Thread: Portrait mode use cases
View Single Post
ragnar is offline ragnar
2009-09-14 , 14:03
Posts: 631 | Thanked: 1,123 times | Joined on Sep 2005 @ Helsinki
#336
Originally Posted by mrojas View Post
The whole idea of migrating from Symbian to Maemo is to, at least, preserve the same features and to forget about its limitations.

Maemo, being feature-wise identical to Symbian would be a no-brainer decision because it wouldn't have said limitations, however, losing features makes that decision harder.

Either Symbian addresses its limitations, or Maemo adds the features it lacks. If Symbian does it first (and they are working on it), then Maemo won't gain new users from this platform and will have to look for them elsewhere.

The reverse, of course, can also happen and that would be more desirable for Maemo's future.
I don't think the purpose of Maemo is to copy Symbian.

For Nokia it's a bit pointless. It already owns Symbian, and it is doing well, there is no need to replicate it. Symbian is not going away.

No feature is free. Every feature you add makes the entire package heavier and makes future development slower. Maemo is in an advantageous state because it doesn't have much legacy right now.

Things like MMS are legacy. Legacy features are features that people still use, but are generally on their way out. People were still using C cassettes a long time after CD discs came out. Irrespective of if and when MMS support comes for Maemo, adding something like MMS support creates a lot of legacy baggage. MMS uses WAP protocols, and it is burdened with several kinds of oddities, service-specific exceptions etc.

Once a feature, any feature, is there, stripping it away becomes very hard. And as long as something cannot be stripped away, it takes time and effort and man months to develop and maintain, and it creates links and hooks and limitations to the UI and the SW, making it increasingly harder to remain agile and making it increasingly likely to slow down future progress.

You surely realize that there is a correlation between how features Symbian has and how long it takes to develop for it. And there is a correlation between how many features you have, and how many 'limitations' the sum of the features then create.

What Symbian is is defined by the features it has and the process in which those features have been built. Projects like "there is application X, I hate the application. Let's try to do a better application Y with all the features of application X." can often end up with Y being just like X. (The Netscape story comes first to my mind.)

So, and this is just my personal viewpoint, if Symbian is for smartphones and Maemo is for mobile computers, I'm happy if it turns out so that Maemo does not try to get every feature that Symbian has, but rather develops a whole bunch of features that Symbian does not have. Naturally there is some overlap, but there are also some quite distinct use cases and use case prioritizations between a "smartphone" and a "mobile computer".
Last edited by ragnar; 2009-09-14 at 14:09.
 

The Following 12 Users Say Thank You to ragnar For This Useful Post: