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The hobbled N770 with broken BT tethering and a CPU that appears to have been selected primarily to be just a little too underpowered to run a full SIP client.

The hobbled N770 with broken BT tethering and a CPU that appears to have been selected primarily to be just a little too underpowered to run a full SIP client. The never-ending uncertainty over the pivot to Meego. The "two bald men fighting over a comb" war between UIQ and Hildon. The cycles of cancellation / un-cancellation / re-cancellation affecting both S80 and S90. As an outsider, it seemed utterly clear at the time that the Maemo devices should have been the focus... but I realise how difficult a wrench that would have been for those who had sunk so much time and effort into Symbian. Elop was right about the burning platform, but it was far too late by that stage.

jokab 1y ago
> Two bald men fighting over a comb I chuckled there for a minute
jillesvangurp 1y ago
Oh this was crystal clear to many insiders as well. Internal mailing lists were hilarious at the time. One thing with Fins is that they don't hold back when they have an opinion. Meego could have run circles around Android. It took Google years to make that stop sucking. It was slow, a bit meh in terms of UX, and overall not that great. The devices were kind of crap as well in the first few years. But it ran Android, Chrome and had decent apps and a great development experience. Because it was basically uncrippled Java. As opposed to the J2ME nonsense that Nokia was deliberately keeping crippled to make people use their quite horrible native SDK for Symbian. Because that native SDK was a control point and Sun (pre Oracle acquisition) was in charge of Java; not Nokia. There never was a touch screen optimized version of J2ME. Google did the smart thing by simply using Apache Harmony and not bothering with Sun certification. That later lead to the copyright dispute with Oracle. But by then Android had decisively established itself as a developer friendly platform that abandoned OEMs could use instead of paying MS or sticking with Symbian. Those OEMs picked Android because it allowed them to build cheap smart phones and ship them without having to invent their own OS. Not because it was so great. Nokia could have easily pivoted Meego with Android compatibility. It basically was Linux with exactly the same kernel, drivers, hardware support, and all the rest. And Android was properly open source. Any suggestion of this was shut down hard by the Symbian cheer leaders. They kept insisting they were going to fix Symbian. By adding QT, by acquiring what was left of Symbian and open sourcing that, etc. None of it worked of course and the rest is history.

jokab 1y ago

> Two bald men fighting over a comb I chuckled there for a minute

jillesvangurp 1y ago

Oh this was crystal clear to many insiders as well. Internal mailing lists were hilarious at the time. One thing with Fins is that they don't hold back when they have an opinion. Meego could have run circles around Android. It took Google years to make that stop sucking. It was slow, a bit meh in terms of UX, and overall not that great. The devices were kind of crap as well in the first few years. But it ran Android, Chrome and had decent apps and a great development experience. Because it was basically uncrippled Java. As opposed to the J2ME nonsense that Nokia was deliberately keeping crippled to make people use their quite horrible native SDK for Symbian. Because that native SDK was a control point and Sun (pre Oracle acquisition) was in charge of Java; not Nokia. There never was a touch screen optimized version of J2ME. Google did the smart thing by simply using Apache Harmony and not bothering with Sun certification. That later lead to the copyright dispute with Oracle. But by then Android had decisively established itself as a developer friendly platform that abandoned OEMs could use instead of paying MS or sticking with Symbian. Those OEMs picked Android because it allowed them to build cheap smart phones and ship them without having to invent their own OS. Not because it was so great. Nokia could have easily pivoted Meego with Android compatibility. It basically was Linux with exactly the same kernel, drivers, hardware support, and all the rest. And Android was properly open source. Any suggestion of this was shut down hard by the Symbian cheer leaders. They kept insisting they were going to fix Symbian. By adding QT, by acquiring what was left of Symbian and open sourcing that, etc. None of it worked of course and the rest is history.