Roger Sperberg at TeleRead asks whether Nokia will succeed in creating a non-PDA handheld market. Roger is talking about all the failed efforts to do it so far with mini-tablets and much-publicized OQO. Well, it’s not a secret that handheld sales have been falling, and it’s not just an unlucky quarter, it’s a consistent trend, where the customers seem to be disillusioned with the ideas of multi-functional “portable desktops”. Meanwhile, iPod sales are gaining, the industry is getting the iPod envy, and Apple is trying to stay abreast by introducing the iPods with photo and video capabilities.
Sperberg (he’s got a device through Nokia Developer program, so why not send us some photos?) writes:
When the Nokia 770 arrives, it won’t have phone capabilities, but Nokia has announced VOIP for the 2006. Linux for Internet Tablets and for cell phones lets them hedge their bets on which way telephony is going. And this is good news for those of us who want a small-form-factor computer with great ebook reading and browsing and email instead of a PDA with make-do capabilities.
Koen Kooi clarifies some confusion about how exactly MP3 playback is enabled on Nokia 770:
The Nokia 770 uses gstreamer to play mp3s, and gstreamer has drivers to use the DSP instead of the CPU. This was the original design for gstreamer when it was started by RidgeRun Inc.
Daniel Monteiro announced KidSketch (with source) - a sketching application for doodling on Nokia 770.
If you are not scared by long Finnish winters and GNOME class libraries, Nokia got a job for you (thanks, Mike Cane). Actually, they’ve got several of them. Nokia is hiring for 770 team and is looking for:
- (Senior) Software Engineer - Personal data management middleware
- DSP-Multimedia Project Manager
- Lead Developer for Linux/Java
- Open Source Linux engineer
- Project Manager for Application development on Linux and Open Source
- Project Manager for Application Development
- Release Manager
- Linux System SW Architect
- Embedded Linux Systems Verification Lead
All about Symbian:
ARCchart do allow that the porting process would be possible if technically not an easy feat. This rather understates the difficulty involved. The strength of Symbian is and always has been the fact it has been designed as a mobile OS from the beginning of its life. From release 6 onwards it has been designed with mobile telephony at the heart of the OS. As a result the Symbian OS is structured is some fundamentally different ways to other OS’s. Power and performance management are key considerations in design from the kernel upwards. As a result the Symbian OS is the most powerful mobile OS available. It would require fundamental changes in Linux’s core to achieve similar specifications.
What started off as a simple exercise in open platforms and wooing software developers can lead to Linux being picked up by a major cell phone manufacturer. Mike Cane wrote in another day with a link to a report by ARCchart, which looks at the current events in Symbian world (where Nokia has 47.9% share) and internal conflicts, where Nokia was a frequent target:
Symbian has strived to assert its independence and to portray itself and being vendor agnostic, and this brought about frequent clashes with Nokia. Nowhere was this conflict felt more than when it came to Symbian’s desire to IPO – a move which would have ended Nokia’s virtual control of the OS.
Linux Pipeline asks whether Nokia will switch to Linux, and says it’s entirely possible, since Nokia will be able to offset the royalty payments.
Such a switch by Symbian would make Linux, in one fell swoop, the leading mobile device platform. It already is riding a wave with PalmSource’s decision to port the Palm OS to Linux and a defection by Nokia would seal the deal.
EnGadget has its share of opinions:
If they do make the switchover there’d be some potentially huge compatibility headaches, but nothing they couldn’t get over, especially since a lot of Series 60 apps are written in Java.
The Guardian analyzes some business decisions behind Nokia’s move into the non-phone business, such as 770.
The problem isn’t that Nokia’s not shipping enough phones - it sold 61 million units last quarter, that’s around a third of all new phones around the world - but that the price of phones is coming down. Nokia have intrinsic benefits over their rivals: long-standing domination thanks to durable products with familiar and intuitive interfaces. They’re putting a lot more emphasis on 3G and smartphones these days, in a market where (particularly in developing countries) the demand is for low-cost handsets.
Nokia opened a Wiki to solicit requests for documentation. So far UI guidelines topic has been used for example, due to frequent requests from developers.
PC Magazine brightens the day with a short article on Nokia 770, which doesn’t have a whole lot to add to what we already know except for the quote from Nokia:
“We will be launching regular updates of the software,” says Janne Jormalainen, vice president of convergence products at Nokia. “The next software release, planned for the first half of next year, will support more presence-based features, including VoIP and instant messaging.”
South African Mail & Guardian Online (a name befitting an anti-spam product more than a newspaper, but what do I know) mentions Nokia 770 in its story on Skype.
In Japan, telecoms giant NTT DoCoMo plans to ship a Wi-Fi-enabled phone later this year, while Nokia unveiled a similar device, the 770 Internet Tablet, at the Linux World trade show in May. The 770 cannot be used as a phone, however. But there are many more waiting down the line. Vonage, a leading rival of Skype, already sells the F1000 mobile handset in the US and Europe.