the iPhone jugganaut will continue to gather momentum until it stops, the only way they can gain more base is to extend their availability to other networks, it will remain popular amongst non tech savvy users but that's the reason why carriers don't want Nokia in the US, Nokia have phones that are open to new applications and very high in data consumption, that's why ATT have a deal with Apple, and they plan on keeping it that way, they can barely handle the data demand for iPhone users, that's why they delayed the MMS ability.

I really hope Nokia doesn't make any deal with a US carrier, the iPhone will remain the most "advanced" option for carrier subsidized phones while high end Nokia's still unlocked and the best option for tech users.

Just to get your facts straight Apple will NEVER release their phones with FM radio (iTunes $$$), FM trasmitter (accesories $$$), full office support (losing sales to desktops, laptops $$$), Open Source Browser with Plugins (Safari $$$), Open Source OS (lol).

Nokia's can easily replace a laptop, iPhones can replace .... ipod touch?

@Giovani,
So you reckon Apple will never release an FM radio eh? Then II guess the Apple FM radio remote for the iPod that enables the builtin radio tuner software in the iPod is a figment of everyone's imagination?

And I guess The Pandora Radio and Spotify iPhone apps don't actually exist on the iPhone either? *shakes head*

I guess you've also not heard of the dozen or so 3rd party browsers availlable for the iPhone - they are all based on the open source webkit engine that Nokia and Android also use for which - shock, horror - Apple is the major contributor.

I assume you've also not heard that Mac OS X is built on the open source BSD unix subsystem or that it has dozens of open source components and Linux APIs or that Apple is the laptop brand you will see dominating every open source gathering around the world?

Sorry Giovani but I think you need to familiarse yourself with facts a little more before making proclamations about Apple.

That sad fact of the matter is that Maemo demonstrates how out of it's depth the legacy Symbian OS is in this brave new world of desktop-class operating systems like iPhone OS X and Android. The even sadder fact is that Maemo has as much chance as N-Gage of setting the developer community on fire.

-Mart

you are right I totally forgot about those things, desktop class operating system iphone os x and android? no.

I don't have apple hate, I own a macbook and it rocks! but the iPhone is just too basic for the price tag, I'd rather support a technology that doesn't limit me to what I can do or unlock it to extend it's features, don't worry about others, the iphone will remain popular, specially those interesting apps.

Giovani,
The fact that the iPhone OS may at the moment lack a few features you want does not negate the fact that it runs the same kernal and many of the frameworks as the desktop Mac OS X or that iPhone software is written using the very same industry-leading object-oriented Xcode development environment.

Compare this to Symbian, a legacy OS designed originally for the old Psion handheld organisers and well past its time which lacks all of the desktop-class features that make up the iPhone OS such as Core Image, Core Animation, Core Location, Core Data, Open GL, etc etc.

Then of course there is the lack of so many of the 70,000 modern 3rd party apps available for the iPhone that make Symbian and Maemo so much *less* feature-rich operating systems. Just looking at the genre of music apps alone shows a wealth of multi-touch synths, instrument simulators, music composition and drum machine apps that are just impossible without the system-wide multi-touch abilities and OpenGL hardware acceleration and Core Audio features of the iPhone OS.

I don't think you realise what desktop-class OS means.

-Mart

The fact that the iPhone OS may at the moment lack a few features you want does not negate the fact that it runs the same kernal and many of the frameworks as the desktop Mac OS X or that iPhone software is written using the very same industry-leading object-oriented Xcode development environment.

And the fact that it has a desktop-class OS doesn't negate that it's missing features, either. What kind of touchscreen OS doesn't support copy/paste for two releases?

As for the development environment, Windows Mobile uses Microsoft's Developer's Studio, the same environment used to program for Windows, too. Plus, it uses the more standard C++, not some also-ran language like Objective-C. (Of course, I don't know if I can defend C# as I've never used it....)

And programmers can use many of the same APIs and frameworks as on the desktop, too -- Win32, MFC, .NET Compact Framework (somewhat more limited, but still similar enough that many skills transfer easily).

Compare this to Symbian, a legacy OS designed originally for the old Psion handheld organisers and well past its time which lacks all of the desktop-class features that make up the iPhone OS such as Core Image, Core Animation, Core Location, Core Data, Open GL, etc etc.

