Thread: Nokia on the brink of failure
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Fuzzillogic is offline Fuzzillogic
2012-04-13 , 10:52
Posts: 479 | Thanked: 1,284 times | Joined on Jan 2012 @ Enschede, The Netherlands
#46
Originally Posted by quipper8 View Post
seeing some of the presenters at this conference, I think I will be getting into the Tizen thing. thp, the maliit guy, etc etc. As long as there is some control of device under the html5 top layer, I'm in. Admittedly I haven't researched it yet.

Presumably some of the maemo brain drain has gone to either intel meego or samsung tizen as well
Well, I did look in Tizen. And I didn't like it a single bit. Using HTML for GUI's is just plain stupid. They're trying to polish a turd.



Originally Posted by Gky007 View Post
i d'nt understand why you (some) hate androids and praise Maemo/meego
"hate" android? Nah. But there are things I don't like:
  • It's controlled by Google, an advertising company. This is very dubious from a privacy-standpoint. Also, while Android is open source, it's not really open development. Qt and Java are much more open. (Yes, Google claims Android is not theirs anymore, but they've given it the OHA. Which they dominate.)
  • Java rip-off. While Android is Java-based, it's not per se compatible with the many, many libraries available for JavaSE. Also, they used another VM which can't run normal Java binaries. While the Dalvik VM is arguably somewhat more efficient than the JVM, it lacked a JIT-compiler until not so long ago (thus it was very slow). Also, given the current multi-core, multi-GiB smartphones the lesser efficiency of the "old" JVM is of no concern.
  • Mediocre multitasking. Most of the time I just have to guess whether an application is still running in the background or not. Apps are deactivated "automatically". On the N9/Meego it's simple: if you haven't closed an app, it's still active. And closing apps is *really* simple. Still, Android beats WP and iOS, which truly regard the users as idiots when it comes to multitasking.
  • And finally, while it is Linux-based, Android lacks common features which most other Linux-based systems, like Harmattan, do have.

Granted, the DalvikVM, the stripped-down Java and Linux-environment probably were necessary to make Android work on the limited hardware of the first smartphones (slow CPU, little RAM and Flash) but currently these factors really are of no concern. Android-devices would be very capable of running full desktop-versions of Linux and full JavaSE. (In fact, JavaSE 7 runs fine on an unmodified N9)