The context of this story

Year: 2008
Products: iPhone

Hopes pinned on Symbian and MeeGo

At the turn of 2009 and 2010, Nokia is struggling with its portfolio from the geeks’ point of view and is not succeeding on the American market, but otherwise it is doing well financially. It consistently earns half a billion euros on mobile phones every quarter, driven primarily by emerging markets, but these markets are driving the entire global telecommunications (and not only that) economy, so it is not surprising and is justifiable.

The lag in smartphones began to become apparent at the end of 2009, when the company was not only being stifled by Apple, but also had no answer to Android, which had reached maturity. Further announced revisions to Symbian and its opening up will not save the situation. At the end of 2008, Nokia bought Symbian outright so that it could better oversee its development, but in truth, it failed to do so. At the beginning of 2010, Symbian is still as imperfect a system as it was before. The clunky graphical interface from the early days of Series 60, poor memory management, and imperfect prioritization of processes for real-time response are all burdens that Symbian carries with it. Nokia decides to rewrite it and at the same time simplify life for developers by gradually transitioning to the Qt framework, which it (Trolltech) purchased in early 2008.

Nokia also announces extensive changes to Symbian, creating “roof versions” that journalists will probably never remember. It seems that sometime around the turn of 2007/8, the company realized that it had to pull out all the stops against the iPhone and that it really did have a certain philosophy on how to achieve this. It intends to consolidate its Symbian platform, which was already fragmenting at the time, so that it can serve both touchscreen and button phones without complicating life for developers, which is precisely what the Qt framework and the unification of Symbian into Roof 1, Roof 2, and Roof 3, culminating in Symbian Roof 4, the biggest change that will affect Symbian and crown the work. Nokia will never get there.

Image: Nokia 770 Caption: The Nokia 770 is a tablet as it should be. In 2005. Nokia recommends it mainly for testing the progressive DVB-H mobile TV technology, which is now clinically dead.

Along with the restructuring of Symbian, Nokia is preparing a return to powerful systems. These will be the Maemo operating system, later renamed MeeGo, on which it is collaborating with Intel and which is intended to power mobile devices requiring high performance. This is nothing new; the company has been flirting with the Linux-based system since 2007, when it pushed it into its Nokia 770 internet tablets under the name Maemo, five years before Apple came out with its tablets. However, Nokia is focusing on the industrial use of Maemo and is not pushing it aggressively on the market. It creates experimental tablets that are popular with system administrators, one of which, the Nokia N900, is later nicknamed the “device for moving from socket to socket.” Maemo and later MeeGo are intended to find a foothold in netbooks, but also in cars as a smart system that will enable the car to work with [”]{dir=”rtl”}converged devices.” Nokia is distracted by gadgets that will not become mainstream.

Sometime in 2009, Nokia realized that Symbian was no longer powerful enough and planned to phase it out of its most powerful phones within three to four years. By pushing developers to switch to the Qt environment in Symbian, which also supports MeeGo, it will secure the loyalty of its 400,000 developers, who will only need to recompile the program. It’s a good vision, but it’s not being implemented quickly enough, even though it’s shared by another major player in the market, Intel. They officially announce it at the Barcelona congress in February 2010, but the shareholders are too depressed. They are not in the mood for three-year horizons; they want to resolve the situation more quickly.

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