Nokia officials 'reveal' Nseries future and Symbian-Maemo transition

Hm, a bit disapointed here,

would have liked to see an e series maemo device: large keyboard, open office ported, good email client, large battery - >2000 mA (in the spirit of the slim e71 with bp-5l battery)

Great news. I'm waiting for fully featured Maemo device. N900 seems too immature yet.

Surprisingly little repsonse to this so far.

Sensible move by Nokia. I expect that a QT faced Symbian phone will eventually equal or better the Maemo offerings in the future. I wonder if Maemo will stay exclusive to Nokia phones or if it will be licensed out?

It'd be interesting for Nokia to position each of these series.

What will the difference between the X-Series and the N-Series be? If it's just X = Symbian and N = Maemo that's not a very customer-oriented product portfolio. Is N-Series going to be high-end and X-Series mid-range? Is it operator dependent?

Nokia's attempts to create series usually just end up in internal business units competing which is confusing for consumers. How is the E-51 an enterprise phone? Why is the 5800 not an N-Series device. Calling the N900 an N-Series phone even though it was a different OS was a rare example of customer-oriented thinking; shame they seem to be reversing the trend.

Also -- I think it's a little premature for Nokia to be planning to move 50 - 100M devices per-year over to a platform that hasn't actually shipped a proven device yet (too early to call N900 and N800/N770 were hardly proofs).

I believe that Nokia Corp. owns Maemo just like it now owns Symbian, I know S60 5th appears on a Samsung and a Sony device but id imagine those deals were done before Nokia aquired Symbian.

I would be surprised if they licence either again for rivals to bastardise with their own flavour.

"QUOTE"
Unregistered
Surprisingly little repsonse to this so far.

Sensible move by Nokia. I expect that a QT faced Symbian phone will eventually equal or better the Maemo offerings in the future. I wonder if Maemo will stay exclusive to Nokia phones or if it will be licensed out?

It's sad. Symbian with S60 used to be the best smartphone you could buy. I had two S60 phones which I really liked.

Today unfortunately, at the normal consumer eyes, the graphical interfacelooks old and clunky. Maybe they think it's not worth the wait to have Symbian with Qt ready and for now they have a better chance with Maemo.

I don't think they expected the Maemo reception to be so positive.

I think we all sort of expected this and it's welcome. Nokia are far behind in mindshare and Maemo 5 and the N900 captured this unexpectedly. Any push towards a more open platform I support. I'll be waiting intently for the N900's successor for my next phone in all likelihood.

I think it makes sense to move away from S60 (this was long rumored), since it is aging and hasn't translated well into the touch market. However, IMO it would make more sense to join the Android crowd than to create yet another smartphone OS in a crowded market. There's a reason Apple has so many applications and a growing share of the market. They have kept things simple. Nokia is making things complicated.

That said, if they make it easy to port Android and iPhone applications, create a real app store (Ovi as it exists today just won't cut it), offer GPS turn-by-turn for free (a la Google), and keep plugging away at the user interface they may have a winner in Maemo. There is more potential there than in S60.

And I will go for N900 at the start of 2010, really looking forward to it 😊

Finally some exciting news.

Relegate Symbian to low end where it belongs and bring on Maemo!

I am really surprised that Steve hasn't chimed in yet with his obligatory "Symbian rules!" analysis.

Unregistered wrote:I believe that Nokia Corp. owns Maemo just like it now owns Symbian, I know S60 5th appears on a Samsung and a Sony device but id imagine those deals were done before Nokia aquired Symbian.

You do know the history of Symbian, don't you?

Symbian has always been available on other platforms, such as on the SE UIQ handsets, NTT Docomo devices, Siemens (the SX1)

Nokia doesn't "own" Symbian, and I think they only ever owned it with other parties. The Symbian Foundation (who are developing the next gen variants) was created by Nokia, SE, Vodafone (!), TI, Samsung, NTT Docomo.

It'll be interesting to see how the dev/hacking community takes to Maemo 5. previously they've worked very closely with the Nokia teams in back-porting features from the later OS to work on the earlier devices - very much akin to having 9.1 FP2 features running on an older N73 or N70.

It appears that for the moment, Nokia are intending to target 3 main operating systems :

S40 - low end
Symbian - low/mid end handsets (5530, 5800)
Maemo - high end

Which makes complete and utter sense, as having one OS that fits all the criteria is unlikely to ever work that well.

I'm intrigued by how this will play out though - the E series being the main point. I would expect Maemo to be a perfect replacement, being considerably more capable of supporting the business apps than Symbian.

Mmmmmm ... Nokia in "common sense" shocker. Must be something else going on then.

Unregistered wrote:Surprisingly little repsonse to this so far.

Sensible move by Nokia. I expect that a QT faced Symbian phone will eventually equal or better the Maemo offerings in the future. I wonder if Maemo will stay exclusive to Nokia phones or if it will be licensed out?