Desktop-class OS, blah, blah, blah. :D The fact is that there's something to be said for designing an OS that's meant for the environment it runs in. Phones aren't desktops, even if they can perform many the of the same tasks. They have different needs for power management, different screen size requirements, etc.

I don't believe that Palm or RIM use a desktop-class OS, yet both have compelling products.

Then of course there is the lack of so many of the 70,000 modern 3rd party apps available for the iPhone that make Symbian and Maemo so much *less* feature-rich operating systems.

The number of applications says nothing about the richness of the OS, only the desire to develop for the platform. For example, a new OS could be richer than any other, but it wouldn't have many apps simply because it's new.

Plus, if 35,000 of the apps are fart sounds or novelty programs, that may actually detract from things. (But there are lots of cool apps for the iPhone, too. That's why I mostly enjoy the "there's an app for that" commercials.)

The types of applications may give an indication of the richness of the OS, but we'll discuss that below.

Just looking at the genre of music apps alone shows a wealth of multi-touch synths, instrument simulators, music composition and drum machine apps that are just impossible without the system-wide multi-touch abilities and OpenGL hardware acceleration and Core Audio features of the iPhone OS.

I think that "impossible" is stretching things. There have been plenty of music apps for Windows Mobile, including synthesizer-type apps. Maybe multi-touch could have made them better (for handling chords, for example), but I suspect the developers were able to handle that (although perhaps not as elegantly).

Yes, the iPhone has had a remarkable effect on the smart phone industry, but you're veering dangerously close to the line between advocate and fanboy (if you haven't crossed it already).

Steve

@Pony99CA:
>What kind of touchscreen OS doesn't support copy/paste for two releases?

Yes, I agree that was a big lack, but that’s history - I could respond by asking what sort of smartphone OS up until two major releases ago would lose all data, apps and settings whenever the battery went flat or the phone hard reset? Hint: the company responsible starts with M and ends with soft. ;-)

>Windows Mobile uses Microsoft's Developer's Studio, the same environment used to program for Windows, too. Plus, it uses the more standard C++, not some also-ran language like Objective-C.

Actually, we were discussing Nokia’s OS development situation, but following your tangent, you can quite easily code in C and C++ for the iPhone as well as Objective C, the language that Tim Berners Lee developed the worldwide web in.

>Desktop-class OS, blah, blah, blah. :D The fact is that there's something to be said for designing an OS that's meant for the environment it runs in. Phones aren't desktops, even if they can perform many the of the same tasks. They have different needs for power management, different screen size requirements, etc.

That’s an easy way to try and excuse the terribly limited capabilities of Windows Mobile which is badly showing it’s Windows CE roots and limitations (will we ever see Windows Mobile v7 and will it be less crash-prone?) or Symbian’s inability to scale to MIDs or RIM’s Java-based Pager OS roots that can't even display HTML mail or provide a decent web browser.

Having a desktop-class OS means it is possible to scale the smartphone into a “real” pocket computer far more readily without all the legacy baggage.

>I don't believe that Palm or RIM use a desktop-class OS, yet both have compelling products.

Actually the Linux-based Palm WebOS and Google's Android *are* modern desktop-class smartphone OSes as compared to the legacy OSes mentioned above.

>The number of applications says nothing about the richness of the OS, only the desire to develop for the platform. For example, a new OS could be richer than any other, but it wouldn't have many apps simply because it's new.

The fact that the iPhone has far more apps available does in fact have a direct bearing on how feature-rich a platform is to the people that matter – the customers and the fact that the iPhone has 75% mobile developer mindshare means it will only increase.

Until Nokia can boast more than a few wallpapers and ringtones on their Ovi store of course the platform will be considered far less feature-rich.

The iPhone OS is now the "MS Windows" of mobile operating systems in terms of software marketshare.

>Plus, if 35,000 of the apps are fart sounds or novelty programs, that may actually detract from things.

Hey if “90% of anything is crap” is true for the iPhone App store...

...then 90% of 70,000 is still a lot more than 90% of 4,500 Symbian apps. :-) Of course, Ovi Store apps are actually split over 75 different devices and multiple platforms so the actual number available for any one Nokia phone is miniscule by comparison.

