A team within Nokia had Android up and running on the company’s Lumia handsets well before Microsoft and Nokia began negotiating Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone and services business, according to two people briefed on the effort who declined to be identified because the project was confidential. Microsoft executives were aware of the existence of the project, these people said.
Another person said the idea of Nokia using Android wasn’t a part of Microsoft’s discussions with the company about an acquisition, even though that was widely recognized as a possibility.
Windows Phone never fit into Nokia’s DNA. It’s too closed, too external, too controlled; Nokia had little influence over its own destiny with Windows Phone. It’s not surprising that many of the brightest minds in the company left in the wake of the Windows Phone announcement (such as the team now at Jolla).
Nokia should have gone Android.
Personally, I would have loved a proper successor to the N9. I’ve played with one and it’s got a much better UI than Android. Too bad pre-Elop Nokia couldn’t see the incoming tsunami that was the iPhone.
Nokia is in a good place at Microsoft. Better than being sold off in parts to various holders.
Me too. But having actually used one for a year, I disagree that the UI is all that superior to Android’s. Android’s notifications are much better, and I think that’s very important for a phone. But WP8 isn’t an improvement, and is still lagging behind on pretty much everything else (the notable exception being the browser, which absolutely sucks on the N9).
The N9’s multitasking and integration of services is still better than all the others, of course. Sms, Google Talk, Skype messages, whatever, all integrate into the same messaging UI (they’re extensions to telepathy, IIRC). Voice calls are the same whether they’re via phone, Skype or Google. You don’t need an app for that, just add the proper account.
Also, the low power AMOLED mode used for displaying the time and notifications was really really useful.
I don’t think notifications is such a big problem at first. If I’m not mistaken both iPhone and Android eventually changed their notification system in later releases.
Get over it… Nokia was in a nose dive. The N9 was built to compete in a Windows Mobil/BlackBerry world, not an iPhone world. By the time Nokia would have come to market with anything relatively close to as mature as ready as Windows Phone 7 would have been another 2 years and we see how poorly the just-barly-late-to-the-game Windows Phone has done. Nokia went with them because they provided Market differentiation, a solid development pathway and a strong potential to execute on a good app market given their past relationship with developers and their commitment to quality tooling.
I didn’t buy it at first, but as more reports come out it does indeed look like Nokia was hedging their bets with an Android device.
It probably was long term due to the agreement restrictions, but I’d imagine they could’ve used it to leverage with Microsoft quite a bit — especially given that they controlled 80% of Windows Phone sales.
On the other hand, without Microsoft’s cash Nokia would be long dead. Billion dollar losses against powerhouse OEMs with unlimited marketing cash, not having a sugar daddy wasn’t going to cut it.
In the end I think Nokia dodged a bullet by avoiding Android. They would’ve had to fork Android to get their own mapping IP onto the platform (foregoing Google Play and the ecosystem advantage) and it would’ve cost them a load of cash in R&D to get up to speed with Android (whereas Windows Phone was subsidized with platform payments and pooled engineering resources at Microsoft).
D&S being bought by Microsoft is an interesting move I didn’t expect Microsoft to make — but the acquisition is a pretty clear statement that they do intend to become a devices company in a serious way.
It will be interesting to look at Nokia’s Q3 financials to see if anything in there was striking enough to urge for an acquisition, and how margins for Lumia devices held up.
Being swallowed up by Microsoft is full of unknowns and risk. Are the Nokia executives moved to Microsoft to aid in the transition or are they there for keeps?
So many questions, fascinating stuff.
You’re assuming that Nokia would have still lost the marketshare it did when it went Windows Phone.
It wouldnt have:
Symbian wouldnt have been called a dying platform
The N9 would actually have been marketed.
Same with the pureview808.
and that is all without going android.
Nokia had the recognition and the branding to keep Sansung at bay if it hadnt spent a couple of years scrapping all its products and then running around looking for a product to sell.
How quickly do you think Nokia could’ve had an Android phone on the market? Not soon enough to make a difference. What about marketing dollars, where’s that coming from? Certainly not Google.
Nokia was in serious shit.
