Re: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
 

Sorry for asking a noob question, but what is a sales warning in the first place? I am just curious. :D

Re: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
 

@kanishou good points here, except you might not have taken into consideration that WP7 is a standalone platform with little backward compatibility with Windows Mobiles, and that Microsoft has already announced the launch Windows 8 on ARM, which can run native (recompile) Windows applications which WP7 platform is also incompatible with.

As Elop was a senior executive of Microsoft, he should have well aware of the new mobile strategy with Windows 8/ARM. Even in the very rare circumstance he didn't know, Elop's decision on buying WP7 is way after the announcement Windows 8/ARM, he shouldn't have ignored it.

It's so obviously that he's well aware of the present situation and future prospect of WP7 and still strike the deal with Microsoft. Everything Elop does would not make any sense if he has no hidden agenda with Microsoft.

You might not believe the board would approve Elop's action. How would it sound like if the board actually support Elop? I cannot go into too much detail on it as it'd be rather off-topic in a tech board.

Re: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
 

That is not true, there is no new mobile strategy. Windows 8 is for tablets, it does not encroach on Windows Phone at all. If anything, it's going to strengthen it through better synergy.

WP7 is not backwards compatible obviously, but it uses familiar APIs. This situation really isn't significantly different from Qt on MeeGo. It is a familiar API, but the idea to just run old (desktop) applications unmodified on a phone is an unrealistic pipe dream.

Re: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
 

It's a financial warning issued before officially scheduled disclosure of their financial results, so as to let the market to digest the news in hope to minimize the impact on the stock price.

Re: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
 

I agree that this seems unlikely.

And I think this is where Nokia went wrong. They kept changing their strategy. Putting the polish on Maemo, getting to step 5 of 5, and adding in Qt as a migration strategy would have made some sense.

Yeah, it would not have been as technically clean to have two different programming API's (Qt and GTK), but time was a-wasting. Starting over again with Meego at such a late date was a very bad decison, IMO.

If the work that went into Meego had gone instead into finishing Maemo, then Maemo could very well have been a competitive platform. Yes, Qt would not have been as integrated and they may not have had as smooth a transition from Symbian, but there are an awful lot of Linux developers out there too.

They shot for perfect instead of accepting good enough and trying to make it perfect over time. When that failed, Nokia had no good choices left. They were either going to become an Android OEM or a WP OEM. They had lost their chance to be a leader.

I am sad about the way things turned out because Maemo was so close to what I, personally, wanted. I am not all that interested in "media delivery platforms", I want a more PC-like device that I control and decide what to install and when and how. Maemo seemed to be headed in that direction.

But there is no enthusiasm, none at all, from the carriers for that kind of device. Nor from Apple, Google or MS. For all of them the device is just a way to extract value from consumers through an exclusive "app store" or ads or whatever. So they have little interest in making their systems truly open in the ways that the PC was.

Re: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
 

Microsoft has not really defined the market positioning of Windows 8/ARM, but they've already rejected the possibility of WP7 being used on tablet. In fact, the incentive to build mobile device on Windows 8/ARM is too high as it can run native Windows applications by porting them. Microsoft has already demonstrated in last CES how Windows 8/ARM is being able to run native Microsoft Office (ARM-compiled).

As you can imagine, there's a greater synergy for Microsoft to run a unified platform on PC and mobile devices.

Of course, those applications need to be modified (ported) to run, but the incentive to do so is very high.

Interestingly, the architecture of Windows 8 is having highest modularity than its predecessors, such that it's possible to strip everything outside its core to run Windows 8 in native terminal mode.

In this regard, it's not impossible to build a new presentation layer for mobile devices of smaller scale than tablets.

Though it'd not happen this year, but since the market incentive, the technical feasibility and even the synergy is all presented in Windows8/ARM, the idea to run legacy applications on a phone is not unrealistic dream.

Note that I'm not here to defend any platform, I just want to say I think WP7 is pretty doomed after Windows 8/ARM. ;)

Re: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
 

It is, because even if you get it to work, the applications are still going to be unusable on a device the size of the phone.

This is also where the whole "write once, run everywhere" idea falls apart.

People are not so desperate for applications on their mobile devices that they would put up with awful UIs.

Even on tablets, being able to run Windows desktop applications isn't really all that exciting. It will still be primarily measured on how many applications will support the tablet UI.

Re: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
 

Say...do you think 800x480 pixels is too small to run any desktop application?

Re: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
 

Having run things like OpenOffice and JEdit on my N900, I would say the issue is not the pixels but the physical size. It is hard to click on tiny buttons, and hard to see tiny text.

It works, and it is useful to be able to do that, but probably only us geeky types would do it.

On a tablet, though, with a 7" or larger screen size, it would probably work fine even if the resolution remained the same.

Re: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
 

Like bob is saying, it's not the resolution that matters but the physical screen size. 4 inch is definitely too small to run any desktop application.