At the developer level, I'd expect them to want to get Maemo out to as wide a community as possible (its primarily open source, thats how it works). From the business side thats unlikely though, as they'll want to make the most of it to sell their own handsets.

QT is being ported to Maemo as well though, so thats a non-starter in the discussion .... and according to the wiki page, maemo 5 has Bundled community-supported Qt libraries. So its there already?

Symbian for Nokia N and E series is dead - 2 years max. It cannot compete with Maemo in terms of actual and potential performance. Nokia views all its high-end smartphones as mobile computers. They have a huge R&D co-operation deal with Intel to accelerate mobile CPU/GPU development. So a clean and powerful, proprietary/open Linux based OS makes perfect sense (compared to piling more and more code on top of the brilliant but dinosaur Psion base). S60 will still ship in tens of millions of mid-range smartphones - but I wonder how many of AAS readers are interested in the mid-range?

This has been perfectly obvious ever since Maemo 5 was first previewed on the N900 and the Maemo 6 road-map announced.

The AAS team, especially Steve, are stuck in legacy denial mode making irrelevant comparisons between the N97 and the N900 and missing the most important comparison - just how bad the N97 is on a "mature" OS and just how good the N900 is on the brand new Maemo 5. If Nokia puts the same effort into Maemo 5 on the N900 as it did fixing the N97 firmware then things will get even better.

Maemo 6 with new and exciting form factors and even more powerful hardware really is where all self respecting Nokia/Smartphone fans will be in 2010/11.

I will swap my E71 for the N900 because that is the future - the same way I swapped fax for e-mail / e-fax back in the day. Also I would like to watch some DivX House and Dexter on the train 😊

It sticks in my throat to say so, but Orlowski has written a clear and concise appraisal on the Reg, and I largely agree with his analysis. Nokia took the best mobile OS by far, gave it a phone UI and pathetic, crappy built-in apps, then spent years making an utter pig's ear of developing it. The final nail in the coffin was jumping on the touch bandwagon and spending all their resources adding an inconsistent and confusing touch layer to an already inconsistent and confusing UI. Joe Public then reads that the "flagship" N97 has an old chipset, no graphics accelerator, design faults in early units, immature firmware; STILL has an inconsistent and confusing UI and crappy built-in apps. And, by the way, the app store is late to market and rubbish.

The clever things they've come up with over the years, like "ShareOnline" or firmware-over-the-air, for some reason get left by the wayside to wither and die. (For example, where are the Facebook* and Picasaweb services on ShareOnline, and why is the UK 5800 still on last year's firmware?)

*Yes, thanks, I do know about Pixelpipe, but why didn't Nokia invent it, instead of mucking around replacing their actually-half-decent messaging suite with the biggest PoS ever to hit a mobile device?

</rant>

clonmult wrote:QT is being ported to Maemo as well though, so thats a non-starter in the discussion .... and according to the wiki page, maemo 5 has Bundled community-supported Qt libraries. So its there already?

Not quite, as developers are not yet allowed to release apps build with Qt for Maemo. Part of the license for the beta.

I hope Maemo will become usable for something that is not a Tablet PC, because for the moment Symbian S60 is far better than Maemo 5, for a phone of course.

Symbian is an old horse that doesn't want to jump the hurdles anymore. Nokia are bringing in a young horse with lots of potential. But they don't seem to realize that it's too late to win the race. iPhone, Android and WinMo7 will be the winners in the next couple of years.

unregistered wrote:Symbian is an old horse that doesn't want to jump the hurdles anymore. Nokia are bringing in a young horse with lots of potential. But they don't seem to realize that it's too late to win the race. iPhone, Android and WinMo7 will be the winners in the next couple of years.

No, that's just not true. It's been in the wrong hands for a while, but it's far more capable than Nokia have managed with it. And WinMo7 couldn't win anything in a thousand years.

neilhoskins wrote:, and why is the UK 5800 still on last year's firmware?)

Because its owner hasn't bothered to update the firmware? My UK 5800 is at V31.

I still maintain that there's nothing wrong with Symbian, only with the hardware it's been released on. Whether the Symbian Foundation is able to do anything about this remains to be seen...

�While it is our policy not to disclose details of our product roadmap, we�d like to explicitly communicate that we remain firmly committed to Symbian as our smartphone platform of choice."
I'm having a Samsung deja-vu moment reading this. Apparently everybody is dropping Symbian by 2012 but nobody has the guts to admit it.

For once the Register hits the nail on the head when it says:

"So, after billions of dollars of investment over 11 years, how can Nokia now justify changing horses? Especially since Symbian still offers the best kernel and middleware stack for mobiles, with the meanest power management, and years of debugging.

It's Nokia�s inept record of developing UIs and services (think anything with the word �Ovi� near it) that's to blame, and also its negligence in failing to give Symbian a modern and attractive development environment (it bought Trolltech�s QT five years too late). Thanks to lousy software development, it had boxed itself into a corner. "

Symbian is here to stay. If MS hadn't killed Sendo, it would have had a proper platform. Symbian = briiliant. Nokia = shite.