Android is way more adaptable than WP. That a single amateur managed to provide 80% functional port of ICS on N9 in half a year without any support nor documentation tells a lot. TI chipsets have been part of signature Google designs at that time.
Thats really no rocket science.
They wouldn’t have needed to – they had a product pipeline that they didnt have to scrap.
That would have brougth them more time.
They also had halo phones which they dare not publicise in fear that it would counter the propagada pushing them towards microsoft.
A modicum of success in those products would have brought them time to either move to Android or complete their own platform, which they were developing on the N9xx range.
Nokia’s marketshare was declining, but it didn’t tank until after Elop declared that “all our platforms are shit and have no future. wait til next year til we move to another platform”, followed a year later by “here is our new platform! but remember this also is dead end, our new new platform will be available next year!”
Edited 2013-09-14 16:48 UTC
Nokia had Maemo and a lot of expertise in Linux. Nokia could launch an Android phone faster than anyone else.
yet they were going to be later to the market than Windows Phone….
That’s completely ridiculous.
How hard was it?
FTA:
“Getting Android to run on Nokia’s hardware was not a Herculean engineering effort, according to the people familiar with the project.”
Symbian was going to die regardless of what Elop did. He did however shoot it in the head, inject it with cyanide and throw it off a bridge with concrete shoes.
I think They made a lot of managerial mistakes even before Elop came on board.
+ partnering with Intel to make Meego instead of continuing with Mameo.
+ Devoting too much resources to symbian, including the effort to buy all the control of the system and open sourcing it. All of that money, time, energy, talent, etc should have been directed towards mameo.
+ Ngage. It killed Nokia’s reputation in North America. It was the worst “phone” and the worst game system ever designed. The usability was insanely bad.
I don’t think its a question weather or not they could have been successful with android. Its just a question of how seriously they would have take the project, how much resources devoted to it, and when they would have made the switch.
If they had hopped on board at the same time HTC or motorola did, everyone would have thought that they were crazy but it probably would have worked.
If they had done it at the time they actually switched to Microsoft, they still could have succeeded. Everyone still would have thought they were crazy.
If they had done it last January, it would have been a desperate move, most likely too late, and elop would have probably repeated his past failed strategy of declaring all his products obsolete while failing to deliver anything to replace them for a year.
Somewhat related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwIUEnXctuA
Microsoft and Symbian react to the announcement of android. Its pretty funny retrospect.
“They are welcome in our world.”
Great comment! Whose world is it now, Steve?
And Nigel Clifford relies on the ‘too many choices’ meme to dismiss Android.
The best of both schadenfreude and lessons of history.
That video right there should be the legacy of Balmer. He couldn’t see competitive threats for what they are. The reactions to changes in the market were too late and too terrible. It used to be that you waited until the third version of a Microsoft product, then it would be good. Well, Apple, Google and others are so good now, no one is waiting for Microsoft’s third attempt.
Meego wasn´t a bad idea. The error was to use Moblin as a starting point instead of using Maemo that had a working product that people used. Then they could replace it component by component if they wanted but no, they started a lot of parts from scratch.
I have always thought that Meego was a missed oportunity to expand Nokia into another markets. They could make multimedia/navigation systems for cars (they owned Navteq).
But that is what Nokia is doing now, with HERE.
Agreed. But for Ngage (the QD), I disagree. Ngage QD is quite good for me
Sorry… Symbian was made to compete with Windows Mobile and Blackberry….it was dying.
As a former employee, I can assure you that many of us used to joke about Microsoft, at least on my unit.
Specially as we were developing software for HP-UX, Solaris and GNU/Linux systems.
So this whole Nokia/Microsoft marriage was a surprise to many of my former colleagues since the first day Elop came to Nokia.
That entire premise is nothing but “magical thinking” which goes “If I use X I will (insert problem to solve)” and that is NOT the way real life works, not at all.
If Nokia would have went Android they would have filed bankruptcy by now, they had no prayer at all in that market, why? Because Nokia can’t compete on price and that is where the majority of Android devices sell, on the bottom end. The ONLY way that Nokia would have had any success with Android is if they managed to unseat #1 which is Samsung…do you REALLY think they would have had a prayer of doing that? Really? when Samsung had the buzz, twice the advertising budget, and frankly already knew how to make top end Android devices that people want to buy?
