According to the Finnish business newspaper Kauppalehti, Nokia's Chief Financial Officer said Nokia is considering manufacturing Linux-based mobile phones. The article quotes Rick Simonson, Nokia's Chief Financial Officer, as saying "we are definitely moving in the direction (of Linux-based phones)" at a seminar in Boston run by JP Morgan Chase. There was no further detail though, and apparently Simonson refused to be drawn on which kind of Linux would be used. Nokia already makes the Linux-based N800 and N810 internet tablets, which use Nokia's own version of Linux called Maemo, but current tablets have no telephony ability.
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After listening a couple of times, it certainly sounds like Nokia is moving towards doing Linux phones instead of Symbian/S60 ones.
On the one hand, it is clear that the answer to the question "why would the Symbian/S60 developer community move to Linux" is: because development is much faster, and because there will be more Linux devices out there (if that is what is meant with "real estate"😉.
On the other hand, the reference to the internet tablet confuses things.
Anybody interested in doing a transcript?
Sander van der Wal
mBrain Software.
After listening a couple of times, it certainly sounds like Nokia is moving towards doing Linux phones instead of Symbian/S60 ones.
Moving onto Linux doesn't necessarily mean abandoning S60, Linux and Symbian are OSes whereas S60 is a UI.
Making S60 run on top of Linux instead of Symbian might actually be a good way of easing the transition between OSes, because the look and feel of the phone would remain the same.
On the other hand, the reference to the internet tablet confuses things.
It's not there to confuse things, it's there to remind people that Nokia is already manufacturing Linux-based devices and developing its own version of Linux called Maemo.
If Nokia does move to Linux phones, the tablets would offer one possible template for iPhone-like devices.
This has already been put to bed by El Reg. Article 'Nokia says no plan to switch phones to Linux'
Besides as an accountant I would never listen to the CFO when it comes to an OS!!!
Are Nokia really going to scrap Maps, N-Gage, Ovi etc etc. Despite what anyone says these are pretty tied to S60.
Yes I know maps is also on S40 but fear not S60 will be here for a while yet.
I think a basic question needs to be answered.
After nearly 10 years of Symbian development and a very healthy S60 product portfolio with Touch UI (the apparent saviour of everything mobile) on the way, would they scrap the whole thing just to jump on the Linux bandwagon?? I'm not convinced.
That isn't to say Linux won't have a mobile place, it's just continuously overstated by analysts and techies alike. In a way it's a bit like the 'Symbian being the next Microsoft' analysis that went round 7 years ago
Googles mobile software division is platform agnostic I think that says a lot
Are Nokia really going to scrap Maps, N-Gage, Ovi etc etc. Despite what anyone says these are pretty tied to S60.
Well, to be fair the CFO himself didn't actually say anything at all about scrapping S60 or Symbian. But you're right that the media speculation around this was going heavily in that direction, and you're also right that Nokia isn't going to dump Symbian or S60 overnight after such recent heavy investment in related services. At most they might start to spread their bets a little.
Nokia sells over 400 million devices a year, that's well over 1 million every day, so if Nokia wants to diversify a little they have plenty of room to do so.
They already sell Linux-based tablets, so if they added telephony to them that would technically count as introducing Linux-based phones, even though they wouldn't really be changing their product line up that much. The tablets are probably Nokia's most plausible rival to the iPhone, especially if they could slim them down and use an interface based on Canola. That would still be a niche market though, whereas S60 is headed towards the mass market, so they wouldn't necessarily be overlapping at all.
I don't doubt that Nokia is going to use Linux in future products (as it already has). However it would almost certainly not be as a replacement for Symbian OS, rather it would be in addition too.
Its interesting to consider whether the OS layer needs to be the same across a portfolio of devices (can one OS be optimal across a wide range?).
I think increasingly the OS will matter less, the value would be in the software higher up the stack. With runtime technologies a lot of this could be platform agnostic anyway. Though I would say that the OS needs to be solid - if you build on sand rather than concrete...
