Do not listen to the Guardian, there will be no Nokia devices running Android any time soon
By Stefan Constantinescu on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 12:00 AM PST In Nokia
I should be ashamed of myself for even linking to this terrible piece of flame bait, but I just have to. The Guardian’s Richard Wray is claiming that industry insiders have tipped him off that at Nokia World 2009, scheduled to take place in Stuttgart Germany between September 2 – 3, a new device will be launched by the Finnish manufacture running Android.
It is bullshit. A quick walk around the Ruoholahti office in Helsinki is all it takes to see that Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s flavor of Linux, Maemo, is the only flavor of Linux the company will ever support. Now Richard may be right about a Linux device being announced at Nokia World, but it will be a cold day in hell if that thing will run Android.
My favorite line: “Nokia was unavailable for comment, however.”
Your article was filed at 00:05 British Summer Time on a Monday, do you expect Nokia to keep a 24 hour a day press team assembled just to deal with someone as thick headed as you?
Update: “Absolutely no truth to this whatsoever,” said a Nokia spokesman. Can we now move on about our day?
How exactly is Android competition for Nokia? Nokia doesn’t really make money from the OS
Android the OS is not competition for Nokia, Android devices however are.
Nokia is already trying to integrate Qt into both Symbian and Maemo, and that’s going to be their cross platform strategy going forward. Android is all about Dalvik.
Like I said above, Maemo is Nokia’s idea of what Linux should look like on mobile devices. Android is Google’s idea of Linux on the handset.
I can’t say which one is better since I’ve yet to own an Android device, and I have never owned a Maemo device.
If they dont jump into the Android bandwagon soon, then in the smartphone league they are going down faster than Titanic. Just look at their latest N97, excellent hardware but the software is so 90s. It just cant compete with the smartphones of today. Once you use an iPhone or Android device, you wont like to spend your money with Symbian. They either get some good developers who can design and write good software or align with people who are doing so.
As always, right on the money Stefan. You put my thoughts into words. And it’s so hilarious to see all the blogs pick it up as if it’s the second coming of Jesus Christ.
of course android OS alone is also a competition to nokia. what’s the most important single factor today in the smartphone space? certainly not the hardware or devices themselves. it’s about the UX, the underlying platform, and even more about developers and quality/quantity of apps coming out of it. do you really think any developer ATM would give a shit about developing apps for something like maemo, when android is just about to take off like it’s no ones business? sure, nokia can say “nooo..! we want to have our own little buggy drunk-engineered linux on our devices!”, but for what price? and with what support in the developer community? you mean, like the huge support they gained with symbian in the last 2 years..? dream on, nokia.. best you dream of the titanic (as mentioned above, heh), then at least your subconsciousness is somewhat prepared of the things that will happen in future if you stay on this suicidal, ignorant course..
[...] picked up and passed along as if it’s an undeniable truth. Of course, Stefan Constantinescu, was the first to put my own thoughts into words and pointed how ridiculous it is, until Nokia stepped up and denied it officially on Reuters, the same denial being posted and [...]
I did not believe for second that Nokia would switch from Symbian to Android. From time to time there is these stupid rumours, I don’t know who starts those or why they do so but it’s sure that Nokia is NOT going to abandon Symbian and switch to Android or something else.
Nokia has invested years and hundreds of millions euros to Symbian. Nokia did recently buy Symbian and they started Symbian foundation for developing it. Nokia did also recently buy Trolltech and Nokia has been working hard to get Trolltech’s QT application- and ui-framework ported to S60.
And now some trolls spread rumour that Nokia is going to abandon all that and start using Android???? Yeah right, suuuuurrree yes sir. AND BULLSHIT!!! That is not going to happen. Nokia is not going to abandon Symbian that’s 100% sure.
“Like I said above, Maemo is Nokia’s idea of what Linux should look like on mobile devices. Android is Google’s idea of Linux on the handset.”
Android is not really Linux. Sure there is linux hidden at the bottom as a OS. But everythig else on Android phones, all applications etc, are made using Java. Android is really just a Java-layer on top of Linux and nothing more. So Android should be called Java-based system rather than linux based.
So Android applications are not native Linux-applications at all. Those are java-applications.
Nokia’s Maemo-platform on the other hand is really Linux. It can run native Maemo applications, which are linux applications with Maemo’s Hildon UI. Maemo applications currently use Hildon UI which is based on GTK+ which is also used by eg. Gnome desktop on Linux. Nokia is now porting QT to Maemo too. QT is the same application and UI framework which is used by KDE desktop on Linux.
In my opinion there is no question about it that native Maemo apps are more efficient both in speed and resource use than Android java-applications.
what i find insulting is that Richard Wray from the Guardian does not change the story. I am sure the news received a lot of hits on the website but readers want to read well researched stories and not total bs quoting “industry insiders”
Nice post, Stefan, forthright and spot on as usual
You tell them Stefan!