i4u: Meego dies and Nokia WP7 born Feburary 11?

[cbn]

http://www.i4u.com/45090/meego-dies-and-nokia-wp7-born-february-11

The future of MeeGo looks bleak today, but the Nokia's future looks uncommonly bright. There's been suspicion of a switch to the Windows Phone 7 platform for a few weeks now. This came to a head when Adnaan Ahmad of Berenberg Bank wrote an open letter to Nokia CEO Stephen Elop urging him to drop MeeGo and ally with Microsoft.

In Q4 2009, Nokia held 40% of the global smartphone market. In Q4 2010, they held only 31%. Profit declined 21% year over year as well. No matter how Nokia tries to paint their quarters and brag over their feature phone dominance, the sad fact is that the Finnish company suffers from a distinct lack of smartphones with any sort of global popularity.

So you can see why Adnaan's note excited some investors. Microsoft's WP7 platform is legitimately pleasant to use. It has a healthy (and growing) app ecosystem and early sales that are promising. Although not overwhelming. Meanwhile, Nokia has a proprietary OS that is kind of cool but wildly late to the party. Although a MeeGo smartphone and tablet are expected to hit MWC, neither of those devices have raised confidence in Nokia 2011.

But the suspicion of a possible alliance with Microsoft has been enough to boost Nokia shares by 4% this week. No spokesperson at either company has commented yet, but some analysts expect a February 11 announcement from Mr. Elop. The Nokia CEO stated in late January that his company was open to "create and/or join other ecosystems".

We'll see just how open next week, right ahead of the Mobile World Congress.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

P.S. I think a completely open source OS would be great to have, but why does Intel want to compete at the top end of the category (where it is harder to grow)?

Unfortunately this story is starting to sound a lot like "Itanium" and "Larabee". (two other products aimed at the high profit market right off the bat).

I would like to see Intel release a product (even more efficient than x86, ARM, MIPS) aimed at the very bottom then work there way up little by little (repeating the same strategy that made x86 such a big success). It would be great for consumers and make the hardware discussions that much more interesting.

EDIT: (Sorry for the flame post) I'll add in the caveat that working slowly from the bottom may actually be Intel's plan. First they learn to integrate the Infineon baseband on their existing x86 uarch. Then as the company's experience grows they make the move to a new more efficient uarch and begin the x86 style undercutting process we expect them to do.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Intel is aiming at the top of the market becase in a way they are already above it. It makes a lot more sense to scale back Atom performance and power consumption to compete at the top of the smartphone market then it does to scale back even farther and compete in less profitable low end systems.

 

[shortylickens]

So, the dude is expected to make a Windows phone cuz someone asked him to?
And this website thinks that speculation qualifies as news?
And the OP thought this needed to be posted?

I am not seeing anything good here at all.

 

[Fox5]

Nokia would be making a mistake to go Windows Phone 7, they'd be even less in control of their platform than if they went Android. Microsoft competes with Nokia on just as many services as Google does, but Microsoft almost certainly won't let Nokia strip out Microsoft's services and replace them with their own.

I'd think one of two things will happen:
Nokia will produce Windows Phone 7 phones for the American market in order to gain brand prescence.
Some sort of app compatibility. Microsoft ports Silverlight to Meego, Nokia ports QT to Windows Phone 7, and the two share an app store.

 

[cbn]

It makes a lot more sense to scale back Atom performance and power consumption to compete at the top of the smartphone market then it does to scale back even farther and compete in less profitable low end systems.

Although low end chips are less profitable, my thinking is that such a strategy might take away some of ARMs programmer momentum aimed at the existing x86? (particularly if the new non-x86 design was truly 21st Century and Intel had a strong roadmap of growth for it).

Think Intel at the bottom with something new (non-x86) and exciting, ARM in the middle, and the remaining x86 Intel CPUs left in their existing spot at the top end. (Intel then gains momentum towards ARM from the bottom taking the wind out of ARM's sails to the top)

Or maybe it is too late and ARM already has the top on lock? (In any event Intel is a large company with plenty of money. I am sure they will think of something to keep technology moving forward.)

 

[cbn]

Puddle Jumper,

I do agree with you though (based on what little I know) that scaling Atom down to even lower voltages for lower profit designs would be tough. But maybe someone can clear this up?

