I’m back from my involuntary sabbatical (Technical difficulties; I had the motherboards in both of my PCs fry in the span of 48 hours) and not much has changed in the landscape of the mobile industry. It has become very difficult for me to hide that I’ve become disillusioned with the state of things. Nokia hasn’t released a device worth putting pen to pad about (unless you live in Indonesia apparently), Sony Ericsson is out to prove that even if the world doesn’t come to an end in 2012 their company will, HTC & Motorola are trying to out-do one another in the “making new Android devices that look exactly the same as all other Android devices” competition that they’ve been locked in since Motorola re-entered the mobile scene last year, and Apple released another iPhone that’s just like the previous 3. Not much to write home about but there are still another 6 months in the year for someone to come forth and evoke some excitement from the masses and no, a 2GHz CPU in a smartphone is nothing to get excited about, especially when it will probably be crammed into the same boring Android device that we’ve seen no less than 6 times already in the first half of this year.
All that being said, the wheels of the mobile industry keep turning and it is our job to keep you up on what’s going on and one thing that keeps moving along and has actually picked up a lot of steam in recent weeks is MeeGo. A few weeks ago, a lengthy document detailing the guidelines of the user interface slipped out and while the document was pulled from http://www.meego.com almost as quickly as it was discovered, nothing escapes Google Cache and soon we were reading all about what Nokia and Intel has in store for future handsets. On paper, it appears that MeeGo will encompass the best parts of iOS, WebOS, Android, Symbian and of course, Maemo. Combining the simplicity of iOS’ menu system, WebOS’ card-based Task Manager, Android’s account and notification management systems and throwing them on top of an OS with the raw power of Symbian and Maemo sounds like a dream user experience but seeing is believing, right? What’s that? MeeGo for Handsets UX v1.0 is out? Why yes it is. As promised, a developer’s preview of MeeGo for Handsets was available for download on June 30th and has provided a glimpse of what the combination of Maemo and Moblin has produced. That glimpse seems to have caused more confusion and created more questions but we got the answers.
This pre-alpha release doesn’t offer much but it at least allows us to see the framework of what developers and companies will have to build upon when designing their MeeGo devices. At first glance, the UI screams iPhone and iOS, maybe it’s the dull simplicity of it or the application launcher but it was the first thing on my mind when I saw the first few screenshots. There is a notification bar at the top that is very much like that which adorns all Android phones but there’s no indication on whether it behaves in the same manner and you can drag it down from the top of the screen to address your current notifications. You may disagree but sorting the main menu into pages that you scroll through with horizontal swipes makes much more sense than a kinetic scrolling list of icons. At this early point in development, homescreen widgets and multiple homescreens are not supported but then again, this is a pre-alpha release (and the fact that there is an item in the main menu called ‘Widgets’ tells me that this will change). The task manager definitely takes a lot more design cues from WebOS Although some users have gone ahead and installed MeeGo 1.1 on their N900s, without support for the cellular radios and a resistive touchscreen that prevents me from taking advantage of multitouch gestures, I don’t see a point in taking the plunge myself.
This developer preview seems to have thrown a few people for a curve and I think I’ll take some time to sort a few things out. First of all, not every device that runs MeeGo will look exactly like this. In fact, it’s quite possible that no device that runs MeeGo looks like this. This is an early UI framework that developers and manufacturers will be able to work with to see how things will behave but the UI is customizable with their own icons, widgets and apps. Think Android but with looser reins so that devices from different manufacturers actually look unique instead of the same phone with a homescreen skin and extra desktop screens for widgets. Also take into account that Nokia already had the next version of Maemo well under development (Maemo 6, codenamed Harmattan) and has renamed it MeeGo-Harmattan. This contains the Harmattan UX which is specific to the N900’s successor and can possibly look more like Maemo 5 than MeeGo 1.1, I’m not saying this is certain but it’s a possibility as Harmattan is meant to bridge the gap between Maemo 5 and Nokia’s future MeeGo UX.
As MeeGo progresses on, many critics, observers and consumers don’t seem to understand where it fits in Nokia’s mobile strategy but it’s not too hard to figure out at all whatsoever. Nokia and Symbian Foundation have spent the past year talking about pushing Symbian downmarket and making handsets powered by the OS cheaper and available to more people all over the world. Obviously, pushing Symbian downmarket leaves a gap at the high end of the scale and this is where MeeGo comes in. This is not to say that there will not also be Symbian devices that are well equipped (we’ve already seen evidence of this in the Nokia N8) but this does mean that you won’t see a low end device powered by MeeGo but with the Wi-Fi and GPS stripped out that’s geared towards emerging markets. This is no different than what Microsoft plans on doing with Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone Classic (or Windows Mobile 6.x) or what Google plans on doing with Android (‘Gingerbread’ will power future high end Android phones and tablets while v2.x will be shoehorned onto cheaper devices) and there didn’t seem to be any confusion when they revealed their plans, so why is it that when Nokia plots the same course we’re suddenly discussing advanced physics? I shouldn’t at all be surprised at this though but it’s beside the point altogether.
