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Nokia was developing an Android phone before the Microsoft purchase
- zrgiu_ 13y agoNokia was experimenting with Android, as any serious business would. You have to explore every option, so that if upper management decides to go that way, they are ready. It's completely normal. Hell, they'll probably continue experimenting, even if it's just to see how Android compares to Windows on the same hardware in terms of speed.
- huherto 13y agoIt may have even help leverage their negotiations with Microsoft.
- kcorbitt 13y agoThat was my immediate thought. Even if they weren't planning on switching to Android in the short term Nokia could have made Microsoft's decision to buy a lot easier by hinting at the possibility.
- joe_the_user 13y agoIt seems like Microsoft's decision to buy Nokia was pretty easy. If Nokia happened to experience a lot of success with Windows Phone, they'd have even more money to hedge their bets and not be dependent on MS. But if Nokia kept slipping and actually went under, MS would lose it's major Windows Phone hardware partner. I mean, ever since Elop became CEO, the talk was "Microsoft just bought Nokia ... for nothing". So what I'd be curious about, after all the lies and betrayals (QT, argh... grrr), did Nokia actually get any "real money" for jumping onto the failing MS Phone ship (edit: given the threat of an Android double-double cross or whatever)?
- bsullivan01 13y agoDuh! Their loyalties are (or were) to their shareholders, not to Microsoft. But I wonder if the pulled a Motorola ("we'll sue other Android phone makers...oh, you want to buy us Google? Hmmm...let's see")
- guerrilla 13y agoI think we need more comics of companies as characters. I read your comment in stick figures :)
- potyl 13y agoI wonder why anyone would be surprised of this. Nokia builds phones and has an R&D. It just make sense that they try different OS on their own hardware as long as they have the source and can deal with the proprietary drivers needed.
- ARothfusz 13y agoAnd, of course, there's nothing to stop Microsoft from releasing an Android phone.
- tigerweeds 13y agoexcept maybe for their board of managers
- tzs 13y agoSuppose that rather than making an Android phone, Microsoft were to release a Windows phone with an Android compatibility layer. The idea would be to lower the barrier for current Android users to trying a Windows phone for their next phone, because they could keep their Android apps.
- richardwhiuk 13y agoThe problem is then nobody would ever write a Windows Phone app as they could just keep users happy with (and monetise) a Android app running on Windows Phone.
- yareally 13y agoA Java VM for .net already exists[1] (Scala for .net leverages it). Obviously the presentation layer would need rewritten for the platform and also for XAML, but an Android app and Windows Phone 8 app can share much of their base code if done correctly. Storage mechanisms like SQLite can also run on either device. [1] http://www.ikvm.net/ http://www.ikvm.net/
- mikeash 13y agoThere's a vast difference between being able to share much of your code base between platforms, and simply having your existing binaries run as-is with no changes. For a lot of developers, the gulf between "do nothing to support Windows Phone" and "do anything at all, even very little, to support Windows Phone" is enough to make them not do it.
- jamesgeck0 13y ago
- revelation 13y agoThey weren't developing it, a bunch of random engineers ported it to the hardware they had. Like MacOS on x86 Intel.
- 300bps 13y agoI read the blog post and every blog post the blog posts pointed to. You seem to be right - some engineers ported Android to Lumia hardware. As the blog posts stated, there are surely Microsoft employees playing around with iOS 7 and Google employees playing around with Windows Phone. This post seems more a symptom of professional bloggers needing to fill story quotas rather than being actual news.
- JimmaDaRustla 13y agoI hate journalism so much for these types of reasons, one of my biggest pet peeves is journalism attempting to trigger an emotion or response rather than reporting the story.
- 4ad 13y agoI have no idea what Nokia did, but the Mac OS X statement is extremely wrong. OS X is a descendant of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP which always ran on IA-32. From 1989. Rhapsody (the unreleased OS X precursor which added a more Mac OS interface to OPENSTEP) ran on IA-32. Even Mac OS X Server 1.0 ran on IA-32. Mac OS X 10.0-10.3 were not released for IA-32, but support was maintained internally by Apple, fact easily checked because the Darwin releases from that period worked on IA-32.
- cokernel_hacker 13y agoI am afraid that you are "extremely wrong" He was referring to Mac OS, not OS X, which did have an intel port http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
- 4ad 13y agoInteresting, I didn't know about this. However, the comment is still wrong, this was a joint effort between Apple and Novell, not "a bunch of random engineers".
- alphakappa 13y agoCan we let go of this post-mortem analysis of the world-that-could-have-been already? It's like the reports you get after someone dies "Oh, he was so happy... he was working on a new album!" Nokia could've done many things, but it's hard to argue that them making an Android phone would have saved either Nokia, or improved the Android ecosystem. Nokia's failings go much deeper than the choice to go with Windows, (or the failure to go Android). And had they gone Android, they would've been yet another hardware vendor trying to differentiate themselves in a crowded Android field. HTC, Samsung, and Motorola are also capable of making good hardware, but unless there was some secret sauce about Nokia that would've solved all the existing shortcomings in that ecosystem, it's pointless to lovingly sigh and talk about what might've happened.
- dz0ny 13y agoNokia had massive respect in Europe, both from consumers and operators side. If they actualy released Android phone in midrange, I'am pretty sure a lot of consumers would buy simply becouse is from Nokia. This acctualy happened with Lumia phones.
- bad_user 13y agoI've heard this argument a lot. It was given as a reason for why Nokia went with Win Phone, even though the writing was on the wall that Win Phone is a failure and represents Nokia's suicide note. And that's why people bring up Android into the conversation. Because Samsung, and not Apple, is the most profitable smartphone maker and because the pie is huge and still growing. I would have bought a Lumia if it came with Android. My wife and my friends too.
- shubb 13y agoLooking at the last generation of non-windows Nokia phones reveals how 'bad' Android is as a phone OS. Nokia's Asha range could go a month between charging. They had support for apps, and for instance had a spotify client. They were oriented towards open standards like email, rather than closed vendor lockin solutions like gmail. An android phone without using google service is half what it could be. Clearly, Android gives a superior user experience, but I think by providing developers with an easy, PC like programming experience, Android made a design decision that will mean it has a fraction the battery life of an OS that makes Aps behave.
- zokier 13y agoThere probably wasn't a thing on earth Nokia wasn't developing before MS got involved.
- dep_b 13y agoTo me it doesn't seem to be extremely hard to get a Android build running on a handset that uses off the shelf hardware for most parts. Especially not if you're a specialist on smartphones.