• gerikson@awful.systems
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    2 days ago

    Maybe… like I mentioned, Nokia’s S60 application stack was a mess. The underlying phone software and platform might have been there, but the 3rd party ecosystem wasn’t. This was a huge part of the success of the iPhone, that 3rd party developers had a stable platform to develop for, and a steady financial partner (Apple) paying them.

    No offense against Nokia but I really don’t think the company had the mentality to offer that.

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      That’s Symbian, though. Nokia managed to launch a grand total of two or three Maemo/MeeGo phones (N900, N9, maybe another one I forget) before Elop killed it in the crib. It would have been one thing if the Burning Platform meno had been about S60, but it wasn’t.

      Being basically just a Qt-based DE on a pretty standard RPM-based Linux distro (much much more so than Android, even at the time) Meego had a low barrier to entry into application development and a rather stable and mature API to work with.

      Then again, if you “don’t think the company had the mentality to offer that” I guess you’re right in the sense that the alleged trojan horse CEO killed the platform before it had the chance to gain any traction.

      • Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz
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        2 days ago

        Yeah, Symbian really was quite a thing. It was insanely optimized for memory and battery, but was nightmare to code.

      • rook@awful.systems
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        2 days ago

        FWIW, maemo still lives… Jolla released their C2 phone which runs the maemo-descended sailfish OS about 6 months ago. I don’t know anything about it, other than its existence, and that it doesn’t have the N900 form factor 😔

    • mountainriver@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      I think this is correct.

      Nokia managed to push Ericsson out of their dominant position because Nokia were more of a consumer products company, including consumer electronics. But because Nokia did phones as consumer electronics, they didn’t think about them in terms of a platform and had a poor position to compete with smart phones. Their best bet would probably have been to make hardware that ran Android, and at the time I was a bit surprised that they didn’t. Their hardware reputation was stellar.

      Elop’s and Microsoft’s actions were still scummy, though from Nokia’s perspective they sold a failing part of their business for billions. Microsoft of course continued to run the phone sales into the ground.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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        2 days ago

        when I started work at Ericsson Australia in late 2000, they’d found out that a third of Australian employees had Nokias, lol. So they bought everyone an Ericsson with a company plan! My first mobile! I hated it so much.