian transformation and the release of Maemo6 / Meego, which Nokia has fed us for the past eighteen months, I was sure that they had lost their course and they really need a “compass” and stability in the form of a third-party modern OS to find your way to the future. The newly appointed CEO Stephen Elop enthusiastically shared this point of view, and a few days later announced that Nokia will terminate the engagement with all previous strategies and put all his future and fortune on a Windows Phone horse.
It seemed right, even undoubtedly logical. Up to this day. Then, I wrote that MeeGo must 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 to be a serious and worthy OS,Microsoft Nokia still treat MeeGo as an unsuccessful experiment, the way it seemed then. It is clear that it’s easy to judge by looking back and already turning the N9 in a couple of hours, but on the other hand, Stephen Elop knew very well where MeeGo was heading while, a couple of months ago, most of us had no idea. So why did he turn away from her?
Returning to the past, I recall my impressions almost a year ago from one of the first prototypes of the Nokia N8. Symbian was nerdy, buggy, and before the then favorites of the iOS and Android show, he was like the moon. To convince the world thatThe OS is a dead end - it was really easy, but convincing us that the beautiful, well-honed N9 system with MeeGo has no future will be much more difficult. In Harmattan, Nokia reduced all user interaction to three pillars - notifications, applications and multitasking, which are the basis of a functional, fast and convenient interface that can compete with the best of competitors in the market. If even a small part of this vision was available to Elop, when he decided to throw himself into the arms of Ballmer, could he show courage and stand up for the brainchild of Nokia? The foundation on which N9 stands is perfectly executed, and if any of the additional functionality is lacking now, it may well appear later - and this is almost a mirror image of the situation with the pre-“Mango” Windows Phone,
Thus, the question remains: why did Nokia decide to abandon such a promising platform? Maybe we would like the answer to include crazy conspiracy theories about Trojan horses and dirty fraud, but a much more plausible explanation is given by an article in Bloomberg published earlier this month. She talks about the January meeting between Stephen Elop and development director Nokia Kai Oistämö, who launched a series of events that included a detailed review of the MeeGo development plan, meetings with leading engineers, an exchange of unflattering remarks, etc. All these events were milestones on the road to the realization that the company's desire to continue working with the OS that they had been cultivating for so long was financially unsustainable. The king, as Oistamo said, was "naked."
The triumphant arrival of N9 inevitably undermines this argument, but let's not forget that deliveries and sales have not yet begun. So the idea that MeeGo will not be ready on time to leave the company competitive is not yet completely discredited, although it does not take into account a small detail - what exactly represents the new smartphone. The greatest appeal of N9 is the notorious user experience as a whole, which is much less sensitive to time than, say, the last Android superphone, which relies mainly on iron specs. 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 alreadyis outdated, which only shows how much software and hardware are licked) and will give users a unique experience that no one else has. This, combined with the expected ability to run applications written for Android using Alri Dalvik by Myriad, will happen even if Nokia does not abandon all its resources on MeeGo. But it is unlikely that in this case, the third-party developers, who are so necessary nowadays, who need to create a functioning ecosystem, will throw their resources. If Nokia does not want to invest in MeeGo and Qt, would you like to?
That is, dear friends, the reason I feel discouraged. This stunning phone caused me a logical excitement, but its future is foggy because of the creators who invest their time and money in a completely different OS. MeeGo and its subspecies Harmatten seem doomed to become victims in the fierce battle for leadership that reigns in the smartphone world. And it will be damn sorry, considering all those wonderful concepts that he preaches.
Did Elop hurry to jump from the “burning platform” ? Having enjoyed spending a little time with N9, I will probably say that yes, I hurried.