I’m personally so sick of hearing how the magical Android could have floated in like fairy and waved a wand and saved Nokia…It would have NEVER EVER in a million years would have worked. Look how many OEMs sell Android now, how many are making profits? Last I checked the only one making consistent profits with Android is Samsung, HTC and LG make some profits but its certainly not money in the bank and with LG the profits are measured in pennies per unit.
I’m sure the Android fanboys will hate me for saying so but the future of Android? Cheap crap, that’s it, for every high end unit that sells there will be 40 cheap crap Android units sold. in my own area there is no less than three sub $50 Android phones being sold and that is on the prepaid plans, with the contracts they are giving away Android phones, sometimes two or three at a time.
Nokia can’t compete with cheap as their factories simply cost to much. If they would have fired everyone, closed the factories at a not inconsiderable cost and moved to Asia? Then maybe, MAYBE they would have had a shot with Android. Otherwise Samsung,HTC, and LG would have curbstomped Nokia right into bankruptcy.
That’s exactly what they did.
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_closes_its_romanian_factory_by_the_en…
http://gigaom.com/2012/02/08/nokia-factories-shift-to-asia-did-it-h…
http://www.zdnet.com/nokias-closure-of-one-small-factory-is-one-big…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323482504578229242024…
Edited 2013-09-14 01:12 UTC
That Romanian factory was originally in Germany, they moved it from Bochum to Romanian.
It was a very big deal in Germany, specially given the incentives Nokia had goten from the North Rhine-Westphalia local government.
What? Competing on price has been their main strategy with Windows Phone. Their top-line 900-series Lumias keep launching at $100 on-contract, nevermind the rest of their lineup.
Nokia is cometing on price in the WP world. They 5xx handsets find any meaningfull success (as opposed to flagships) precisely bc they are cheaper than comparatively specced Android devices.
Nokia definitely could have competed on price. For years, they pushed way more dumb phones than smartphones at low prices, which is why they were the largest phone manufacturer for a long time.
At the time Nokia were a significant player, symbian was huge and their dumbphones were even bigger… They had plenty of manufacturing clout thanks to the huge number of dumbphones they sell so they could have competed on price had they wanted to, plus they were a known brand with a good reputation so they could also have competed at the higher end with apple…
As it happens, their lumia series are basically being sold at fire-sale prices in order to shift any units at all, they are pretty much *only* competing on price and only really selling to former dumbphone users who have never used android or ios before (ie phone shops see them as suckers).
They do not differentiate with windows phone, other windows phones are exactly the same, the only reason to buy a nokia over an htc or samsung windows phone is the price. Android manufacturers actually differentiate a lot more through custom frontends and the like, although arguably most of these actually make the device worse than stock android.
Nokia could easily have been where samsung are today, had they embraced android.
I disagree. Any company that can make a profit selling a $20 phone is King of Cheap.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/01/technology/mobile/cheap-nokia-cell-…
They also had tremendous brand loyalty, by the way.
Nokia has one of the lowest ASP(average sales price) for smartphones, WAY bellow market average, WAY below Android. Why? Unsold Lumias and the 520.
And in reality it’s even worse than it appears, due to MS quarterly gifts
http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/08/20/windows-smartp…
Stop spreading lies. Lumias are one of the cheapest unsold smartphones on the market.
WP and Android are not magic. They compete in the same market for the same customers.
People talk about WP as if it was a market apart.
Yes, that’s what Apple bloggers do with iOS too; they segment the market arbitrarily to make it look better. E.g., Apple bloggers will often only focus on the US, ignoring the fact that iOS isn’t doing well anywhere else. WP advocates tend to do the same thing.
If you need to arbitrarily exclude important markets to look good, you’re not doing good.
Though, WP has a point… they do really well in the other large phone markets….Google knows WP8 is a good platform for users and that is why they make using their services difficult…. I am an android fan boy but I would certainly have bought a Lumia 521 for my son rather than an Optimus F3 had Google services (especially music) been officially supported with native apps.
