I vowed to myself that I would not reply to you but calling the software developers at maemo lazy while completely excusing Elop (as an "incidental traveller") for Nokias current state annoyed me enough to reply, just in case anybody believes your nonsense. The N9 software did not have two years. Meego was announced in February 2010 and pretty much destroyed in March 2011 by Elop. Elop took over in September 2010. The insufficient resources were Elop's doing he not only did not help its development but he cut resources while announcing the platform as pretty much dead. All this before the N9 was even released. It's funny that both you and Elop keep talking about a transition and the countless billions it's costing Nokia yet Meego had its budget cut and given less than a year to bear fruit. in fact it was announced dead before a device was even released, how could it.

Even if we say 7yrs in development (maemo instead of meego) and the limited resources. You think it's not a valiant effort? You want me to believe this was lazy software engineers and not Elop? This is lazy compared to what? the 12yrs and unlimited resources MS had to create the sub par Windows phone that Elop adopted?

The argument most folks that love WP7 blindly is that they started from scratch to build what we know now as WP7 - totally disregarding that there's Windows CE 6.x lurking in there somewhere - and that Harmattan had been lurking in one form or another since 2005.

That latter part, not true fully. Sure the kernel and parts of Harmattan have been around for a while, but the Harmattan UI is pretty dang new. A small group of dedicated engineers put that entire UI/UX together and did it without massive amounts of funding, did it without the support Symbian has enjoyed... did it because that underfunded group wanted to do something special and did it in under 2 years.

And it worked. Lazy? I'd never say that about the Harmattan group.

And pertaining the pieces of stuff laying around that's "old" in Harmattan; older exists in WP7 still. It's going to take WP8 to break that cycle... by going to the NT kernel.

Which is... older.

That (to me) smacks of laziness.

I'm off of my soapbox now.

You have a point there. Nokia has never been a software company. They have Nokia OS (S40), but that is only a small and "simple" baseband RTOS. Symbian was made by Symbian, and S60 (on top of Symbian) was a complete mess. OVI was a complete mess, even maps was a complete mess. Maemo is the only exception, and although we can argue indefinitely on this board about the merits and potential and the causes, the fact remains that the merits did not live up to it's potential after years of development on several devices.

It was when Nokia decided to take the entire OS/software portfolio in their own hands it started to go down. The Maemo/Symbian roadmap looked nice on paper, but without teams lead by seasoned and absolute top OS architect and programmers, like the ones found at Google and Apple, well the whole roadmap was nothing more than wishful thinking with no base in reality. It is not before Nokia Belle that Symbian finally is almost on the same level as Android was 3-4 years ago regarding UX.

Samsung did a similar blunder with Bada. Bada is a very nice OS from the perspective of the end user. Architecturally however, it is a disaster because it is practically impossible to port apps from iOS/Android without starting from scratch due to namespacing and libraries. A simple rewrite is not enough, a restructuring of the entire code of the app is needed. If Bada became big, this wouldn't really matter, but how will it become big when it has no killer apps? Luckily (for Samsung) they went for Android when WM and Symbian just didn't cut it anymore.

In hindsight it is obvious that the cardinal sin made by Nokia was not going with Android at first chance. Cardinal sin number two was not going with Android at the second chance. Cardinal sin number 3 was going with WP7.X believing it would enable them making competitive devices. Another sin (although not that cardinal as the others) was to kill Maemo. Maemo could live happily as a niche selling 2-3 mill devices a year. Maemo as in a world wide dominating force (as many of you in here like to think), forget it, such thinking will only destroy it, they way it has done.

IMO the battle is still not lost. WP8 built on the NT kernel could be what brings Nokia back because it enables Nokia to go with top HW of choice. Time will show. For now, Android rules because everybody makes juicy devices running it. ICS is juicy all by itself as well.

To be fair nokia acquired Qt in 2008 and before that focused mostly on their (failed) services strategy. Software development takes time.

Now that Nokia is getting all this negative press, stocks are junk. How much sales will they loose because of that? I think that results for Q2 is going to be a disaster.

Qt? Qt has been around for ages enabling cross platform UI amongst other things a decade before Nokia came in. The only thing Nokia did was to inject a small amount of money so they could make Qt Creator. Besides, IMO Qt is just as much of a cpu hog as Java or Dalvik, even though Qt is supposed to be "native". Why isn't Qt optimized more than it is? It's not like Nokia didn't have time to do it.

Someone should make a real comparison in terms of performance between Android and Qt, taking measure of the actual overhead involved. It is not like the mechanisms in Qt comes for free. For instance, the N8 and HTC Magic have roughly the same CPU and clockspeed. The Magic runs Android 1.5 from 2009, the N8 runs Symbian Belle from 2012 and have a very powerful GPU. The Magic UX is more fluent and faster than the N8. Another comparison is the Nexus S and the N9. The Nexus S is far from the fastest Android today, still it runs ICS better than the N9 runs Harmattan.

Back on topic. Acquiring Qt was one of the right things Nokia did, but as it seems now, it was all in vain, because the roadmap (Symbian/Maemo) was nothing but a dream with no base in reality. What's pushing the stock down, is the lack of optimization of Qt on Nokias handsets. If the reason is that Qt doesn't really deliver what is promised, or that Nokia isn't able to make it deliver, it doesn't matter.

The UI. Be honest and pick the best UI for you of every UI you can think of. For me it is Belle or native ICS. Metro is far down the list, Swipe not so far down, more or less along all the branded Android UI's. I think I have most people with me on this except the iPhone crowd perhaps. I don't think the UI is all that important at the end of the day, but the point is, when given a choice most people would prefer just about everything over Metro. Nokia has made both Belle and Swipe, UIs that are praised by people and tech-news. On their flagship devices they use Metro. I mean, of course the stock slides.

The second Nokia releases a competitive device, the stock will rise. It's as simple as that. Why don't they?

Mobile apps are mostly like toy-apps if you compare to computer applications. Load times and other types of functionality affects how fast the app is.
As mobiles is becoming more and more advanced apps are going to be more advanced too and the importance of speed and power consumption (C++ is king designing apps for low power consumption) will increase.
I think that Android is moving towards native C++, more parts can be used natively by native languages.

The first android versions was running java apps interpreted.

art of technology, let harmattan improve and keep it alive, nokia i hope you read this

I think people put way too much faith in having their voice and words heard and read; I'd rather my voice and words acted upon instead.

Nokia fits a german word perfectly, eigenwillig. No longer listening to reason, no longer willing to accept other options.

Their stock is paying the price. I'm still trying to get a stock certificate from them before it drops to a penny stock.

A honest question, have you ever written anything more complex than a Hello World app in both Java (running in JVM or Dalvik) and Qt (running on whatever platform you want)? Trying to determine if just ignorant or dishonest...