When I was in Japan in 2008, my friend's cell phone screen could rotate out 90 degrees (into a traditional 16:9 TV-looking layout [1]) and he could watch quite a few TV channels on it that way.
This wasn't something he was paying for, it was just part of his base plan apparently..
It's called 1seg and is part of the Japanese digital terrestrial OTA TV network (the regular digital OTA broadcasts contain a low-bandwidth stream for mobile devices to pick up).
Best phone and OS according to who? The same folks who cheered on the OpenMoko? As Elop said, the market has turned from a battle of devices into a war of ecosystems. Meego would've ended up like BB10 running on QNX(remember how many folks on here salivated about a QNX based mobile OS?), critically appreciated but with no apps and sales.
Nokia recently became the fourth largest OEM in the US market.
http://pocketnow.com/2013/11/01/nokia-smartphone-sales
I doubt that given Nokia never really had a brand in the US for smartphones, it could've done so without Microsoft's support.
According to everyone who saw it and touched it. I was watching their unveiling of the phone, trading their stock and listening to market opinion, and I remember that very day. Everyone in the market agreed that Meego could have been huge (it was also open-source like Android, and in many ways a better OS), and it was only Elop's allegiance to Microsoft which killed it.
Meego was good enough that Jolla picked it up, and Intel spun it into Tizen. At the time of the N9 unveiling, it was better than Android.
Speaking of ecosystems, fast forward a few years, if Nokia had indeed attempted to push Meego and failed, Android would have been the logical choice. Now they're settling for scraps with Windows Phone, when they were once THE leader worldwide in smartphones...
Edit - by the way, Nokia was the smartphone market share leader as recently as 2011... In fact, it was during Elop's tenure that Nokia lost most of its market share, although they were on the way out for awhile before then. But had Meego had better traction, it could have been very different. Nokia had an ecosystem, and had mindshare...
Another problem is that the final (and truly brilliant) UI of the N9 didn't exist at the time Elop made the decision to kill it. At the time, the Swipe UI was not done, and was actually the 3rd "let's start over" initiative with the MeeGo UI at the time (so you can see why there was skepticism on it).
But man, they really knocked it out of the park. It was (and still is) the best smartphone UI ever made.
> (it was also open-source like Android, and in many ways a better OS).
Open source is not a very big selling point to the masses. WebOS was open source and better than Android at the time, had good reviews, but it flopped miserably.
>Speaking of ecosystems, fast forward a few years, if Nokia had indeed attempted to push Meego and failed, Android would have been the logical choice
You're assuming that Nokia would not be dead from all the losses in the meantime. Microsoft was pumping $250M into them per quarter to ease the transition. If Nokia went alone, it may not have survived the big transition to Meego.
>and it was only Elop's allegiance to Microsoft which killed it.
No, it was Nokia's board that hired him in the first place and approved all his big decisions.
> You do know that a company's board can fire the CEO at any time right?
Oh really?
> Open source is not a very big selling point to the masses.
No, but it enables other manufacturers to hop on board and create an ecosystem. Nokia had Intel and others in their corner...
> WebOS was open source and better than Android at the time, had good reviews, but it flopped miserably.
It wasn't open source until it had already failed. Plus it never felt as though HP really cared all that much about mobile devices, they were a huge monolithic entity making too much money on desktops, servers, etc...
Contrast this with Nokia, the world leader in phones (including smartphones) for quite some time.
Also, at one point Symbian held 70+ percent of smartphone market share, Nokia obviously did know how to create an ecosystem.
> No, it was Nokia's board that hired him in the first place and approved all his big decisions.
Obviously a mistake on their part. Corporate boards don't always make the best decisions, though in theory they should.
Also, at one point Symbian held 70+ percent of smartphone market share, Nokia obviously did know how to create an ecosystem.
That data point actually proves the exact opposite: Nokia knew how to sell mobile phones, but they had no idea how to create an ecosystem.
Despite Symbian's huge marketshare, the market for 3rd party Symbian apps was in shambles. There had been an initial enthusiasm for Symbian app development in 2002-2004, but that was slowly killed by Symbian's obtuse certification processes and SDKs that kept growing in complexity and crappiness.
When the iPhone was introduced, Nokia was marketing their Symbian phones with the slogan: "This is what computers have become." But almost nobody was doing computer-like things on Symbian phones. The browser sucked, even though it was WebKit-based (Nokia had forked the code and left it to linger). There was no channel for selling apps to ordinary consumers.
A few geeks installed weird stuff like Quake ports on their N95 phones, but the average Symbian user just did phone calls, SMS and occasional photos.
I agree with your points, but as a quibble, webOS was not open source at the time. The decision to open-source webOS didn't come until the end of 2011.
4th at 4.1%. Beating Motorola (which was stagnating, even after the Google buy) and ZTE (which didn't have much US brand recognition anyway) wasn't super difficult.
Also, Meego Harmattan (released with the N9) got pretty stellar reviews all round. See for your self:
N9 had more apps at the time than Windows Phone today. Nokia had a large developer base and the Qt development environment for N9 was really good. There was nothing to stop it gaining market share as it was overall a really decent platform/ecosystem.
