From what I've seen, the Lumia is good hardware. With minor modifications
(the
appropriate set of buttons) it could run Android very nicely and it would
be
just as durable. These are good selling points. However I do agree that
Nokia
wasn't looking at using Android because they wanted to be as unique
as they
were used to being.
No, what was jarring was that they had several things
that they had just
started selling in earnest (eg. the Ovi store, camera phones
worthy of the
name), and some other things which had been cooking for a while
and were
going to come to market Real Soon Now™ (Linux/Meego phones, that is
N800, N900 and N9), and they were still actively developing Symbian for each
of low-end, midrange and high-end markets. The lightfield camera phone
still
came out with Symbian on it, simply because that's what it had been
integrated
with, not Windows. In short, they had competitive products in the
pipeline
which, regardless of the screwed-up American markets, would have
sold well in
Europe and probably elsewhere.
And then Elop comes along and immediately
says "**** that ****, we're doing
Windows Windows Windows." Fun fact: Ovi
means "door", and the Ovi brand
was just getting a bit of traction, and next
thing we know Ovi is being closed,
seemingly just to weaken Symbian in
consumers' eyes. Teams working on
Symbian and Linux related projects (eg. Qt)
got outsourced, seemingly just to
get rid of them - Finnish employment law
rightly makes it hard to outright fire
people who are doing good work, but damn
if Nokia isn't trying their hardest
to do it now.
And I am reminded
irresistably of Microsoft's old strategy: "Embrace, Extend,
Extinguish". I
seriously don't know what they gain by killing Nokia, but they're
succeeding at
it.
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