And compare that to Android where even the prepaid phone companies are giving away Android phones and how is Nokia supposed to compete with that?
In my area the Straighttalk prepaid is becoming crazy popular and You can have a Galaxy Precedent or a Huawei Ascend Y for…drumroll…$0. That’s right, nothing, just buy a phone card and they’ll hand you an Android phone. The best price I’ve seen for the Lumia? $99 and that was for a 2 year contract, my friend’s wife looked at them and went for a Motorola Droid, why? $0.99 with 2 year contract. again how is Nokia supposed to compete with that? And let me just leave this here, the #2 OEM is reporting yet another quarter of losses, if they couldn’t compete with Samsung, what chance had Nokia?
http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/30/htc-q3-2013-forecast/
HTC be second in the US and get a lot of attention in the US, but it is not #2 globally. LG is listed as number 2 for Android here: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2573415
Possibly other sources have slightly different estimates, but I’m fairly certain no one thinks HTC is number 2 worldwide. Also, I think Motorola is #3 Android vendor in the US, so that should tell you how relevant US-only numbers are.
LG is reporting a profit on their mobile business: http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/24/lg-q2-earnings-record-smartphone…
Sony does too: http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_turns_small_profit_in_q1_with_thanks_t…
I know a lot people think if a company doesn’t make as much money as Samsung, they should shut down their mobile business, but that is the wrong perspective. Making billions in profit per quarter is quite rare and an unrealistic goal for most companies. If
Uhhhh..I like my LG Android but have you SEEN what LG is selling friend? The fast majority of the LG sales are in the under $80 USD market, LG has become the dumbphone of the future.
That doesn’t change the fact that Nokia would have gotten curbstomped by Samsung, HTC,LG,and Huawei, ALL of whom have MUCH more experience with the OS, a better range of phones to sell, and ALL of them have less cost per smartphone than what Nokia was paying to make the Lumia. Again you can get a Huawei Ascend or Galaxy Precedent for free, a Motorola droid for 99c, or pay $100 for a Nokia Android Lumia…which do YOU think the customers will choose? i can tell you it sure as hell ain’t gonna be the Nokia pal.
In the Android market as your own link shows Samsung has gobbled up pretty much ALL of the top end and with their Precedent line a good chunk of the middle too, that leaves everybody else fighting for scraps and while they could make dirt cheap dumbphones Nokia has shown ZERO ability to make smartphones on the low end, if they could? They would have have 99c Lumias and the prepaid carriers giving away Lumias.
All it takes is for one of those dogs fighting for scraps to realize selling vanilla Android with releases at the same time as Google makes them and people will flock to it (because their geeks will send them to them) Nokia could have done that, still would not have won because they are managed by fools.
If, Nokia really didn’t compete on price, how did they manage to sell all of those low end devices in developing markets?
Reputation of solidity.
The wife and I were just discussing last week how a Nokia built Android phone would have murdered anything currently on the market. The dream phone we conjured up had a 41 Megapixel camera, removable microSD slot, FM tuner/transmitter, and Ovi Maps in place of Google Maps. There was plenty that Nokia could have done hardware wise to differentiate themselves from the plastic slabs currently on the market. The only thing we disagreed on was size … I liked something in the N8 size, while she preferred something closer to her Nexus 4.
It’s easy to claim that Android was the clear option and Elop was an idiot, but let’s go back to February 2011. Nokia had always followed its own way and the deal with Microsoft was a good idea to continue their product differentiation while also capitalizing on the enterprise market that Blackberry was shedding. At the time, Android was just one of many smartphone OSes on the market trying to catch up to iOS. There was WebOS, Bada, Blackberry, WP7, and still hope that there would be a Meego release (remember it took months for Elop to admit that Symbian and Meego would be killed off). Windows Phone had just as many shortcomings as any other OS, and iOS was way out in the lead of everything. Android also had the looming Oracle lawsuit and patent uncertainty to deal with. Fast forward 2½ years and Android is _dominant_. We no longer hear the phrase “this is the release where Android finally catches up with iPhone” because Android has silently matured beyond iOS. The fact that we can say that Android is the obvious choice is a testament to how far it has come in a short time. Windows Phone, on the other hand, suffers from a slower pace of product updates.