Only thing that killed it was Elop who decided to limit sales to just 23 small countries, and left big markets for their WP launch device, which was horrible at the time (Lumia 800). Of course the whole MeeGo strategy was killed earlier which made the device DOA.. And it still sold 10x more than the Lumia 800.
As someone who loves the N9, I still feel compelled to point out that it is simply false that the N9 had more apps at the time than Windows Phone has today.
There were a lot of Qt developers (still are) and I definitely agree that the N9 was set up to not succeed, and that had a negative effect on the ecosystem.
Although even before feb 11, when Nokia was all-in with Symbian+Qt+Meego, developer interest was lagging behind iOS, Android, and even Windows Phone which was vaporware at the time. Here's one from mid-2010: http://www.appcelerator.com/assets/appcelerator-mobile-devel...
Sad to see so many technical folks wanting Blackberry and Nokia to join the Android bandwagon. The mobile market needs more competition and diversity, not less, or it will end up like the PC market did. If you want an Android phone, there's an immense variety already out there. It's like recommending that Apple scrap OS X and ship Windows on their Macs.
While I agree that going Android would be bad for BB, and having more diversity would be good for the mobile space, I disagree that there is immense variety in the existing Android handsets.
They're all more or less the same design: thin low-quality plastic slabs of touchscreen phones of varying sizes. Choice is even smaller if you want a decent/high end phone: those just tend to be big. There is no differentiation based on form factors any more, it's basically a game of me-too and playing it safe.
I don't know that Android is a long term winning strategy for them but I could see them staying alive. Many people point to hardware features like the keyboard as things they love about Blackberry.
The conventional wisdom may be wrong in this case. Conventionally, if you wanted to save them you'd look at what they do best, look at their very core best capability and you'd go all in with that and maybe find a winning partner for the other stuff. As an outsider, and maybe because I'm just a computer dork and see the world this way, Blackberry is either a handset company or they're a bbOS company. So I'd say, put the people's platform on their handsets or put their OS on Samsung and other handsets.
The one thing about them putting Android on their handsets, it gives their fans access to their hardware and it gives their customers access to software. BB10 has the same problems Windows Phone has, it may be great but my favorite apps aren't on it. How much better does the platform have to be to get over the missing apps?
I hope they survive and come up with a plan. I don't see them ever being as big or profitable as they once were though.
Company 1 has a history of monopoly abuse (including giving OEMs financial incentives to not ship computers with competing OSes pre-installed).
Company 2 has let at least two (probably more) new mobile OSes bootstrap themselves using parts of its ecosystem.
Which company do you think is going to get the benefit of the doubt when introducing security features that make device modification more difficult?
That being said, I think the biggest issue with UEFI secure boot isn't the idea, it's the implementation. People have reported things like confusing, hard-to-use key enrollment interfaces (that sometimes don't work or even don't exist at all) and other crazy, undocumented restrictions (e.g. only allowing OSes with certain names). And there's a lot of concern that these issues won't be fixed in a timely fashion, because installing an alternative OS is a corner case use for most OEMs. And then there's the issue that there's no shared authority (across most OEMs) for signing off on bootloaders other than Microsoft. Add past history into all of that...
Meanwhile, on the Android side, there's a clear, standard unlocking process, implemented on the Nexus devices of each generation (worth noting that the Nexus 5 support was added to a well-known rooting tool within minutes of the tools developer getting the device). Yes, there's still potential for problems and abuse (e.g. bootloaders locked by manufacturers, usually by carrier request), but the issues and pitfalls are relatively well-understood, including ways of avoiding them (buy from manufacturers that offer a bootloader unlock process, avoid AT&T and Verizon-specific devices and so on). And these issues need to be balanced against the security benefits. There are certainly still issues to watch out for, but past history suggests that they will be balanced appropriately.
Bill Gates has spent a lot of time among the world's poorest poor. When you do that, your perspective changes completely and he seems to be talking from that perspective.
Also, did you read the linked article? He clearly addresses your point.
>Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation,” he says. But while “technology’s amazing, it doesn’t get down to the people most in need in anything near the timeframe we should want it to”.
Well, what Google and Gates' are doing is still better than Jobs' take on charity from his biography that demeans it:
"“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”"
"Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything"
Which is a funny statement coming from Jobs, since he didn't invent anything either. Ripping off is fine when you add value, like the original Mac which borrowed a lot from Xerox labs prototypes.
I agree with you that Jobs was never a brilliant engineer, but I don't think Gates was particularly brilliant either and to say Jobs lacked imagination is ludicrous and to say he never invented anything is simply untrue. It may even be true he never invented a circuit (such as the Disk II controller) or never built a prototype himself, but that's not the whole of inventing something.
BTW, it was the Lisa that built upon the Alto (and added quite a bit of very clever ideas that never made it into the Mac).
Honeslty, Windows Phone's UI is a neat concept and very modern and stylish, but I've been using a WP7 phone for over two years now and I have to say - the silhouette icon approach sucks.
Merging icons and widgets? Brillian, Google should've though of that. Simple, modern, flat styling? Fantastic. Monochrome 2-color icons? Do not want.
