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by cannam
3028 days ago
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When they announced the move to Windows Phone, I thought it seemed like a good idea. Meego clearly wasn't ready, Symbian was an antique, and Windows Phone was promising in so many ways -- even now I believe we will never see another smartphone OS as well-designed as Windows Phone 7. Then some months later, for some reason, I ended up owning a phone with the last release of Symbian on it (Symbian Belle). And I realised that the original Nokia plan wasn't as stupid as it seemed. Symbian Belle was a surprisingly smooth and pleasant OS -- much smoother in many contexts than Android at the time. It had some serious pitfalls, but it turned out there was quite a lot of productive turd-polishing that could be done. A lot of the good stuff on Belle was down to Qt Quick, which was the same framework as they were intending to carry through for Meego developers. And although I never used Meego, I can believe that it could have worked very nicely in the end, and a polished Symbian could have seen it through for a while. But I was just as surprised to find out how much infrastructure there was behind it all. Nokia had an app store and billing platform serving a lot of countries and languages, that could bill you for apps either from credit card or straight from your carrier balance. They had one of the best mapping providers, a decent weather service, and a fine music provider. They had first-class hardware and a lot of public goodwill. The experience changed my mind completely. Nokia could have done it with Symbian and Meego. |
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