By the way, this “rumor” that Nokia was internally testing Android is not really news. This is a market with exactly THREE practical operating systems: one of which you already own, one of which is open-source and free for everybody with 80% of the market, and one that is closed to everybody. What would have been real news is if Nokia were NOT testing Android, or if they were secretly testing Sailfish OS internally (one could hope, right).
What are you talking about? WP has horrible penetration of the enterprise market.
In context, I was talking about the 2011 view that a Microsoft-Nokia parnership would supplant RIM in enterprise IT:
http://readwrite.com/2011/02/11/partnership-keeps-nokia-and-mi#awes…
http://theemf.org/2011/02/11/holy-partnership-batman-nokia-and-micr…
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/15/can-nokia-and-microsoft-win-…
Instead, it’s almost 2014 and Windows Phone still doesn’t support S/MIME or VPN.
Nokia was growing, strongly. It wasn’t number 1 but was growing faster than iOS.
Only for some definition of “growing strongly” that doesn’t include very much market share. Or profits.
Percentage-wise, it looked impressive. But not in absolute numbers. That is part of the “next quarter” fallacy that has haunted them since the Lumia line was introduced. The volume was never there and may not be even now that the 52x series is selling “strongly”.
They needed to hit about 10 million units per quarter to actually make a profit. That was before the 52x series which killed their ASP but didn’t improve volumes enough to make up for the reduced margins.
What are you talking about? At that time Android´s growth was exponential. It was a lot in both relative and absolute numbers.
Yes, Android sales have been much better than Lumia sales ever since Lumias were launched. Why are you comparing the 15 or so Lumia models from Nokia to all models from all manufacturers running Android? What does that comparison show that makes Lumia percentages and volumes look good?
Is that the time period are you referring to? Over the 8 quarters from Q3 ’11 to Q2 ’13 Lumia volumes went from zero to 7.4 million units per quarter.
Percentage increases were very good during some, but not all, of those quarterly intervals. It is still not enough in absolute numbers to make a profit.
In relative numbers it is about 3.3% market share in smartphones after 2 years. Not horrible, but how is that “a lot”?
Nokia didn’t start from zeo. They were converting former Symbian customers. From that point of view Lumia is a complete disaster.
Nor did I say Nokia started from zero. I said Lumia.
And yes, they were at 24 million smartphones per quarter before the Lumia was released and started ‘converting’ Symbian customers to some other manufacturer’s customers. A complete disaster is right.
The problem is not android.
the problem is that both Nokia and windows just threw all the work they had out the window.
Ms completely killed off windows mobile 6, if the would have included some kind of legacy support in the system, they would have had no problems with programs. Instead apple bragged about the app store, when windows phone had thousands already. There is no excuse when I can run opera 10 in windows phone 7 just fine. Or the fact that windows phone had gpu drivers for mobile 6. They didn’t know how to transition your their base.
Nokia completely bombed all their base smart phone users by killing off support without a transition in place. What is the upgrade path for n93? Or an Samsung Omnia or HD2? There was nothing but android and ios.
The problem was Nokia never seemed to do a release.
I can’t remember who said it but they said “version 1 sucks but release it anyway”. That is what was done with Android and the iPhone.
Exactly. I had my pile of cash all saved up to by the N900’s successor for Christmas in 2010, when it was supposed to ship.
I would have happily bought it warts and all, and waited for the beautiful UI release in summer 2011 when the N9 finally shipped.
Instead, they deprecated the N9 even before finally selling it, and switched to an OS (and partner) of which I’m quite un-fond. When the Edge failed to win enough funding, and Jolla decided not to ship to the USA (yet), and with my old N900 finally starting to come apart from 4+ years of hard use, I broke down and bought a Nexus 4 on fire sale.
Nice phone, but I’ll still pursue an alternative to Android and iOS – perhaps load Ubuntu Touch on it when released. Even a relatively open OS like Android needs good competition to innovate.