>I think that "impossible" is stretching things. There have been plenty of music apps for Windows Mobile, including synthesizer-type apps. Maybe multi-touch could have made them better (for handling chords, for example), but I suspect the developers were able to handle that (although perhaps not as elegantly).

Ahem, multi-touch *is* physically impossible on the resistive screens used by the vast majority of the installed base of Nokia and WM phones and the difference between the apps available for the Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones I’ve owned compared to the iPhone is like night and day (and yes I did spend hundreds of dollars on WM apps like Destinator GPS, SPB Utilities, Laridian, etc.)

>you're veering dangerously close to the line between advocate and fanboy (if you haven't crossed it already).

Yes, we’re all fans of something. In my case I have been trying to illustrate a few reasons why Nokia’s dual-OS strategy is broken from the get-go. It’d be nice if such a discussion could proceed without resorting to flinging the old “fanboy defense”. *sigh*

-Mart

@Pony99CA:
>What kind of touchscreen OS doesn't support copy/paste for two releases?

Yes, I agree that was a big lack, but that’s history - I could respond by asking what sort of smartphone OS up until two major releases ago would lose all data, apps and settings whenever the battery went flat or the phone hard reset? Hint: the company responsible starts with M and ends with soft. ;-)

Actually, wouldn't that also include Palm? The fact is that flash memory wasn't really cheap enough until a few years ago to use for storage memory, so device makers used RAM, which of course lost its contents when the battery died.

Did BlackBerry or Symbian not suffer from the same problem?

>Actually, we were discussing Nokia’s OS development situation, but following your tangent, you can quite easily code in C and C++ for the iPhone as well as Objective C, the language that Tim Berners Lee developed the worldwide web in.

Sorry, but that wasn't a tangent at all. You brought up the iPhone development environment being the same as their desktop development environment as being an advantage. I was just pointing out that Apple wasn't the only company that had that advantage.

I don't know much about Symbian, so I won't comment on it.

>Desktop-class OS, blah, blah, blah. :D The fact is that there's something to be said for designing an OS that's meant for the environment it runs in. Phones aren't desktops, even if they can perform many the of the same tasks. They have different needs for power management, different screen size requirements, etc.

That’s an easy way to try and excuse the terribly limited capabilities of Windows Mobile which is badly showing it’s Windows CE roots and limitations (will we ever see Windows Mobile v7 and will it be less crash-prone?) or Symbian’s inability to scale to MIDs or RIM’s Java-based Pager OS roots that can't even display HTML mail or provide a decent web browser.

Having a desktop-class OS means it is possible to scale the smartphone into a “real” pocket computer far more readily without all the legacy baggage.

As far as I'm concerned, we've had "real" pocket computers since at least the Palm-Size PC. By almost any definition of "computer", what we had then (and have now) are pocket computers.

>I don't believe that Palm or RIM use a desktop-class OS, yet both have compelling products.

Actually the Linux-based Palm WebOS and Google's Android *are* modern desktop-class smartphone OSes as compared to the legacy OSes mentioned above.

Android may scale to netbooks, but if it's a desktop-class OS, why did Google come out with Chrome? I guess they feel the need for a dual OS strategy, too.

As for WebOS, do you consider anything based on Linux to be desktop-class?

Finally, there have actually been Windows CE desktop-like machines. For example, the Sharp Tripad was basically a convertible tablet/notebook PC.

>The number of applications says nothing about the richness of the OS, only the desire to develop for the platform. For example, a new OS could be richer than any other, but it wouldn't have many apps simply because it's new.

The fact that the iPhone has far more apps available does in fact have a direct bearing on how feature-rich a platform is to the people that matter – the customers and the fact that the iPhone has 75% mobile developer mindshare means it will only increase.

The number of apps may have a bearing on how a platform is perceived but says nothing about the intrinsic richness of a platform. If I produced 90,000 applications for Windows Mobile which each only made one sound (fart, car horn, air horn, police siren, etc.), would you concede that Windows Mobile was a richer platform than the iPhone? I don't think so. So application volume is irrelevant to determining the true richness of the platform.