At first glance, the Nokia N9 is all I ever wanted from this company: a smartphone with competitive hardware, sophisticated industrial design and a distinctive touch-screen interface. Excellent in terms of speed and appearance, the Harmattan interface for MeeGo is a crushing blow under the breath to all skeptics (including me) who doubted Nokia’s ability to shake off the Symbian legacy and show a decent operating system for devices with a touchscreen. The only thing left of Symbian in MeeGo 1.2 is a couple of traces in iconography, where the Symbian inherited rounded icons, and Qt support. Otherwise, this is a completely new system (far from even 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, even though that I enjoyed the sea for my short acquaintance with the N9? The answer is below.
In the courtyard on February 9, 2011, an ordinary Wednesday, just like today, and I compose my part to the column on Engadget about what to expect from the announcement of Nokia on February 11. Being fed up with inconsistent promises about the Symbian transformation and the release of Maemo6 / Meego, which Nokia has fed us for the past eighteen months, I was sure that they had lost their course and they really need a “compass” and stability in the form of a third-party modern OS to find your way to the future. The newly appointed CEO Stephen Elop enthusiastically shared this point of view, and a few days later announced that Nokia will terminate the engagement with all previous strategies and put all his future and fortune on a Windows Phone horse.
It seemed right, even undoubtedly logical. Up to this day. Then, I wrote that MeeGo must 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 to be a serious and worthy OS,
Returning to the past, I recall my impressions almost a year ago from one of the first prototypes of the Nokia N8. Symbian was nerdy, buggy, and before the then favorites of the iOS and Android show, he was like the moon. To convince the world thatThe OS is a dead end - it was really easy, but convincing us that the beautiful, well-honed N9 system with MeeGo has no future will be much more difficult. In Harmattan, Nokia reduced all user interaction to three pillars - notifications, applications and multitasking, which are the basis of a functional, fast and convenient interface that can compete with the best of competitors in the market. If even a small part of this vision was available to Elop, when he decided to throw himself into the arms of Ballmer, could he show courage and stand up for the brainchild of Nokia? The foundation on which N9 stands is perfectly executed, and if any of the additional functionality is lacking now, it may well appear later - and this is almost a mirror image of the situation with the pre-“Mango” Windows Phone,
Thus, the question remains: why did Nokia decide to abandon such a promising platform? Maybe we would like the answer to include crazy conspiracy theories about Trojan horses and dirty fraud, but a much more plausible explanation is given by an article in Bloomberg published earlier this month. She talks about the January meeting between Stephen Elop and development director Nokia Kai Oistämö, who launched a series of events that included a detailed review of the MeeGo development plan, meetings with leading engineers, an exchange of unflattering remarks, etc. All these events were milestones on the road to the realization that the company's desire to continue working with the OS that they had been cultivating for so long was financially unsustainable. The king, as Oistamo said, was "naked."
The triumphant arrival of N9 inevitably undermines this argument, but let's not forget that deliveries and sales have not yet begun. So the idea that MeeGo will not be ready on time to leave the company competitive is not yet completely discredited, although it does not take into account a small detail - what exactly represents the new smartphone. The greatest appeal of N9 is the notorious user experience as a whole, which is much less sensitive to time than, say, the last Android superphone, which relies mainly on iron specs. 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 alreadyis outdated, which only shows how much software and hardware are licked) and will give users a unique experience that no one else has. This, combined with the expected ability to run applications written for Android using Alri Dalvik by Myriad, will happen even if Nokia does not abandon all its resources on MeeGo. But it is unlikely that in this case, the third-party developers, who are so necessary nowadays, who need to create a functioning ecosystem, will throw their resources. If Nokia does not want to invest in MeeGo and Qt, would you like to?
That is, dear friends, the reason I feel discouraged. This stunning phone caused me a logical excitement, but its future is foggy because of the creators who invest their time and money in a completely different OS. MeeGo and its subspecies Harmatten seem doomed to become victims in the fierce battle for leadership that reigns in the smartphone world. And it will be damn sorry, considering all those wonderful concepts that he preaches.
Did Elop hurry to jump from the “burning platform” ? Having enjoyed spending a little time with N9, I will probably say that yes, I hurried.
