We DO know. Elop's memo TOLD US. The board approved of this. What more do we need to know?

I can just imagine if someone came here and went on and on about MMS, portrait mode or all the other features Maemo was missing the way y'all are going on about things that are already in the first update (cut and paste) or that don't stop iPhone buyers (multitasking). Is cut and paste any more of an omission than custom ringtones? The most powerful OS developer in the world joins forces with the greatest phone hardware developer in the world. It's IBM + MS all over again. I don't see how this can be a bad thing in the end.

B.t.w., if those estimates are anywhere near correct, they are pretty shocking I must say. Nokia apparently pays about

• 1200 people to work on Symbian kernel
• 5000 on Symbian user experience
• 1800 on MeeGo and Qt (of which probably between 300 and 500 on Qt)

(Again, assuming that these estimates are ballpark correct) I think it's understandable that people are questioning what they have to show for this.

One big reason that many of us are not looking at is that so far Nokia has been good selling phones by itself. But it hasnt managened this in NA because here ISP tie-ups count a lot. Face it, in North America, Nokia doesnt have any stores, they closed their only 2 premium show stores ( in NY and Chicago) , they have to tie-ups with ISP to sell discounted phones which is the only way MOST Americans buy their phones.

Lacking this distribution channel in NA, they had no way to sell Maemo or Meego phones even if they were ready. Also the ISP's play a big part is accepting or rejecting a phone on tier networks and most NA ISP's are unwilling to test a new unproven OS on their networks. It takes a lot of money and time for the ISP to certify a device and a OS on their networks.

Also the mobile market has been moving so fast that for Nokia to catch up, they needed an OS with some ecosystem around it. Android while being the best choice in terms of ecosystem was unsuyitabel for Nokia as they would be commoditized along with mfrs as HTC, Samsung, LG etc.
Nobody wants to go there - unless you can make phones on the cheap.
And the Android phone market is chock full of cheap phones so competing on that front was a serious risk.

They only other viable option was WP7. Being an underdog (MS WP7 is an underdog in the mobile world) Nokia could play a stronger role - and we did see this - Nokia managed to get serious rights to change and customize WP7 in their own way. While it may not be the best of choices, its the only one they had to hit the ground running.

Without Meego having anything to show for it, and Symbian seriously showing its age, I think Nokia chose the least bad of the bad options that it had.

I think the key was that Meego while being trumped up to be a very good OS, delivered too little too late for Nokia.

Look even Palm/HP delievered WebOS in short time and now HP has said that they will make WebOS work on Smartphones, Tablets (already done) and also on PC's very soon. Wasn't that the vision of Meego too ? But lets face it when we all saw Meego 1.1 it was not ready in any shape or form for geeky end users. Meego 1.2 is still months away from fir and finish looks. So how much ever Nokia customised their own UI, the base Meego OS first has to be ready - which it is not.

I think you are missing quite a lot if you don't see that? You are comparing what there is now to what there will be in the future. Instead of what there could've been in the future versus what there will be in the future. I think you're missing a gigantic part of the picture there. As Elop put it, it's a war of ecosystems and Nokia gave up on that.

1. People wouldn't be paying so much for Android and especially iOS phones if they didn't really want any of the features. "Need " is another issue, but they definitely want them. They want a capacitive touchscreen - they have no idea what that is, but they've heard that's what they should want. They want to pinch things - why, they don't know, but the more fingers you can use at one time on the screen, the better. Say, thirty. Etc., etc.


2. Nokia didn't have anything better than Symbian ready to go.If they did, they'd have already deployed it.

3. Nokia will have complete control over WP7 on their phones.

But they don't have WP7 ready to go either until maybe somewhere towards the end of this year. Like with MeeGo. Only they now destroyed their Symbian sales too by announcing it's going out.

But not the ecosystem, that's the big thing here.

Thank you for this question, patlak, for it catalyzed (or joined an epiphany regarding the situation in my (aching, thick) head.

There are indeed two points of view here -- that of the end consumers, and that of the developers and people professionally involved with Nokia (not discussing the shareholder's position, which is represented by a less vocal group). Your question is from the point of view of the end consumer -- what will the change to WP7 bring to the market, and are we going to want to buy it. The answer is, for most people here, likely NO, we will not want any of it. WP7's philosophy is polarly opposite to that of Maemo/Meego, and if we liked this philosophy we'd be happy with iOS gadgets and not spend time on TMO. So no wonder why many people here are turning to Android (the lesser evil). But we have always been a very small group that barely affects the market.

The other point of view is that of Nokia and those working for / with it. Shrinking market share in the much larger Symbian segment had to be addressed somehow. Qt was a feasible solution, but apparently it wasn't working for Symbian as expected. So the board decided to replace Symbian with WP7, a decision about which I couldn't care less because I have never been interested in Symbian devices anyway.