I'm not saying that the iPhone platform isn't the richest (I don't know how it compares with Android or WebOS, for example), just that sheer application volume isn't the true measure of a platform.

The same is true for the number of developers creating software. The iPhone is a great platform and has great market growth, so of course it will get a lot of developers. Palm OS also had a lot of developers at one time, but lost their lead because they let the OS stagnate and Windows Mobile passed them. Now Microsoft is finding themselves in a similar situation, which is one reason the iPhone has caught up and passed Windows Mobile.

Until Nokia can boast more than a few wallpapers and ringtones on their Ovi store of course the platform will be considered far less feature-rich.

You're drinking the app store Kool-Aid. You can't measure the success of most platforms based solely on the OS-supplied app store.

The fact is that most platforms allow installing software from other places. Visit Handango, for example, and you'll see a few thousand applications for Symbian phones. Microsoft doesn't even have an app store out yet, but does that mean there are no applications for Windows Mobile?

The iPhone OS is now the "MS Windows" of mobile operating systems in terms of software marketshare.

True, but not in terms of overall marketshare. Nokia still owns that.

>Plus, if 35,000 of the apps are fart sounds or novelty programs, that may actually detract from things.

Hey if “90% of anything is crap” is true for the iPhone App store...

...then 90% of 70,000 is still a lot more than 90% of 4,500 Symbian apps. :-)

I think you mean 10%, if you want to count the non-crap. ;) Unless you think it's an advantage to have more crapware....

Ahem, multi-touch *is* physically impossible on the resistive screens used by the vast majority of the installed base of Nokia and WM phones and the difference between the apps available for the Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones I’ve owned compared to the iPhone is like night and day (and yes I did spend hundreds of dollars on WM apps like Destinator GPS, SPB Utilities, Laridian, etc.)

Is it really "impossible" to do multi-touch on a resistive screen? I'm not a hardware person, so I don't know, but it seems like there'd be a way to do it.

I also recall reading about some software that allowed multi-touch on a Windows Mobile device. Maybe it was somehow faked, like multi-tasking is on devices with only one CPU/core, but it may be good enough.

>you're veering dangerously close to the line between advocate and fanboy (if you haven't crossed it already).

Yes, we’re all fans of something. In my case I have been trying to illustrate a few reasons why Nokia’s dual-OS strategy is broken from the get-go. It’d be nice if such a discussion could proceed without resorting to flinging the old “fanboy defense”. *sigh*

There's a difference between a fan and a fanboy.

A fan uses a system and can rationally discuss the pros and cons of the system and admit when other systems have an advantage. I'm a fan of Windows Mobile, but not so blind that I can't see what other platforms bring to the table.

A fanboy only sees the pros of their system and can't believe any other system has any advantages. They also tend to denigrate fans of other systems.

While you do seem mostly like a fan, your fairly condescending posts to Giovani (some of which may have been deserved) are what made me warn you about coming off as a fanboy.

Steve

>>what sort of smartphone OS up until two major releases ago would lose all data, apps and settings whenever the battery went flat or the phone hard reset?
>Actually, wouldn't that also include Palm?

Yes, I still have my Palm III from back in 1994. However, it was inexcusable for Microsoft (or anyone else) to still have that flawed architecture more than a decade later! The amount of data I lost and hours I wasted rebuilding my WM PDA phones after such outages was soul-destroying. (Not to mention that blasted blasted touch-and-drag tutorial you were forced to endure after every flippin hard reset!)

>Sorry, but that wasn't a tangent at all. You brought up the iPhone development environment being the same as their desktop development environment as being an advantage. I was just pointing out that Apple wasn't the only company that had that advantage.

Yes, however both examples highlight the lack in Symbian which Giovani and I were debating.

>As far as I'm concerned, we've had "real" pocket computers since at least the Palm-Size PC. By almost any definition of "computer", what we had then (and have now) are pocket computers.

We can debate endlessly what makes a truly *modern* pocket computer architecture and the failure of Microsoft's UMPC architecture highlights it's also possible to err at the other end - when bringing a desktop OS down to pocket size!
The point is that the legacy mobile operating systems that have been around for a decade or more have had all sorts of compromises written into their very core in order to fit into tiny amounts of RAM and storage and work on terribly resource-constrained CPUs. They are not easily scaled up to the brave new world of hundreds of megs of RAM, gigabytes of storage, 800MHz+ dual-core CPUs with hardware graphics acceleration etc.

