http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11...lost_platform/

Great read

Very interesting. Thank you. Now I know there's some connection between the earliest maemo version and the symbian touch models of those years... Thanks to this article, I know a little more about the history of hildon as a symbian framework. What I still don't understand is how hildon became a GTK based framework for a GNU/Linux device when it was originally designed for symbian. I assume they can't have used the same codebase... Still, they must have taken enough of the original symbian concept to justify keeping the name. Was it the same team? Was it only because the look and feel was almost the same? Does anyone know the full story of hildon, including the 770 and its successors?

As I recall, Symbian was meant to be a lightweight OS for cell phones, just like java based feature phones. I think they used Hildon as a dev ide because they realized from the start that a pure Hildon based linux OS would be too heavy for the current SoC of that time.

Not to such detail, but some of those points were mentioned in old my-symbian threads and articles.

Many of the old communicator userbase have dealt with the feeling of being orphaned by Nokia. Personally, I bought the N900 as a replacement for the old 9500 I had (the E90 wouldn't cut it; it was a makeshift, parody of an offering), and hell if I knew that the 9500 carried Hildon code.

Still, history seems to repeat itself. Those familiar with Nokia's management, especially those who enjoyed Nokia's products and were later on let down by its corporate practices, remember vividly those times.

The 9500 was a joy to have, and even though big the those days standards (today it would probably be considered humongous), one could type using (most) of his fingers on its keyboard, instead of thum-typing. That was a major feature. The Communicator line was Nokia's flagship, also it was it's most recognizable phone, I believe. It sold well in the corporate market.

The whole in-division fighting, first with S80 (Hildon, now it seems) and S60, which foreshadowed the bizarre marketing practices that would arise as nokia split between N division and E division, was probably the first sight of how badly managed the company was.

First, S80 Hildon was orphaned, much like the N900 was, more recently. It was undersupported, received few updates, a lot of bugs weren't fixed. Case in point: Nokia didn't bother to code a driver for SU-8W operation on the 9500, which IMO, is a huge sign of abandon. Yes, history will repeat itself in the N900, but still.

Then, Hildon would be relegated to the backstage, with the NIT line. The company was split between N and E divisions, which were to compete between themselves, a ludicrous concept at best. N division got most the dough and had the most lobby, so E became underfunded. The more underfunded E division became, the worst it did for itself... That's probably not hard to realise, but still, they must grow some really funky mushrooms in Finland.

From a Communicator enthuast's perspective, the worst offense came with the E90 "Communicator"; to sum it up, that thing was supposed to a mobile computer.

It had no copy and paste. That's all I'll say about that, you can imagine the rest.

The E90 was based on the same hardware as the N95 (in essence, it was an N95 with a keyboard), but I believe that, once again, N lobbying got the best of it. Hardware features that were on the N95 were cut from E90, some of which were rather interesting for the corporate market, like TV-out (slideshows, presentations, anyone?). There was also some memory management thingy that was enabled in the N95 in later firmwares that was withheld from the E90, I can't remember what it was...

In essence, the Communicator line was getting the blunt of the "hardware diferentiation" strategy, stupid as it were, while the N crowd got all the bells and whistles. I think the bottom-line was that business users could do with crippled devices.

Anyways, this was at a time when S60 presented itself as being able to be just as flexible as Hildon, as long as a feature pack was added to it. It obviously wasn't the case.

Nokia's management continued to baffle the world, even with the N line, as it continue to create offerings that competed against nothing except nokia's own phones, which was as bizarre as bizarre would get. The company was literally chewing itself out from within.

Then came the iPhone, Android, the N900, MeeGo, Elop, Windows Phones, and well... The rest is history.

I got goosebumps while reading this.

Reaching back in my memories to 2002/2003; some more things make sense now. I remember reading about Hildon and the 7700 back in the times... then the 7650... the 6600... the 9300 Communicator...

Wow. Imagine where Nokia could have been today if it weren't for their internal politics, secrets, stupidity, etc.

This applies for too many corporations. See Siemens for example. I used their cells before switching to Nokia (and had a job somewhere there too).

@number41, great post. Had to say.

As someone who ran Psions from the old Organiser II to the 5MX (still have 2 of them) this article highlighting the ancestry and DNA back from the maemo devices to the old devices left me with a warm fuzzy feeling all over.