This course of action is crazy enough to work but it’s also risky, not just for Nokia but for Android and Windows Mobile as well albeit, for very different reasons. Android has a fragmentation problem already (which is not as big of a deal as some make it out to be, Android has bigger problems IMHO) and doesn’t need to keep the consumer guessing whether or not their device will get updated as fast as Android OS does or whether it will be left to languish with an outdated version. Not to mention, the issue they have differentiating between devices, both hardware (Seriously?) and software (once you get past the homescreen skins, they’re all exactly the same no matter who makes it). Windows Mobile needed a refreshed UI that was more finger friendly, more intuitive and easier on the eyes (sound familiar Symbian users?) but Microsoft threw the baby out with the bathwater and decided to start fresh with Windows Phone 7. From what we know thus far, Microsoft has locked down the shop and rolled out an OS that’s more first generation iPhone than 7th version of what was once a flexible OS.
One major problem that all of these companies are faced with is by taking this path, they are allowing their software to dictate the hardware requirements when it should be the other way around. The hardware requirement for Windows Phone 7 have been out there for time, the rumoured requirements for Android’s ‘Gingerbread’ were leaked recently and while there hasn’t been a list of specific hardware specifications, if you’ve paid close enough attention, you have an idea of what the hardware requirements for MeeGo and Symbian will be (capacitive touchscreen, >256MB of RAM, a CPU that’s preferably not ARM11 based 
). All of these requirements dictate that these software versions will only run on high-end devices and break compatibility with previous versions (previous versions that the companies fully intend on supporting and deploying). Now I’m all for more high-end devices in this world that we live in but by allowing the software to lead the hardware, you not only alienate users but you constrict developers. The best example of I can off on how badly this can turn out is Windows Vista. The goal should be to create an OS that runs good on lower end hardware and AMAZING on high-end hardware and as of right now, the only operating system that can claim a consistent experience throughout it’s entire device catalogue is Blackberry but that’s because every Blackberry device is the same, not because they purposely set out to create this kind of experience.
Now I did say that this plan is crazy enough to work but we have to expect that there will be casualties. There is absolutely no way that Windows Mobile 6.x lives on to even be rebranded as Windows Phone Classic once the first WP7 handsets start rolling out. Let’s be honest with ourselves for a second here, it’s already dead. Support is already drying up for some of the most recent Windows Mobile 6.5 devices that were released (HTC Touch Pro 2 and HD2) and some that were scheduled to be released never saw the light of day (Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2a and HTC’s entire WinMo catalogue for 2010), Microsoft was hoping not to cannibalize the US sales of the HTC HD2, which had the misfortune of being released a few weeks after Windows Phone 7 was announced at Mobile World Congress. Additionally, don’t expect too many new Android devices running Éclair and Froyo once Gingerbread is released (Side note: Google either needs to get better codenames or stop letting the fattest person in the room name Android versions). There isn’t exactly a vast market for low-end Android devices because they are awful and unless HTC, Samsung and Motorola are absolutely married to their Sense, TouchWiz and MotoBlur skins, respectively (which Gingerbread will not support), they won’t stick with v2.x when they can see who can cram the exact same components into similar looking devices the best. The strangest part about this Android strategy is that Android 2.x won’t exactly run on a device with a 434MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM (#shotsfired) so I’m not sure how low-end they expect these future Éclair and Froyo devices. In Nokia’s case, it’s a bit murkier. It would almost make sense to say that Symbian is the OS that will see the axe. Everyone says Symbian is dying, some say it’s already dead but in reality, Symbian is very much alive. In fact, it’s too big to be killed in a timely fashion. Too many people have Symbian powered devices to pull the plug and go with MeeGo anytime soon but at the same time, MeeGo seems to be something that Nokia and Intel (the latter especially) are taking very seriously and the world’s largest cell phone maker and the world’s largest chip maker are simply too large to ignore (pardon the pun). So at all costs, Nokia has to make this strategy work for them because they have too much invested at both ends of the spectrum and everywhere in the between…and let this OS invest too much in them.
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Kyron has written 18 articles for your enjoyment.
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About: Your favorite blogger's favorite blogger coming at you live from Toronto, Canada. One of the original BMEs and a cell phone fanatic.