Witness the fact that MS will still not have an answer to the iPhone until Windows Mobile 7 late in 2010.

>Android may scale to netbooks, but if it's a desktop-class OS, why did Google come out with Chrome? I guess they feel the need for a dual OS strategy, too.

True, but both Chrome and Android are modern desktop Linux-based OSes from the start and are in fact close cousins compared to the vast difference and total incompatibility between Symbian and Maemo.

>As for WebOS, do you consider anything based on Linux to be desktop-class?

Far more so than Symbian. Wouldn't you agree? Nokia certainly does. :-)

>application volume is irrelevant to determining the true richness of the platform.

True, but application *quality* combined with quantity is entirely relevant. I've already given the example of the amazing quality of multi-touch iPhone music apps - but I could also highlight the vast richness of the iPhone OS gaming platform which all commentators including such luminaries as ID's John Carmack agree rivals and even beats the PSP and DS in graphic quality, processing power and innovative motion and touch interfaces.

>You're drinking the app store Kool-Aid. You can't measure the success of most platforms based solely on the OS-supplied app store. The fact is that most platforms allow installing software from other places. Visit Handango, for example, and you'll see a few thousand applications for Symbian phones.

The same issues apply to Handango that apply to Ovi. All those Symbian apps are fragmented over the incompatible S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) versions of Symbian and further fragmented by individual device. Those thousand mostly old legacy apps get whittled down to a much smaller fraction for any individual phone and apps that do work on a wide range of models are lowest common denominator quality.

>>The iPhone OS is now the "MS Windows" of mobile operating systems in terms of software marketshare.
>True, but not in terms of overall marketshare. Nokia still owns that.

Nokia's hardware marketshare is a different kettle of fish, one which is rapidly diminishing every quarter so it isn't something Nokia can be too happy about, particularly since their share of profits in the phone market is so much smaller. RIM and Apple combined are expected to capture about 50% of the profitshare in the entire mobile phone market next year something that must have every Nokia shareholder getting pretty worried.

>I think you mean 10%, if you want to count the non-crap. ;)

You are quite correct. :-)

>There's a difference between a fan and a fanboy.
>While you do seem mostly like a fan, your fairly condescending posts to Giovani (some of which may have been deserved) are what made me warn you about coming off as a fanboy.

Fair enough - re-reading some of my posts, I probably was a bit "over-enthusiastic" at times. Thanks for the reasoned dialogue Steve, it is refreshing. :-)

-Mart

This thread is getting too long, so I'll just address a few points.

>As far as I'm concerned, we've had "real" pocket computers since at least the Palm-Size PC. By almost any definition of "computer", what we had then (and have now) are pocket computers.

We can debate endlessly what makes a truly *modern* pocket computer architecture and the failure of Microsoft's UMPC architecture highlights it's also possible to err at the other end - when bringing a desktop OS down to pocket size!

Actually, that comment wasn't discussing architecture at all. I'm just saying that, by almost any definition of "computer", Pocket PCs have been computers for years (as are the iPhone, Android devices, etc.).

The point is that the legacy mobile operating systems that have been around for a decade or more have had all sorts of compromises written into their very core in order to fit into tiny amounts of RAM and storage and work on terribly resource-constrained CPUs. They are not easily scaled up to the brave new world of hundreds of megs of RAM, gigabytes of storage, 800MHz+ dual-core CPUs with hardware graphics acceleration etc.

It's generally easier to scale up for more resources than scale down to fewer. Apple had the advantage of entering late in the game when resources weren't so constrained, so they didn't have to scale too much of their desktop OS down.

That doesn't mean that Microsoft can't scale the Windows CE (the Windows Mobile core) up. It was already designed as an extensible, multi-tasking OS from day one. (More on that in a bit.)

Also, are you claiming that, in 5-10 years, Apple won't face those same scaling problems? Suppose something like quantum computing or massively-parallel architectures become standard on desktops. That would probably make Linux or any OS today look ancient.

>application volume is irrelevant to determining the true richness of the platform.