One can say the same about Symbian, but Apple did one thing neither Microsoft nor Nokia did. They put all the apps together, in a central repository, and made them easy to find, install, and purchase. That’s what sold the App Store, not the quantity nor even the quality of apps at first. With both Windows Mobile and Symbian you had to use the same process of finding, downloading, installing, purchasing, and entering serial numbers you had to go through on your PC. Most people back then didn’t even do that; they had their friends do it for them or else they bought programs on CD that came with a slip of paper with the serial number on it. They didn’t search for a program, download it, go through online purchasing processes, etc on their pcs most of the time so why would they have ever done it for a phone?
Ms and Nokia both could’ve stomped Apple if they’d done two things: update their UI, and start a central repository. They both did, of course, eventually do these things, but far too late. Apple had grabbed theirrelatively small, but steady, share, and Android had taken the rest of not only the device market, but the software developers as well.
Additionally it was a huge pain to develop for Symbian.
The SDK was a mix of batch files, perl scripts, and a cryptic C++ dialect.
Then there was the Metrowerks IDE, followed by two different versions of Eclipse based IDEs, finalizing with what is now know as QtCreator.
So very few developers would jump of joy when proposed to write code for Symbian.
Too true. Both Symbian and Windows Mobile were a royal pita to work with, each for its own reason. Symbian’s SDK was terrible, and then with the switch to QT that was never executed properly no one wanted to develop for it. WM had too many variations. Standard, Pro, Classic (and that’s just WM 6). You also had to target version 5, and occasionally even PocketPC, since comparitively few devices ran 6 even at the end, and that brought its own set of headaches into the game. Devs would have, of course, continued to develop for both of these platforms had nothing better come around, but I don’t think we’d have ever seen the explosion in mobile apps that we’ve seen today. Smartphones would have remained a niche market, and would have stagnated.
First, the team behind the SDK must have been creating the SDK for their own use, they don’t mind end users. Second, the cryptic C/C++ is confusing to me, that is why I prefer pascal.
I remember I’ve downloaded everything a developer needs when the first Android SDK was released, and I had it running in no time. But i am not a java developer, so never created a software..
. Just my two cents.
I am also a Pascal refugee, but sadly Borland was another company that suffered from mismanagement and with it killed Object Pascal in the industry.
One can write Android apps with Pascal (FPC). Takes some patching, but can be done, see:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_JVM_Android_Development
I know, but sadly Pascal has become a legacy language in our industry.
Unless you want to work on legacy systems, better have something more actual on the CV as last worked projects.
I did Delphi over a 10 year period about 6 or 7 years ago. My CV still has it on there. I’ve had a few bites recently (as I just moved jobs a few months back and so put my CV out “there”.) I wouldn’t touch it again though as it’s a complete dead end now.
The last time I checked, the free pascal mailing list was very active. Aside from Embarcado, there are so many modern Pascal languages today, like Morfik and Oxygene(Not your Daddy’s Pascal). However, Pascal is not as popular as C/Java/.Net today. One thing that .NET, Android, iOS developers needs to take a look is Oxygene. http://www.remobjects.com/oxygene/‎, it can do .NET, Cocoa and Android native app development.
So, in summary, Pascal is well and alive.
Mostly hobby developers and students, I would bet.
Can you get at least a €50K job doing greenfield applications in Pascal?
Most likely not, as all the jobs I see on European job boards are for maintenance projects, thus legacy work.
Nokia’s Ovi store was launched only 8 months later than Apple’s.
My beloved Z10 died of overheating last week
So I went back to the Lumia while waiting for the replacement. So far it’s been several days of displeasure. I can’t believe it’s been a year and Microsoft barely fixed the OS.
It still feels green, cumbersome and most of the applications can’t multitask properly. I’m glad Windows Phone is doing better, but the OS still feels five years behind everything else.
The Z10 probably has less apps, but they are of much, much better quality than the Windows Phone counterparts.
So, I’m afraid that since they own Nokia now, they’ll sit on their laurels and start focusing even less on Windows Phone, because it’s been a year and the OS is still terrible.
