The Nokia WP7 announcement: A late comment.

While everybody else is preparing for CeBIT, which I will attend, too (though just for one day) I want to spend some time on pointing out my opinion on Nokia´s WP7 deal.

Knowing not too much about Symbian (I actually never head a Symbian cell phone / smart phone), but having watched the evolvement of mobile platforms during the past years, this announcement saddened me when I heard of it. Not just because I dislike Microsoft (I admire them for their success, but believe that their market domination is not a good thing), much more because I am supportive of open source software.

While Nokia´s previous MeeGo / Symbian strategy had a common factor (Qt) and, as now leaked out, were to get about the same user interface / UX, which meant a huge commitment to opensource software due to the opensourced nature of Symbian and the fact that MeeGo is Linux based and Qt is an opensource toolkit, originally developed by a company called Trolltech, this announcement put an end to this, as Nokia officials stated that Qt wouldn´t be ported over to WP7 and as Microsoft doesn´t allow GPLv3 (or similar) licensed software on its relatively new (and thus relatively immature) mobile platform, this meant a slap in the face of the open source community. Nokia will release a developer aimed follow up to the Maemo5 running N900 this year though, most likely this phone will be called N950 and be a keyboardless, touchscreen only device, running MeeGo – probably on silicon by Intel (Medfield).

The move towards WP7, including the dumping of Symbian and making MeeGo a “playground for future research”, didn’t come as too much of a surprise. Nokia´s smartphone smartphone sales continued to drop down, and a while ago the MeeGo lead at Nokia, Ari Jaaski, left after a new CEO was in charge: Steven Elop, who had worked at Microsoft before. Then, only a few days before Nokia announced its new partnership, Symbian^4 was canceled with Nokia saying, that they would stop the versioning of Symbian (which isn´t the worst idea ever, especially if you failed to fulfill reviewers expectations before, as major releases raise expectations) – it all sounded strange, and the WP7 rumors became more and more powerful.

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Eldar Murtazin, editor in chief of mobile-review.com, a russia-based website which has been reviewing mobile phones (smartphone and “normal ones”) for ages (in a very good and detailed way, better than all german magazines on this very topic I ever sneaked a look at), has written a few very interesting articles about this move (which he doesn´t consider a wise one) which features data that is quite interesting: The numbers of employees at Nokia and what they are assigned to.  Looking at these numbers, 6200 people working on Symbian (kernel + UI / UX) in comparison to what reviewers voices were makes you think: Now what do all these girls and guys do?

Actually, it might just be a slow release schedule that makes all these employees seem so lazy, as there will be one more mayor UI/UX overhaul for Symbian later this year – if you wonder, why Nokia does this, just look at the scheduled release of their first WP7 phone: It won´t be on the market that soon (christmas?), so Nokia has to keep Symbian alive to sell at least some handsets – and they do so without too many tears and crying, as Symbian development is being generously supported by the European Union (when I read about this for the first time, I only thought: What the h***?).

Many people have been asking what will happen to Qt when Nokia has killed (the previously tax payer funded) Symbian in 2013 or 2014 and MeeGo just remains a playground for R&D and a few others at Nokia – I don´t know the answer, but as this is a widely successful technology, I doubt that Nokia will dump it to the trash bin – they´ll much rather try to sell it, as this transition will be a costly process – and I am sure they will find a buyer, maybe Intel, as MeeGo relies on Qt quite heavily. 

All in all, this seems to be a sad move away from what sounded to be a promising idea: Symbian and MeeGo based smartphones with alike Qt based UI/UX – it´ s a move that happens before delivery. Nokia will face hard times with WP7 just as it would have with MeeGo/Symbian, it´s doubtable whether this move helps Nokia to bring down cost as they will have to pay a few US$ for each and every license. The winner of this move is Microsoft, as Nokia becomes the most committed WP7 handset manufacturer, and they gain access to Nokia´s OviMaps (some people bought Symbian phones just because of the free offline navigation Nokia offers) – Nokia remains struggling, just as it has been before.