Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Of Harmattan and S60

Despite most of Nokia's will directed to Windows phone release,  they finally showed their view of Meego.
Meego - open source, Linux-based system was supposed to be future of Nokia and future of mobile open source (as Meego follows far more open model than Android).

Without strong backing from device (especially phone and tablet) manufacturers Meego may slip to irrelevance. However, with great response after the  announcement of N9 with Meego Harmattan and Swipe UX, many are thinking, what could be achieved, if Nokia would countinue to support  Meego.

As I see it, in spite of great user experience, Meego had great potential for disaster with Nokia in lead, because of very strong similarity to another Nokia's failure - Symbian/S60.

Symbian was the best system for mobile devices (at it's time), created by consortium of manufacturers, trying to create one common environment and at the same time trying to differentiate.
That's why Nokia developed custom user interface based on Symbian called S60.

The failure of Symbian is tied to the failure of S60 (and other user interfaces) to progress quickly, as custom changes, required by Nokia slowed down the development of the system.

Now back to Meego...  What was the most praised property of Meego based Nokia N9?
Swipe user experience - custom desktop based on closed source software that Nokia didn't plan to share with rest of the Meego community.