See, all this talk about Android and bashing of Elop is just completely missing the point. Nokia basically killed itself by not giving OSSO the resources and backing that was required to make it really succeed. The rest of the story is Nokia trying to fix this mistake.
For not at least introducing an Android phone. I mean what would it have hurt working with both platforms? This belief changed though with my recent switch from a Samsung S3 to a Nokia 925. I can list at least 25 things that are better with the user experience than Android even though there are still a few holes to patch with WP8 updates. Battery life and battery management being one of them. People are going to laugh at me now but the future of phone OSs are not going to be built on Objective C or Java…it’s going to be built on .NET in C# and VB.net. Use WP8 for a week on a Nokia and then talk about how good Android will be for the future.
That’s assuming WP will be the future “phone OS”, on which I’d bet even less than on lottery (on which I do not bet at all). Plus, the day when I’ll write another line of code in VB the sky will fall down, and aliens from another galaxy will visit us just to beat me senseless :]
The only thing that keeps me from leaving VB.net is that C/C++ or Objective C is so cryptic and senseless to _my_ taste. That is why I prefer Pascal more than anything else. VB.NET is useful to me, you may only have a point if you are talking about VB6.
We will see once Enterprise customers figure out that Visual Studio and SQL Server and Office is in WP8.
+2!
Currently Android is stagnated in terms of official programming languages.
The NDK is an up hill battle compared with what iOS and Windows Phone users enjoy for native development.
Lacks integrated experience, and only some APIs are exposed, forcing developers to write JNI wrappers for the remaining ones.
Then Java language version is stuck at version 6, with no signs of ever changing. The same applies to the JIT and GC, with no visible optimizations since Android 2.3.
I’ve watched a few Google I/O firesides recently, and Google would answer you “Use Java, it’s a first party citizen”. The Google Developers really don’t seem to want the use of the NDK to replace Java, and for good reason. Apps written in Java are completely cross platform on all supported processors. Personally, I use Aide (on board IDE) on ARM and x86 hosts, and other than the NDK plugin for it being ARM only, the rest works flawlessly for Java development.
How does that really affect Android though?
Well, it uses a completely different VM which is register rather than stack based, so the Java VM has little relevance to Android really. So really, they are on their own and that might be the issue. I get the feeling that the Android dev team at Google is overworked.
Edited 2013-09-16 12:03 UTC
Yeah, I know that is the official position.
But truth is that since they won’t upgrade their Java support and there are lots of libraries missing, they have effectively created a fragmentation problem, where some Java libraries need explicit Android versions.
Currently I would have sided with Oracle in the lawsuit, as Google has actually managed to do what Microsoft was forbidden to do.
Anyway I just use C++ with the required abstraction layers, to keep my native code portable across mobile devices.
Some of the new features in Java 7 generate new bytecodes that the JVM -> Dalvik (dex) translator is not aware.
Additionally some features require library changes, like try with resources, for example.
There are plenty of Java VM and native compilers out there, if the Android dev team does not improve theirs, surely it is a political decision.
I doubt Google lacks the money to invest on it, if they really cared.
I’m sorry, but at this point I don’t see what people sees in Windows Phone.
Multitasking is terrible, most apps even the native ones take ages to resume.
The user interface is confusing. Color codes for icons are great for quickly finding what you need. In Windows Phone everything looks the same and you have to look at it alphabetically.
Live tiles and toast notifications seem great in concept, but due to the horrible multitasking. It makes the app (gtalk, skype, etc) open to see what the message is, and if you currently don’t have 3G (on subway) you can’t even see a message you know you received a few minutes ago.
Count how many steps it takes to call someone from your address book from pushing the phone icon. On Android it’s 1, on WP it’s 4.
Not even for development the phone is good, starting by the fact that the screen must be unlocked for you to upload your app. What the fuck?? Then trying the DirectX demos, the simple marble ball demo starts nicely, then drops to 1fps for no reason.
So again, the phone OS is really green. It’s promising but it needs a lot more development time to even match Android or iOS.
It’s been a while since you played around with it I take it. The new Nokia’s don’t have any resume issue.
