Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Just read Tommi Ahonen's blogpost: http://communities-dominate.blogs.co...-to-n9-me.html
According to it Nokia N9 is outselling WP7 3 to 1 in rich markets, where WP7 got major push, and 2 to 1 globally. Harmattan refuses to die and just marches stepping on the face of WP7 efforts by Elop.
That is something we, as a wonderful community have helped achieve I think!
Thanks for the efforts of the Harmattan team in Nokia! I really hope that miracles can happen and Harmattan can fight his way out of the doom!
Any thoughts guys?

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

I NEED TO BUYYY ONEEE hopefully soon but am never getting rid of my N900

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

It's dead. Whether or not the N9 is outselling WP is neither here nor there. Nobody outside of Nokia has the real figure, and even the most optimistic number is still very low when compared to the more relevant competition (iOS and Android devices). Maybe Commodore 64 outsold ZX Spectrum last quarter, but nobody cares.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

And noone should except Nokia's sales department and it's stockholders.

They have invested on testing the market's reaction in devices running other then iOS and android IMO.

The question was "meego or WP7"? And the answer is "Neither"

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

really the only hope we have is that nokia does very well with windows sl that niche products and little independent projects inside the company will have enough surplus to live off of. Super nichye things like the n810 WiMAX, lol.

hopefully the brain drain from the maemo meego harmattan tablet whatever you wanna call it team hasnt been so decimated that similar projects will never surface.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

@marxian
I know you are right with my mind, but the same thing inside me that makes me appreciate and marvel LOTR books/heroes and StarWars saga is making me to not accept Maemo/Harmattan destiny without even a chance of a fight ;-)

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

I think those days are over. Not just at Nokia, but at every major corporation. Such niche projects are no longer deemed to be economically viable. Welcome to the new economic reality. Sucks to be us.

http://www.tiricosuave.com/images/ec...allyviable.jpg

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Maybe nobody cares but equally few care about what OS is on their phone. Even if you bought a bunch of apps, they're $5 each.

Anyone can take marketshare if the phone is sexy enough and easy-to-use.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

am pretty convinced that harmattan for high end phones and symbian for low end phones mixed with QT would of made one hell of a combination, and got people talking, but then Nokia decides to kill Harmattan the minute its released...

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

I don't see how that is relevant to the point that I was making, which is that MeeGo-Harmattan is dead, regardless of how well the N9 sells vs WP devices.

Of course most smartphone buyers do not care which platform their device runs. However, they do care about availability of the applications/services that they are used to having, and MeeGo-Harmattan fails in this department because Nokia basically put up a big sign saying 'DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME WITH MEEGO-HARMATTAN'.

Also, the market for shiny smartphones is already oversaturated, which is why I think it was a mistake for Nokia to jump on the iClone bandwagon.

For me, Harmattan's glorious fate would be to seduce a community as great and talented as the N900, but I'm not seeing anything of the sort. Most seem to look at the N9 as a toy.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Seems N9 was only brought to market due to contracts with Intel on Meego.
The deal Nokia made with MS is to go for WP, so that's what will happen.

I just hope this fantastic UI will live on in future devices. Cyanogen?

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

No matter what people say about harmatan being dead it is still awesome as hell knowing that is outselling win phail.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

From Nokias Q4 statement:

Under Nokia's new strategy for smartphones, MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Plain English translation:

MeeGo has been kicked into the long grass.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

or joining with S80 and S90 in the long term.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Dead is an absolute term. This community will live on for at least five years. I've seen it so many times. Hell, closed source OS/2 is still going and they stopped selling it to end-users 9 years ago.

And Maemo is still vastly better than anything else out there apart from Meego.

So I'd use the term knee-capped.

Too true.

Nah the hardware is improving all the time, plus phones get damaged and lost/stolen. Also, people will replace them for fashion purposes.

Pretty much everyone needs a phone - and the marginal cost of it being smart will dwindle to almost nothing.

Look at the size of the growing Chinese market. India is following suit. Western markets will soon look tiny in comparison.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

I don't think it's about a contract with Intel. Intel is not interested in ARM phones, and the N9 runs Maemo instead of a real MeeGo anyway.

Probably the development of Harmattan was so damn expensive that bringing one of the Harmattan devices to market was required to get back the money.
Remember that MeeGo was once destined to become Nokia's main smartphone strategy, so they sure did put a lot of money behind it before switching to WP.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

I am wondering how an opensource project with a user/developers community can die ? Actually I am glad and surprised about N9 achievement , I did not expected this that quick I could have waited more years ..

I feel the main risk today is if this project is considered as a dissident then we'll have to face our new enemies...

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

easy, because it's not the opensource software that's in danger it's the availability of devices. If that is not maintained then neither is the software support as devices become dated or break, people will move on and the community will cease to exist.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Even if you disregard the fact that devices die, the N9 isn't really an open-source project, considering how much of it is open and, especially, how much is not.

Anyways, short answer, no.

The N9 will likely go down in history as yet another one of Nokia's "it could have been huge" failures... Not unlike our beloved N900s, at that.

The real irony here, though, is that even a phone that has been effectively EOL'd even before launch gets to outsell Nokia's Win phones.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

That's a pretty slow process, nothing like enough to kill a community.

Plus hopefully the Nemo guys can get it running on some of the faster hardware coming out.

I don't forsee any major backers running with it but we can be happy with our N9/00s until something better eventually comes along.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Interesting read: bit.ly/xt2r8v Can QT be the Holy Grail and turning point for Nokia/Maemo?

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

I'm not sure what you meant but Nemo is not using Harmattan, they are using Mer. Maybe there's some overlap, but it's minimal AFAIK

I don't see how Harmattan has a better chance to be adapted to hardware coming out than Mer/Nemo, or even N900 for that matter. I have seen noone even attempting to replace the closed source Swipe UI of Harmattan with an open UI.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Nemo has gestures too, you know.. The overlap is that we share same UI components mostly, Qt framework, but not apps or base system. We're fairly binary compatible.

Harmattan's not good for porting to other devices, as it's a Maemo deriative.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Agreed. But the way you say that is like it was inevitable that Harmattan is not good for porting to other devices because of its Maemo heritage. AFAIK there is nothing about the architecture about Maemo that makes derivatives inherently not good for porting to other devices. Harmattan is not good for porting because it has a lot of closed source parts.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Let's just say it this way: If Maemo had been more portable, there wouldn't have been a need for the MeeGo rebase on top of Moblin. Maemo couldn't scale up to multiple device categories or SoC types.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Agreed again. I think most people currently in maemo community are primarily interested in Arm based handsets and small tablets so it's not much of a problem for us.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Even across different ARM devices..

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Sure, I don't disagree that Harmattan can't scale to all ARM devices.

I'll bite one more time ;) For the record, I am not proposing to port Harmattan to any future device, but which ARM SoC types are it restricted to or from in your opinion?

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Nokia OMAP3 devices with Nokia modems.

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

Essentially, Nemo is the opensource components of Harmattan on a Mer core. Nemo is even mostly binary compatible with Harmattan. So the overlap is not minimal at all!

Re: Can Harmattan forge its own glory fate?
 

OK, there's lot of commonalities then. Let's not get hung up on whether Nemo (re)using the Harmattan (not upstream) components is minimal or not. I don't want to start counting packages and stuff like that, etc.

The original issue to which I responded was "...can get it running on some of the faster hardware coming out." When it comes to the faster hardware coming out, Nemo is better suited to that than Harmattan because it uses Core OS, which is what I was thinking about. I didn't know then that Harmattan will only work well on Nokia OMAP 3 devices with Nokia modems like stskeeps said.