What a freaking dufus. I don't know what problem Nokia has that he thinks using WP7 or Android will solve. Nobody disputes that Nokia has plenty of work to do to win back market share in the USA. But there is no other company that sells as many handsets as they do, and no other company that sells as many smartphones as they do.

Android is not a company and Google does not sell android phones (well...they branded one a while back). It would be fair to compare Nokia to Samsung. Samsung makes some of the coolest Android devices out there. They are doing very well. But they still haven't outsold Nokia. Nokia claims 28.3 million smartphone sales in Q4. Even a conservative extrapolation out to a full year gives them sales of around 100 million smartphones a year. And that is without the US market contributing much. Samsung says they sold around 20 million smartphones last year, and they hope to sell 60 million smartphones next year. Perhaps they will far exceed that expectation and quadruple their last year sales and sell 80 million. Wildly exceeding their own expectations would still leave them far short of what Nokia is selling. So why should Nokia, who is beating them in market share, emulate them?

I don't know if Nokia will get it right with meego...I think they dropped the ball with maemo and never let it live up to its full potential. But if meego follows the same design principals as Linux generally does, they give themselves a great base to work from where the OS guys get to worry about implementing the hardware and drivers and the user experience guys get to build on top of that in a fairly generic way with a bunch of standard libraries. And hardware manufacturers (like the ones who make the compass chips and the Near Field Communications chips) can make linux drivers that should be extremely similar or the same for android phones or meego phones. I wouldn't be surprised if, a year or two from now, we start seeing Davlik, Symbian, and possibly WebOs implemented as a UX layer on top of meego.

And to top it off, Nokia does pretty much the opposite of what this article is saying in switching from maemo to meego. Instead of having an in-house, Nokia-only linux implementation that they are working on, they have shifted it out-of-house, shared the burden with Intel, and opened it up to a wider set of implementers who will (hopefully) contribute back to its development.

I hope Nokia doesn't listen to this guy. I really want to see the positive things we have in maemo expanded upon in newer phones. N900, for all of its faults and for all of Nokia's missteps with it, is a major step forward in putting power and flexibility in the hands of users. Moving to a tightly controlled app-based environment like Android or WP7 would be a step backwards.