[LAU] Sorta-OT: Linux phones?

[Nick Copeland]

> From: inaudible at simplesuperlativ.es
>  not abandon it as a short-lived experiment, 

I thought that even Nokia recognised that Maemo was a stepping stone rather than 
a final goal, a means of demonstrating feasibility of Linux as a mobile platform whilst
not actually being a corporate direction - I still see it as a sandbox for them rather 
than a product.

> anyones guess with google breathing down their necks and apple setting the benchmark.

So this is personal opinion rather than anything heard off the net: I have iPhone, Androids
and the N900 here and what is too evident is that Maemo is lightyears away from these
two competitors. The unit is great as a geek computer but the interface is slow and kludgy
compared to the slick Android and 'iOS' interfaces, partly due to the resistive screen but in
part due to the disparate focus of Nokia on Symbian, Maemo, Meego and others - there has
just not been enough attention to the usability or presentation of this interface. On top of that 
when I got the iPhone (for the wife, but I 'play' with it every now and then) the store had 
280K apps, then Google is up towards what, 100K+. The N900 has somewhere short of 3K 
apps available and almost zero growth. 

- They have lost it. 

The issue is not the _number_ of apps, the issue is that developers are simply ignoring the 
platform, all of the Nokia platforms at the moment, including Symbian. People are looking
at smartphones for apps. Nokia has none. That does not draw in customers and without the
customers then the developers are not going to get onboard - with previous phones (I have
been a staunch user of Nokia phones for years) their own technology defined the popularity
of the product, Nokia were in control. They are no longer directly responsible for the 
success of their products, the apps companies are, and Nokia seem to have a problem 
getting their head around this.

It is going to be a seriously slow crawl out of a damn big hole they have dug for themselves, 
will just have to see if it is 6' deep leaving them as an 'also ran', or that they back off and
release an Android phone/tablet thereby giving up on the mobile OS race.

Regards, nick.
 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-user/attachments/20110127/99e6f673/attachment.htm>