True, but application *quality* combined with quantity is entirely relevant. I've already given the example of the amazing quality of multi-touch iPhone music apps - but I could also highlight the vast richness of the iPhone OS gaming platform which all commentators including such luminaries as ID's John Carmack agree rivals and even beats the PSP and DS in graphic quality, processing power and innovative motion and touch interfaces.

That's really two points.

First, application quality can be indicative of the platform's richness, but not necessarily. Let me give some examples from Windows Mobile, but first let me define two terms: "platform richness" means the intrinsic capabilities of the OS (in other words, applications adding features don't count); "platform power" means the combination of richness and extensibility (so applications can count).

Before Microsoft added certain features to Windows Mobile (or Pocket PC), some OEMs did it first. To wit:

* Toshiba added phone support, WiFi support and VGA support to their Pocket PCs before Microsoft officially supported them. The OS didn't have the richness of those features, but it had the power to support them. (Well, technically, the OS did support multiple resolutions beyond 240x320, but Microsoft didn't ship the resources to support them. There were programs that allowed changing system resolutions, too.)

* HP added Bluetooth support, biometrics (fingerprint scanner) and a touchpad before Microsoft officially supported them (I'm not sure if it supports biometrics yet, even). Again, the OS had the power to support them even though it wasn't rich enough to handle those features itself.

* Mitac added GPS to a Pocket PC before Microsoft officially supported it. Yadda, yadda, yadda. :D

* Software vendors added limited copy/paste support to the Smartphone (non-touchscreen) platform before Microsoft did.

* A hardware vendor created an accelerometer dongle for the iPAQ years ago.

So, just because some application can do something doesn't necessarily indicate how rich the platform is, just how powerful it is.

>You're drinking the app store Kool-Aid. You can't measure the success of most platforms based solely on the OS-supplied app store. The fact is that most platforms allow installing software from other places. Visit Handango, for example, and you'll see a few thousand applications for Symbian phones.

The same issues apply to Handango that apply to Ovi. All those Symbian apps are fragmented over the incompatible S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) versions of Symbian and further fragmented by individual device. Those thousand mostly old legacy apps get whittled down to a much smaller fraction for any individual phone and apps that do work on a wide range of models are lowest common denominator quality.

Handango allows you to select your device and (supposedly) only shows the compatible applications. I selected two devices and one had 3400+ applications, the other over 4,000. I doubt those were all ringtones or wallpapers. :D

And don't think fragmentation won't happen with the iPhone. It's probably already starting. If an application supports the digital compass in the iPhone 3gS, how will the original iPhone or iPhone 3g work with it? By your argument, you'll either have fragmentation or certain apps will take the lowest common denominator approach.

However, I think there's a third path you forgot -- scalability. An application can support features of the device and scale back if those features aren't available. For example, in Windows Mobile, you might be able to create an application for touchscreen devices that allows text selection and copy/paste that still works on non-touchscreen devices, either by disallowing text selection and copy/paste or implementing limited versions yourself.

However, Apple's burden is eased because they're pretty much taking a one-size fits all approach. Their current iPhones all have basically the same form factor, for example. Windows Mobile, where many different form factors are supported and hardware OEMs add new features (HTC and Samsung both have g-sensors, for example), can have apps that only work on some devices. However, as long as the user is clear on what applications work on their device, I wouldn't denigrate them by calling them lowest common denominator (especially if the developer chooses a scalable approach).

The platforms a developer chooses to support is merely another design decision.

Steve

Phew, this thread is indeed getting long and I'd say we've lost everyone by now! :-) and I am getting weary, but let me close by re-stating my main arguments which I do not believe you have addressed:

1. In choosing Maemo as the OS for their high-end devices, Nokia has effectively admitted that the legacy Symbian OS is incapable of competing in this day and age of modern desktop-class mobile OSes like the iPhone and Android (and WebOS - though it is questionable whether Palm will remain financially solvent enough to make WebOS a real challenger considering the low sales to date of the Pre)

2. Microsoft has demonstrated a singular inability to scale the legacy Windows Mobile OS into a serious challenger with the supposed true iPhone-competitor version 7 not being released till late 2010 - an eternity away in mobile internet time. With a falling marketshare (9% across all WM phone manufacturers compared to the iPhone's 14% which is up 375% year over year) thanks to many of their OEM partners deserting ship for Android (and WebOS in the case of Palm), it is very evident a warmed over WM v6.5 is not going to cut the mustard.

