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by mseebach 5810 days ago
Shipping Android isn't an option for Nokia. They will be late to the party to the tune of two years. It's not a politics thing - they have a huge market and mindshare in smartphones. Actively commoditizing smartphones on the Android platform would be suicide.

If you like Macs you don't get a new computer, you get a new Mac. If you like Windows/Linux, you just get a new computer. It might be a Dell, a HP or a ThinkPad, you might have a preference, but in the end the specs matter much more than the brand.

If Nokia starts shipping Androids, they'll likely be the ThinkPads of smartphones. Rock-solid, reliable, great hardware, all boxes ticked, something of a following, but if you're in a pinch, there's an HTC that does the same for $100 less.

The only option for Nokia is figuring out how they can pivot their current smartphone market leadership into a niche that can compete with Android, the iPhone and BlackBerry.

I don't have the recipe, but it's going to require some very clear and bold leadership, that's for sure. Also, shipping three or four competing platforms isn't part of the solution, either (Symbian S60, Symbian 3rd gen, Maemo and MeeGo).
1 comments
vetinari 5810 days ago
Symbian S60 and Symbian 3rd gen is the same (or actually 3rd gen is subset of S60); Maemo and MeeGo is the same. That makes it down to two platfoms.

They actually have also S40, but that is for feature phones. I believe that they want to get rid of S40, put S60 on low end and MeeGo on high end phones.

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mseebach 5810 days ago
OK, I've got my facts backwards... Good for them on Maemo/MeeGo, I though they'd completely lost it there.

But Symbian 3rd gen (aka. Symbian^3) is indeed different from S60 (which has 4 editions: 1, 2, 3 and 5), with 5th edition becoming Symbian^1. As a matter of fact, Symbian^4 (in which the current UI is replaced by the Nokia Qt SDK) is positioned for a 2011 launch according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_platform

It's the Qt SDK that I counted as a new platform in itself.

Long story short: Focus. Nokia can't have two promising and incompatible smartphone platforms.

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vetinari 5810 days ago
Yes, I agree with you, they lost focus wrt their platforms. The first step for them is decide, what they want and then follow with steps to achieve that. And only that, no forking and dead ends.
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zokier 5810 days ago
They are aiming to have two completely different platforms (symbian&meego) that are source-level compatible because of Qt. Or thats my guess anyways
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