Now, the conflict arises from the fact that Qt and Meego are incompatible and compete directly with WP7, so when Symbian goes they are canned as well. From the point of view of Nokia this is really unimportant, Meego being just an experimental platform with zero market share. From the point of view of most end users on TMO it is the world.

In the end of the day, for Nokia, it was never about Meego being ready or not. They will get it ready in some form, but they cannot keep it as more than an experiment since it will contradict the move to WP7 in the lower segment. It is simpler to have both lower and higher end phones running on WP7.

I guess I can now leave the conspiracy theories alone, suck it up and move on. Let's hope we get a decent successor to the N900 -- the first and last Meego phone from Nokia, but c'est la vie. If it has a screen larger than 3.5'', I'll buy it.

While it may take a year still for WP7 phones, at least it has a eco-system around it - yes still not as thriving as Android - but neverthless a system around it that WORKS.

Nokia lame excuse of an ecosystem - OVI - purely sucked. It didn't work either on N900. It didn't have a strong and secure payment system. Maybe you don't remember the fracas when we could actually download a paid app on OVI without paying for it. While that feels good to some "it should all be free" open source type guys - its not what builds a viable ecosystem.

They might not control the WP7 ecosystem - but they can ride that to some success (hopefully).

Just developing Meego itself wouldn't have sufficed in this case.

Yes I agree....

Meego will not produce a good phone before it dies.. there just not enough power/traction behind it... (aka there should have been one or two early adopters devices by now, to get close to competing in the market)

Even it they released the planned Meego phone Q4-2010 it would have still been a steep uphill battle.

Specially given how Nokia went with Maemo. I mean the N900 is a great great phone... and I'll probably use mine until it dies. Hopefully by that time some other free/oss phone is out there... otherwise I'll guess I'll have to sell my soul to HP/WebOS.

But Nokia never really worked with a good plan for Maemo as far as I could see.

Given that they let there base-os fall into the slums of decay, never rebased on current Debians and did not actively let the community contribute to the core os... (Felt more like a OpenSolaris type of development then PostGreSQL or Debian)

It would have taken a long time before there would have been consumer ready Maemo phones. But there could have been one by now!! with another one at Q2 or Q3 2011, really settling Maemo into the market..

No; there became Meego... basically throwing Maemo out of the window entirely... (sure sure it was a 'merger'... personally I have not seen much 'merging', I've seen a lot of Moblin turning into Meego)

There where hopes for Meego but to my eyes basically the same thing happened as with Maemo...

Somehow.. I have never felt much love for the platforms from Nokia after the N800....

Yes the N900 is great (and I'll say it a thousands times more) but even during the Nokia/Maemo/N900 Amsterdam event, I felt engaged... not empowered by Nokia..

Given the track record in the past the never gave me the feeling that they where actually committed... committed in more then just words and some money... With the N900 all previous devices again died in Nokia's eyes... Now I can understand this given the history... but it should not have to been that way... with proper setup of Maemo it should have been possible to keep the older devices up to date... let the community take over the roles of maintaining the devices... but i guess more coorperate issues like patents, copyrights, licenses and backroom deals where in the way of realizing that...

My hopes now are with the CSSU

I would really love to see US working together to rebase Maemo on Debian 6 (Squeeze) or 7 (Wheezy) trying to create a firmware that will completely blow away Maemo 5.

Maybe visually something like combining an updated userland with Canola like interface. (could be QT, could be something else)

And with development board like the Beagle and Panda board powering anything from our N900 to Tables to Cars and Home devices like thermostats, automation and whatever you can think of..

Well... guess this rambling just shows that I still love the potential of what was (is?) Maemo...

I just would have loved to see Nokia put there enormous knowledge from the like of Symbian into the Linux kernel and help create lightweight versions of some of the things bogging down Linux on small devices now...

Then we should not need to run Java (oeps I mean Dalvak) to get a Linux powered device to make phone calls with, listen to shoutcast and browse the web....

In some sense Apple already show us that this is possible right ? how much different in effect is an iPhone ? it's just a Unix kernel, with Mac userland, Obj-C and apples gui on top right ?.. sure lots of development and Q&A to make it all work nicely together, but isn't this just where Maemo and Meego failed ? Something more then a hand full of contracted developers to code up individual parts of the OS ?

But this is all so many years overdue now that I must agree with your sentiment that for a company like Nokia that needs to compete right now; it just isn't ready... and by the time it is, given the current conditions and management of it it will be many (3+) years to late.

They should have realized a year ago....

Right-- as in, pick MeeGo, run with it.

Elop deserves blame. If he had wanted, he could have scrambled Nokia into making MeeGo Priority 1, and we WOULD have a device right now. But I'm now convinced he was set against MeeGo from the start, and sabotaged its chances.