The tiles are faster than pushing through pages and pages of icons in no particular order. Even if you have Android icons arranged perfectly…if you have a lot of apps you keep moving through page after page. The WP8 tiles are great for notifications, but isn’t it much easier just flicking to the WP8 apps list and hitting a character to select the first letter of your app? Not to mention the integration on WP8 is better so you don’t need a bunch of different apps to do things between Facebook, Google Mail, etc.
Not sure what you mean here.
I count three steps. You can make a tile for that and do it in two. Or use the voice command and do it in one. There are probably other ways also.
Your crazy. Visual Studio Express WP8 with it’s GUI SMOKES Google’s SDK. You have to use Basic for Android to even get close. Managed code is the key here.
“Windows Phone never fit into Nokia’s DNA.”
Well, for the part of Nokia that I’ve seen from the inside, I would say that it’s not just WP, but the whole Microsoft-way that doesn’t fit with Nokia’s DNA.
Quite true.
I will reserve my opinion about Windows Phone, but I can say Android as provided by Google was more than anything not fitting into Nokia’s DNA, with its sometimes chaotic and often inconsistent interface, geeky target audience (contrary to Nokia’s audience), and Google-Services rooted more and more into the OS which would had to fight with Nokia’s own services.
Android would need a significant change “a la Samsung” to make it suitable for Nokia, and I guess that is exactly what this secret team was doing, and it is unknown how far they managed.
But the numbers are speaking, the current growing rate of the LUMIA family and the shareholders support is showing that Nokia made a good bet (with an unpleasant 2 years that scared the hell out of them), and the outcome of any other OS bet is guesswork.
That Nokia decided to try Android seems to me more a response to the circumstances and pressure from the press, and not than the OS would fit in their DNA, if so it would have been their former choice over Windows Phone.
By Going with WP Nokia not only got a big cash infusion up front, but also managed to ‘force’ MS to buy its failing phone business for probably a lot more than it was worth. Nokia not only walks away with a big pile of cash, but is now free to focus on the potentially more profitable sides of it’s business.
Remember this is a company that used to make wood pulp and rubber boots, so it’s not like they’re completely alien to drop product lines and changing directions.
They lost over $9 billion dollars during the ‘turnaround’ which seems to have ended with selling off the still unprofitable handset division. And that after getting $1.5 billion up front and $250 million per quarter from msft.
Could it have been even worse if they hadn’t been so “smart”? Maybe.
Regardless of OS, I think whoever, designs and implement the best experience have a easier time of being significant.
Every competitor is trying to be better than Apple, but do not pay as much attention to design as apple does. Apple doesn’t only look at the OS – they ensure OS and Hardware play well together seamlessly and make it very simple for the end-user. They ensure that even the packaging makes the customer feel appreciated.
People have said that android is a bit complicated and confusing UI wise. Most people (and I mean non-techies) do not want to be fiddling around, making the UI custom, unless it’s dead simple.
Android makes it cheaper for a manufacturer to build a phone, but hardly anyone is doing anything unique in the android market (except Samsung).
I hope Microsoft did this buy to make the consumer experience the best. They do have the potential to do it.
With regards to leadership, I sure wouldn’t want a handset manufacturer CEO to be CEO of a software (and now “hardware”) company i.e. Microsoft. MS needs a CEO that have different experiences in not just software and hardware, but culture, business, film, animation etc. Such a mix gives one the insight into knowing what will attract consumers – one call pull and synthesize from those experiences. Recall Steve Jobs – became Steve Jobs after he went out and do different stuff.
I still don’t understand why this case has not been investigated nor prosecuted.
It’s so obvious that Nokia has been ripped of its future from within, by placing a giant Microsoft Mole at its head.
The most important effort of Elop has undertaken is to comprehensively destroy the Nokia Symbian / Qt / OVI store ecosystem, to make room for Microsoft, and as a consequence, leave no other choice to Nokia than to be a puppet of Microsoft. Nokia will be bought later on for a fraction of its former value.
What a massive value destruction for Nokia shareholders ! And I’m not even talking about Nokia employees, and sub-contractors, which lose even more, but have not even a word to complain ! At the very least, Nokia shareholders should ask why they were ripped of this way.