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For me the saddest thing is not Windows Phone going away, it's Nokia not going all the way with their Qt based Linux distro, Meego. I had a Nokia N9 smartphone,
by oblio 3y ago
For me the saddest thing is not Windows Phone going away, it's Nokia not going all the way with their Qt based Linux distro, Meego. I had a Nokia N9 smartphone, the UI was amazing. It took 5 (I think?) years for iOS and Android to sort of copy the gesture based UI, badly.
Damn internal corporate politics at Nokia.
- gandalfian 3y agoI miss Psion which ironically abandoned the market because they thought Microsoft would dominate it. Some of their ease of use has never been replicated.
- rbanffy 3y agoI miss WebOS, which was criminally cancelled by the imbecile HP hired. It took years for any other mobile platform to catch up to the convenience of my beloved Palm Pre.
- pjmlp 3y agoI use it every day on my TVs.
- rbanffy 3y agoCan't make phone calls, or carry my TVs in my pocket.
- pjmlp 3y agoIrrelevant for the fact that WebOS is still around.
- rbanffy 3y agoAll the things that made WebOS interesting and a competitor to both iPhone and Android (and Blackberry, and Windows) are gone and not usable in the TV interface. I remember some people did have a half-working port to the PinePhone, but I don't know how far did it go.
- pjmlp 3y agoIf it was a worthy competitor it would have stayed around in mobile devices, I was never impressed with the Web based UI in the Psions. Nokia had already tried it a couple of years before with the Web runtime for Symbian, and it wasn't great either, nor the failed Firefox OS. It lives on as TV OS, and actually the experience is much better than Android TV, regarding the UI junk (less of it), hence why I got it. And yeah, there are people still shipping apps for it to run on TV, if one feels so inclined to do so.
- rbanffy 3y ago> Nokia had already tried it a couple of years before with the Web runtime for Symbian, and it wasn't great either, nor the failed Firefox OS. IIRC, WebOS was the first mobile to rely on WebKit for the whole UI presentation layer. Prior to that, nothing was fast enough.
- zerr 3y agoNokia acquisition of Trolltech gave us LGPL Qt.
- NewJazz 3y agoWhich I guess later gave rise to Unity8/UBPorts, or at least factored in.
- zyang 3y agoBlackberry went all the way with QNX and it didn't pan out either. There just wasn't room for a third player.
- tiernano 3y agoMight be wrong, tell me if i am, but Blackberry, especially here in Ireland, was expensive because of the extra plan to get it to work with mail. I remember spending weeks trying to get my Exchange server at home to talk to Blackberry mail... Gave up and took me 5 min to get it working on Windows Phone with Exchange Active Sync, and later with the iPhone. And for Blackberry, i had to spend extra per month for it to get it enabled. I ended up canceling that part and staying with standard data and all went well on iPhone and Windows Phone.
- goosedragons 3y agoBB10 (QNX based) phones didn't need a special plan.
- tiernano 3y agoyea, i was using them before that...
- rospaya 3y ago> There just wasn't room for a third player It took something like four years until Apple and Android passed Nokia's market share. They had their chance to fight.
- hahn-kev 3y agoYeah no one would make apps for 3rd place, Android already has the problem of being the 2nd target for many new apps. It's worth it for services but a lot of times the Apple app is better because users pay more.
- oblio 3y agoYou're looking at everything through the present lense. Android wasn't in full swing back then. Linux + Qt could have been built up into an amazing mobile OS. I'd argue Android could have ended up as the 3rd place OS. Nokia just needed to switch to being the premier Linux + Qt phone maker instead of the only one + trying to lock everything up on top of Linux + Qt.
- pengaru 3y agoDidn't it live on as SailfishOS and Jolla, before dying for lack of customers? I too had an N9, and while I wouldn't describe it as amazing, it was reasonably good for the time and probably the best we've ever had in terms of a functional multitouch "linux phone". IMO what killed it was the closed off nature of Harmattan and the lack of support from Nokia in encouraging hacking the OS. No reproducible firmware, no trivial flashing of community builds standing on the shoulders of what Nokia shipped on the phone. We'd be in a very different place today had the N9 been where the PinePhone is in terms of ability to easily derive and swap out distros, and the vibrant community this enables.
- bzzzt 3y agoI had the predecessor (N900) at the time, but I don't think the OSS community would have helped. Lots of effort was directed to typical 'hacker' uses of the phone, not stuff your regular 'end user' would need. It was fun to see a full port of OpenOffice on the thing but it needed a full minute to start and was useless on the small screen. Also, most end users don't know what to do with the terminal ;) While I think they improved a lot with the N9 Nokia was already severely outclassed by Apple, followed by Google by then. Directly stating the N9 line was unsupported at release time was the nail in the coffin.
- Apocryphon 3y agoSailfish is still around, albeit very barely
- pjmlp 3y agoSymbian was too strong internally.
- idonotknowwhy 3y agoElop was clearly a mole. I use the Nokia N9 alarm clock was an example of a perfect piece of software.
- pjmlp 3y agoThis keeps being told. It was the Nokia board that decided to hire him. It was the Nokia board that gave him a contract with a bonus clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, as discussed on the Finn press at the time.
- herbst 3y agoThe saddest aspect for me is that every alternative had so much better battery potential than whatever android is doing. Phones, watches, TVs all are slow and battery hungry just because nobody would opt in for a little less functionality (or app selection)