And at the time-scales we're talking about things are quite fluid. The mobile technology industry is very dynamic and difficult to predict (outside the overview level).
when terms like "moving over to Linux", "taking the developer base there", instead of "adding Linux to the portfolio" or "expanding the developer base to include Linux developers", I think "they are going to abandon Symbian at some point, not very far into the future". But that's then just me, I guess...
Sander van der Wal
mBrain Software.
Abandon Symbian when they are the majority owner of it? Hmm.. not going to happen, nor should it. Symbian is a very solid basis.
My guess is that we won't see anything other than Internet Tablets with a cell phone radio added for quite some time still.
I am sure that guy got a bit of spanking when he got back to the HQ. 😊 ;P
Easy to see this one coming. Nokia's bought Trolltech, and their embedded QT environment has been around and doesn't show as much age as S60. Couple that with the fact that the Symbian OS *is* showing some age, this all makes perfect sense.
I'm sure the interim goal is to move developers towards QT/Embedded development which will eventually liberate all involved (Nokia, Developers) from S60.
Jonnycat26 wrote:Easy to see this one coming. Nokia's bought Trolltech, and their embedded QT environment has been around and doesn't show as much age as S60.
I was hoping that the Qt purchase would be leveraged to allow Nokia to develop software for OSX and Linux in addition to Windows.
Unregistered wrote:I was hoping that the Qt purchase would be leveraged to allow Nokia to develop software for OSX and Linux in addition to Windows.
Nokia's been able to do that for a long time.
I know for an absolute fact that at one point Nokia had java code that allowed for communication with early EPOC/Symbian devices, and this code worked on both Macs and Linux.
Why they never developed it is beyond me.
They do have telephone options: SIP. It'll run on any wifi covered area. Companies, campusses, whole city blocks. Particular the N810 WiMax version is pretty 'far reaching'. If the mini-SD slot were not so inconveniently positioned on the N800 a miniSD 3G/GPRS card with a driver could reach the world over SIP.
No doubt Symbian will be challenged by some form of Unix in the future. In the end we will see hardware with a virtual machine BIOS and BIOS-drivers. Running any OS: Java, Symbian or what ever ticks your fancy.
It is nice to notice that it's now official. Check out hardware specs of E90 and N810; E90 running maemo was strongly rumored here in Finland 😉
Everyone here's talking about the possibility of Linux replacing Symbian underneath S60, and I think for the reasons given (the technical investment in Symbian), this won't be an initial move by Nokia (maybe somewhere down the line...)
What no one's talking about is Linux as a replacement for the proprietary Nokia OS that underlies, or is, S40. To me, this makes much more sense. S40 has become increasingly sophisticated to the point where it is almost a slightly less capable version of S60, even to the extent of multitasking in Java (S40 5th Edition?). I say almost as S40 is not a smartphone OS because it doesn't allow 3rd parties to program the native OS in a non-sandboxed way (this is the only reliable differentiator to my mind). Phones and "smartphones" must and will merge, so we have one continuous spectrum of device capabilities rather an artificial delineation. S40 must either stagnate and be for the chop, or improve. To improve it must become S60 in a de-facto if not literal, sense (or in practice be replaced by S60). Either way, we will see a trend for the OS underlying low end devices to become more sophisticated - this is the nature of technological progression. Note this does NOT mean low end phone UIs will become more complicated and traditionally "smartphone"-like, it simply means the underlying OS can support more sophisticated functionality to pass onto the user in simpler forms. Competition will come in this market area from Android, and Nokia must compete, especially bearing in mind Linux & Android being free and Symbian having a price tag.
*Ultimately* either S60 will eat S40, or vice versa, but either way ultimately they will merge and become one and the same. Nothing else makes sense (though of course at the user level, there will be a spectrum of devices and prices of increasing sophistication from the very low end). I suspect that like Apple did with OSX moving to Intel, there will be an internal Nokia project moving S60 to Linux and probably a much farther advanced project moving S40 to Linux, or possibly these are one and the same.
Alex
phonething.com
[email][email protected][/email]