In contrast to Z600 atom, Cortex A5 (sparrow) is .53mm2 (with L1 cache) on 40nm while being faster than existing ARM 11 designs (in LG Optimus One, etc) according to marketing materials put out by ARM.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

meego is the os that will never be. theyve had years to put something decent out and they havent even come close. its too late for meego, everyone should forget about it, android/chrome is everything meego was meant to be. nokia should go with multiple operating systems. they used to be one of the biggest cell phone makers in the us and now you can hardly buy their phones. they design beautiful stuff (have you seen their netbooks?), if they came out with android or windows phones they would be really attractive and they would instantly become a major player in the smartphone business in the us. so it would be an immediate answer to their problems. it sucks for them not to be the total hard/software provider but they will be better off going with os's that have some acceptance already rather than trying to push something no one sees a need for (symbian/meego)

 

[cbn]

Nokia would be making a mistake to go Windows Phone 7, they'd be even less in control of their platform than if they went Android. Microsoft competes with Nokia on just as many services as Google does, but Microsoft almost certainly won't let Nokia strip out Microsoft's services and replace them with their own.

Yep, I still think it is amazing Google will let a company (eg, Amazon) launch its own version of Android (complete with a non Google app store).

 

[gsaldivar]

Misery loves company.

 

[cbn]

meego is the os that will never be. theyve had years to put something decent out and they havent even come close. its too late for meego, everyone should forget about it, android/chrome is everything meego was meant to be.

I still think it would be awesome if Meego could become a good alternative to Android. (Having two Open mobile OSes would be a great thing IMO).

 

[OBLAMA2009]

Yep, I still think it is amazing Google will let a company (eg, Amazon) launch its own version of Android (complete with a non Google app store).

is amazon making its own android or just opening a store? what would they put it on, their own phones and kindles???

 

[cbn]

is amazon making its own android or just opening a store? what would they put it on, their own phones and kindles???

Here is an article with more information.

Amazon’s Disruptive Android App Store Now Open To Developers — Full Details

Jason Kincaid
Jan 5, 2011

Fragmentation. Curation. Recommendations. Take your pick: Android is getting all three, compliments of a new Amazon-run application marketplace due to launch later this year. Today, Amazon has launched the developer-facing part of the store, inviting devs to submit their applications so that they’re ready when the app store is ready for its consumer debut later this year (Amazon isn’t giving a firm date on the full launch). The developer portal is at http://developer.amazon.com.

We reported on this impending news back in September, so it isn’t a huge surprise. But it’s going to bring some very interesting dynamics to the way Android applications are purchased and distributed. In some senses, this is the Android equivalent of Apple’s App Store — even more so than Google’s official Android Market.

I spoke with Aaron Rubenson, category leader for Amazon Mobile Services, and
Ameesh Paleja, general manager for the Engineering Division of Mobile Services, about the new store, and it clearly has the potential to be a big deal.

First, some background for those who don’t follow Android too closely. All Google-endorsed Android devices ship with the Android Market, along with a suite of other Google-made applications like Gmail. Android Market is a lot like Apple’s App Store with a few key differences: it doesn’t have an approval system, so developers can quickly submit and iterate on their applications. It also tends to have a lot of junky applications that Apple would reject — things that crash on launch on certain devices, or apps with that occasionally have features that don’t work as expected. While Google’s terms do require descriptions to be accurate, the general attitude is to let the market decide what works, and it surfaces the top rated applications (most of the time) while letting the junk sink.

Amazon is taking an approach that is more in line with Apple’s. Developers who wish to appear on Amazon’s store have to get approval (Amazon says that the process is currently taking about a week). And Amazon is going to have slightly more stringent guidelines: your application has to work properly (i.e. it can’t crash right off the bat) and it has to do what you say it does. It also has to be safe. Android Market has many of these same requirements, but the difference here is that Amazon checks apps before they’re deployed to its store, while Google does so after problematic applications are reported.

However, unlike Apple’s screening policies (which were largely a mystery for years and are still pretty wishy-washy), Amazon says it’s going to take a more liberal stance as far as what’s allowed on the store. Porn and illegal apps are not allowed, but your satire apps should be okay. And developers won’t have to make any changes to their .apk files, either — it sounds like you can upload the same ones to both Google’s and Amazon’s marketplaces (neither has any exclusivity requirements).

The biggest departure from the mobile app stores we’ve grown accustomed to involves pricing. Unlike Apple’s App Store and Android Market, where developers can set their price to whatever they’d like, Amazon retains full control over how it wants to price your application. The setup is a bit confusing: upon submitting your application, you can set a ‘List Price’, which is the price you’d normally sell it at. Amazon will use a variety of market factors to determine what price it wants to use, and you get a 70% cut of the proceeds of each sale (which is the industry standard). In the event that Amazon steeply discounts your application, or offers it for free, you’re guaranteed to get 20% of the List Price.

