Thread: N9 FAQ: facts vs. fiction
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lma is offline lma
2011-07-13 , 02:35
Posts: 2,802 | Thanked: 4,491 times | Joined on Nov 2007
#66
Originally Posted by sjgadsby View Post
Years ago, Nokia deliberately split internally and erected silos: E series, N series, and mobiles. Only E was permitted to include in their devices features thought to be of interest to on-the-go business people. Only N was permitted to include in their devices features thought to be of interest to creative, media hungry, tech savvy users.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Maemo had gone to the E camp. Our community has proven itself more than capable of providing plenty of better media players, social service terminal apps etc so we wouldn't have lost anything important, but on the other hand we still don't have a decent email client.

Meanwhile, neither E nor N tackled the tough work enhancing and preparing Symbian or its UIs for the future. By all accounts, Symbian C++ is no joy to work upon, and neither division wanted to be the fool who spent their precious budget allocations on development work the other division would take, use, and benefit from for free.
Well, by that time at least they were all playing with S60 (aka "you shall have all this processing power but you can only control it with a numeric keypad and a tiny joystick"). Before, they also had S80 (the ATM-style UI found in Communicators) and S90 (Hildon's ancestor) to contend with.

So as their technical foundation grew old and crumbled, E and N built the walls of their internal empires out of legions of middle managers. Customers were lost. Market share eroded.
There was also a funny little thing called Symbian Signed which played a role in that. If you ever meet anyone who wrote apps for Symbian OS, buy them a round or three (they'll need it) and ask them about it.

Enhancements to Symbian and its UIs were blocked.
Symbian also had UIQ, a UI that they developed in-house. It was really nice originally (the SE P9x0s for instance were years ahead of anything Nokia had to offer at the time), but version 3 was so bad that it essentially killed it.

When Nokia at last recognized their position and developed a Qt ecosystem plan as their salvation
There is some speculation/superstition going around that Qt is the kiss of death for mobile platforms (Zaurus, Openmoko, Greenphone, and now Maemo, Symbian ...) (yeah, I know it's not totally accurate).

they found themselves weighed down by the cryptic fragility of Symbian
So they bought it, opened it, found out that nobody cared anymore and eventually closed it and re-sold it. Clever, that :-/

the underdeveloped state of Maemo
So they nuked whatever the original plan was, and made everyone wait 4(!) years for the Qt version with only a single more underdeveloped and also still-born release in-between. Oh, and the Qt version turned out to be still-born too.