I’m off to bed, thanks again for the debate Steve.

-Mart

I hope you got your rest; I didn't get much (not because of this, though). :D

I think I did more or less address those.

1. I said that I was no Symbian expert, but I did point out that Google has introduced Chrome. That doesn't mean that Android isn't capable of competing today. (Yes, Android is much newer, but the point remains.)

I thought Maemo was aimed at MIDs and such, not necessarily phones (but, not caring much about Nokia, I don't really know). If that's true, though, introducing a new OS for a different hardware platform doesn't necessarily imply the other OS isn't good enough for its niche.

2. I wouldn't say Microsoft has demonstrated a "singular inability" to scale up Windows Mobile.

First, it's not "singular" because how long did Palm take to get a new OS out? They failed with Topaz (or was it Cobalt? I don't remember) and lost marketshare. They even had to come to Microsoft and put Windows Mobile on the Palm Treo to tide them over.

Second, I don't think Microsoft has as far to go as Palm did. As I mentioned, Windows CE was designed for multi-tasking, media and Internet access back before most PDAs thought about those concepts.

The two major issues Microsoft needs to work on are:

* Improving the UI (only because lots of people think so; I'm pretty happy with it as is)

* Making the platform more robust (less lagging, fewer crashes)

I don't care too much about multi-touch or capacitive screens -- the pinch zoom is cool, but rectangles work fine, too; I don't make music on my PDA; and I only play casual games.

For more detailed arguments, read my editorials Why Windows Mobile Needs A Styluls and Windows Mobile New Year's Resolutions (a very detailed list of improvements for WM).

Steve

About the FM radio, I think that might help you discover more music, music that you'd then want to buy from iTunes to get better quality (because most FM is so-so) that you could listen to when you want. Can you imagine linking a Shazam type of program up with iTunes so you can buy the song you're listening to (sort of like iTunes tagging on HD radio)?

Steve

Hehe, yeah that iPhone OS, it'll never catch on. Queue picture of 45 million iPhone OS devices stretching into the distance. :-)

Seriously though, it is rather mind boggling that Nokia is continuing with such a fragmented OS strategy. Considering how impossible it is to get any developer mindshare in competition with the iPhone for one alternative OS let alone two from the same manufacturer, Nokia appears to continue to stick it's head in the sand going lalalalal I can't hear you as the iPhone jugganaut continues to gather momentum.

Rather sad as I have some fond memories of my old expensive Symbian smartphone.

-Mart

It is not surprising, if you understand that Nokia is taking a long-term view.
As I see the only disadvantage with multi-OS strategy is developer cannot develop/deploy the same app for multiple devices. But Nokia will use QT to tackle it in a couple of year's time (2012)
In another 5 years, Apple will go back to being a Niche player, while Nokia will atleast maintain its current dominant marketshare.

Um, you seem mighty confident in the accuracy of your crystal ball... :-)

Unfortunately Nokia may not have time to reverse their decline at the rate that the mobile world is developing. The future of the world's next big platform - the mobile, interconnected, app-rich consumer OS - is being determined now, not 5 years in the future.

Nokia is starting to look more like the next Palm at this point, an industry giant that has rested on it's laurels for too long which is now too slowly trying several incompatible strategies to resurrect itself in the face of new spry competitors.

The trouble with QT and other cross-platform technologies like Java is they usually end up with lowest common denominator results that fail to take advantage of any specific advantages of the individual hardware. Check out the low quality and shovelware status of most Java apps for phones for example.

-Mart

Well Palm has made a come-back after being almost wiped out.

By contrast the top half a dozen handsets (by world wide sales) are all made by Nokia ( http://www.rethink-wireless.com/?article_id=1852 ) - This includes s40 based 6303 at the 3rd place. So I dont think it is all doom & gloom for Nokia.

Your point regarding QT seems genuine. But I believe Nokia has the resources to create rich and uniform experience across all classes of devices from S40 to Maemo to Windows 7. Atleast the Nokia executives are publicly confident. Lets wait and see on this.