The bottom line here is that Amazon will be offering discounts on some applications (possibly making them much cheaper than the same application on Android Market or elsewhere). That sounds like it could be a recipe for frustration for some developers, but Rubenson and Paleja say that they’re going to do everything they can to maximize the amount of money developers make, and that sometimes that involves adjusting pricing. They also say that Amazon has an incentive to keep developers happy — and that developers can remove their apps from the store with ten day’s notice. We’ll have to wait and see if the system works.

So why, aside from these pricing differences, would consumers want to use this Amazon App Store at all? There are a few answers to that question.

The first is that there are manufacturers making Android devices that decide not to partner with Google to offer the official suite of Google applications (including Android Market). Amazon is happy to offer their store to these manufacturers, and it will work on any Android device version 1.6 or up. So if, for example, Facebook releases its own flavor of Android down the line, they could include Amazon’s App Store.


Reason number two: Amazon says that it can offer recommendations using the technology that already exists on Amazon.com. This includes the obvious example of showing applications that are similar to each other, but Amazon will also be looking for correlations between physical products and apps — it might start recommending a popular baseball app to someone browsing for a baseball bat, for example. And it’s going to be promoting these applications as users browse Amazon.com.

Amazon says it’s premature to talk about what the store itself will look like, but they did share a few details about the consumer experience. First, payments unsurprisingly will be done using Amazon’s one-click payment system (which already has tens of millions of credit cards on file), though developers can integrate whatever transaction system they want into the app itself.

Customers will be able to browse through applications from their phone or on Amazon.com using their desktop computers, and they’ll be able to ‘send’ applications they buy to their mobile device. This sounds similar to what Google showed off at Google I/O, but with one minor caveat: the apps won’t actually be pushed and installed immediately, it sounds like you’ll have to fire up the Amazon application to do that.

So how will people actually get access to this Amazon marketplace from their Android device? This is going to prove a bit tricky for some users — Amazon will offer a walkthrough instructing users on how to do this, but it will require you dig into the settings menu on the device and allow installation from “Unknown Sources”. It’s easy to find if you know what you’re doing, but it sounds a bit scary. However, Amazon is also in talks with various partners, and we’ll likely be seeing plenty of applications shipping with the market pre-installed.

Now, Amazon isn’t the only company that’s making alternative Android App Stores — Verizon is also doing one of its own, and there will surely be more to follow. But Amazon is in a position to establish itself as the de facto non-Google App Store — and that could prove to be very important. As Kevin Marks wrote recently (and we discussed further), Android is going to increasingly fragment into flavors that aren’t as closely tied to Google, and we’ll start seeing more alternative versions of the core ‘Google Apps’. Amazon’s App Store would fit in nicely as one part of this alternative suite.

This will also bring pricing battles over the same applications into the equation (which hasn’t really been possible when app distribution is monopolized by a single storefront). And, yes, it could lead to some user confusion, though Amazon has a strong incentive to keep this as straightforward as it can.

Make no mistake — this isn’t going to replace Google’s Android Market by any means. Google’s store will have better international support for some time (Amazon is US-only at launch) and it will still be shipping on plenty of phones by default. But given how many Android devices are going to be out there in the near future (they’re activating over 300,000 a day), there’s certainly going to be enough customers to keep more than one store in business.

I asked a few times about timing for the consumer launch but couldn’t get anything more specific than “this year”. However, the team did say that the mobile storefront is being built with tablets in mind, so my guess is that we can expect this to launch after Android tablets running Honeycomb are on the market (which will probably be around April or later).

I asked the Amazon team how Google felt about the launch — there was an audible chuckle, and they said something about Android being on an amazing growth trajectory and that they were fond of its openness.

Reached for comment, Google gave this statement:

Android is an open platform – and entities other than Google are free to create their own content and marketplaces, much like the web.

I bet they’re thrilled.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

that doesnt actually say amazon is going to make their own android os. it sounds like theyre going to make a higher quality app store. i dont think id use it though, amazon is just a middle man that already has too much control over books/ebooks

 

[OBLAMA2009]

I still think it would be awesome if Meego could become a good alternative to Android. (Having two Open mobile OSes would be a great thing IMO).

yeah id like to see a nongoogle alternative as well. im not sure what they are doing now though. its been in development for forever it seems and there are still no products on the horizon. last time i checked meego looked a little bloated (it was larger than most linux distributions) and i cant see it running well on a phone or a netbook. they also seem to be holding back on meego (will only let it run on some cpus, wont let it become a desktop os) so it wont compete with windows

 

[darkewaffle]

I really like the looks of WP7 I'm just waiting for it to come to my carrier (Verizon) and I'd love to see it on some higher end hardware. Plausible or not, I wouldn't mind seeing this happen.

 

[Munky]

The OP news sounds sketchy and iffy at best. As a Nokia user, I find their OS is quite capable, and if they switch to WP7, I'm switching to Android.