yup...the chinese corps will manufacture cheaper and cheaper and the knock-offs of those will be equally competitive and the quality will (like all heavily exploited tech) deteriorate abysmally until it just isn't worth buying the junk.
No...until the "next big thing" comes along ...and I think that the NIT's from the 770 up to the 900 were the glimpse of the pocketable market in phones to come...true computers in the hand that... in the end... could make a call...
The NIT's were just ahead of their time.
And I think that time is well nigh.

After that...well..
phones are pretty much done as juiceme said (and I agree)
Look at what is being exploited now....
wearables...
forcryinoutloud....
wearables to phones are the proverbial death song like "Disco Duck" was to Disco.
("Disco Duck" most definitely put the nail in Discos coffin)

For you. And me. And juiceme, reinob, wicket, peterleinchen, Copernicus, sixwheeledbeast and a lot of other TMO members.

But not for Jane Average.

When my wife's friend came for a visit, we tried in vain for 30 minutes to enter our WiFi password in her shiny and dearly beloved iPhones. (Yes, the plural is intentional. She has three of them!) The stumbling block was the '`' (the reverse apostrophe) character. Essential when you want to type anything meaningful in the Unix command line and hence essential for a NIT but a "what on earth would you use it for?" affair for Jane Average with three iPhones. Thank [a deity of your choice] for SMS, the only truly compatible service: texting the password to her worked.

There are a LOT of Jane Averages out there. Much more than endsormeanses and pichlos. By at least five orders of magnitude.

This proves to me that Jane Average desperately needs a NIT too, since she cannot manage her apostopheria with any of her precious iPhones...

Think about french for example, the whole language is filled with aphostropes!

Jane Average would not choose a WiFi password with characters she could not type on her iPhone.
Jane Average was a victim of visiting a geek house

hahahaa
ah...
Poor Jane...
hm...I remember the good-ol' days way back when I could get away with the happy hobbit life of the Luddite.

Speaking of poor Jane...imagine in a few more years when just like online banking eclipsed normal banking..ones groceries are just as tied ...ones actual necessity to eat...is tied to whether or not Jane can type that apostrophe ...
Interestingly our gov't is now mulling over the proposition of making internet access an "essential service" . Like water or electricity...

I think perhaps the new great Darwinian weed-eater of humanity may be of our species own devising.
And I'm not quite sure we should call ourselves "the odd men out" or "the minority" ...
rather I think the predicament we maemoers find ourselves in is more akin to riding the horns of the tidal wave...
Everyone is either on it or in it's way ...
Frankly I think we have one of the best seats on the technological wave and the best view.

/me makes a mental note to remind myself to add a backquote to my WiFi passphase.

Anyone know if the Nokia mobile division sale to Microsoft included their mobile patent portfolio? I always assumed that it did. That alone would make it very difficult for Nokia to reenter the mobile market in a meaningful way.

No patents were transferred to MS in the NMP sale. That would have been really silly indeed.

That explains why it was sold off so cheaply. I guess Elop wasn't even competent as a trojan horse if he let that slip through his fingers.

I do have to ask though, why keep the patents if they have no plans to reenter the market? Maybe they plan to auction them off to the highest bidder?

EDIT: More likely that they're happy to continue receiving royalties from patent licensing.

True. The patent portfolio was never for sale. However MS got good licensing terms for the next 10 years for a large wad of patents.


Yes, many of the patents are being licensed to several handset manufacturers (many to MS but to others too)
All current licensing deals are non-exclusive AFAIK (meaning, same patent can be lisenced to multiple parties)

What the hell is apostopheria/aphostropes ??
I don't know what you are saying here.
Are you referring to " , " ?

Even Google doesn't know:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=apostopheria