I think the E-series will live on and succeed greatly with Symbian, since it seems to be the most powerful/efficient OS when given modest hardware requirements. And it still has a healthy ecosystem of 3rd party products. Unfortunately, I think this streak will end in a few years when hi powered hardware becomes more commoditized, in which case Symbian will really be more for entry level phones. From the looks of ideas.symbian.org, I feel the team is less willing to make fundamental changes to scale to hi-end hardware, and continue the approach of making the most of scarce resources. But that would only solidy Nokia's position in the entry-level space, as the OS is really quite capable, and better than any crappy phone OS that usually comes with regular phones.

Maemo is best put on N-series for the multimedia demands required, which would require hi-end hardware and software across the board. It seems like Linux is the only OS capable of scaling to lower-end hardware as well as capable of taking advantage of hi-end hardware. The ecosystem is also healthy, but there seems to be much less 3rd party support, but tons of community support. I can only hope that a Maemo device will come to AT&T or Verizon next year.

Unregistered wrote: Symbian = briiliant. Nokia = shite.

Nokia = cannot make one phone without major flaws (I need N97 mini with faster processor and 3D and with Xenon flash - is that too difficult?); slow moving in software and services (eg. Nokia Internet Radio and Sports Tracker still are not converted to S60 V5 - after one year on the market; Share Online still very limited etc.)

Unregistered wrote:Symbian = brilliant, except terrible touch UI and high complexity (good for geeks like me, unusable for non-technical users)

What? Unusable? So the millions of 5800 buyers can't use their phones? It's perfectly usable. It's not the best but it's good. Has a steeper learning curve, but now I'm used to it it's VERY good to use.

Unregistered wrote:
Nokia = cannot make one phone without major flaws (I need N97 mini with faster processor and 3D and with Xenon flash - is that too difficult?); slow moving in software and services (eg. Nokia Internet Radio and Sports Tracker still are not converted to S60 V5 - after one year on the market; Share Online still very limited etc.)

My SportsTracker is running perfectly on my 5800. The About dialog says: v2.05(S60 5.0). What's the problem?

The 5800 and 5530 are good phones without major flaws. There are many others too. The N96 and N97 were poorly executed, no doubt. They damaged Nokia a bit.

I foresee major disappointment in the future. When N900 appears and subsequent Maemo/QT processor sucking software appears on future N Series, implemented by Nokia it ain't going to be pretty.

Unregistered wrote:What? Unusable? So the millions of 5800 buyers can't use their phones? It's perfectly usable. It's not the best but it's good. Has a steeper learning curve, but now I'm used to it it's VERY good to use. .

Most people I know with S60 phones use very basic functions only - basically the phonebook and the call button. No syncing, no internet, no radio, no apps, maps - nothing.

Unregistered wrote:My SportsTracker is running perfectly on my 5800. The About dialog says: v2.05(S60 5.0). What's the problem?

The 5800 and 5530 are good phones without major flaws. There are many others too. The N96 and N97 were poorly executed, no doubt. They damaged Nokia a bit.

2.05 is very recent. It does work, but it is nowhere to be found on NST website. Who will find it? Why is it hidden?
Nokia Internet Radio does not, whatever you do. Nokia wireless keyboard drivers not compatible (work temporally then crashes etc.)

5800 and 5530 are cheap phones, so by design have major flows - very lousy cameras, crippled software (eg. no kinetic scrolling), cheap build quality (squeaky plastic), non transleflective screen.

Unregistered wrote:Most people I know with S60 phones use very basic functions only - basically the phonebook and the call button. No syncing, no internet, no radio, no apps, maps - nothing.

2.05 is very recent. It does work, but it is nowhere to be found on NST website. Who will find it? Why is it hidden?
Nokia Internet Radio does not, whatever you do. Nokia wireless keyboard drivers not compatible (work temporally then crashes etc.)

5800 and 5530 are cheap phones, so by design have major flows - very lousy cameras, crippled software (eg. no kinetic scrolling), cheap build quality (squeaky plastic), non transleflective screen.

What do you mean by "recent"? SportsTracker 2.05 was available April 2009. It took me 10 seconds of googling to find it again 2 minutes ago.

And without getting into a semantics discussion, a product that has reduced features so that it can be sold for less money is not flawed, and certainly doesn't have "major" flaws for that reason. My car is not flawed because it doesn't have split-zone climate control, and it is slower than a Veyron.
The 5800 and 5530as value phones are perfectly good for their very low price.

Unregistered wrote:Most people I know with S60 phones use very basic functions only - basically the phonebook and the call button. No syncing, no internet, no radio, no apps, maps - nothing.

Are you and your friend over 60? Most people I know with S60 phones use Facebook, Web Browsing, email, photos, GPS, maps, iPlayer and add new apps too. I find it extremely easy to use and I'm not a techie geek.

Nobody I know uses Internet Radio, because there is nothing interesting to listen to for them.