Nokia exits the mobile market

Nokia exits the mobile market

So Nokia have given up and sold their mobile handset and presumably the mobile infrastructure to Microsoft. Last year, Nokia, the World’s No. 1 mobile phone manufacturer but were struggling to meet the onslaught of Apple’s iphone and the rapidly alternative  growing of Android decided to shit-can their two Linux projects and exclusively throw in their lot with one of the then weakest phone operating-  and eco-systems, Microsoft! Coincidently they had just hired Steven Elop as CEO, whom they had poached from Microsoft. …

About the mobile operating system market

While considering the Mozilla foundation’s entry into the mobile phone market, I came across Seth Rosenblatt’s article, “Firefox OS faces brutal road ahead” at CNET News, but they have Telefonica signed up and are launching in Spain, and Latin America; they’re made by Alcatel. Will open-source and privacy be the competitive weapons it needs to succeed where Blackberry and Nokia are failing? Quartz argues that real web services will be the competitive advantage, creating the largest developer community. Actually I doubt it; the carriers will insert their spyware and closed garden stores, it’s too hard to avoid Google and despite Blackberry’s last wrong turn they competed and lost on privacy. …

Mobile Future, can Yahoo! really show the way?

Business Insider reports that Yahoo CEO Marisa Meyer is considering giving iphones to all Yahoo! Employees. It seems she agrees with those in the company who feel that their IT department’s commitment to Blackberry is holding them back and that their engineers would benefit from using devices that they aim to deliver services to; not Blackberrys. This was known at Sun Microsystems as “Eating our own dog food” The article finished with what I assume to be a Business Insider editorial comment,

“Yahoo should be innovating for the future, and BlackBerrys are not part of the future. They are part of the quickly fading past.”

The article also states that Meyer is not so wedded to Apple, and might consider Android. The unspoken question is whether Yahoo! is part of the quickly fading past.

On another note, I use all three devices, although the Apple device is an ipod touch and since like everyone I am unhappy with what I have, and am already looking forward to replacing both the phones. …

Using Mail on a Nokia-Orange Phone

Nokia have turned off my e-mail client on my mobile phone without my permission. I have been using a Nokia 5800 Xpress as my personal mobile phone since leaving Sun Microsystems. I got it because it runs S3 and could be used to host Joikuspot which turns the phone into a wifi internet gateway. Over the 21 months I have been using it, my use has varied, to the extent that I also used an HTC Hero for two weeks. …

Total wirelessness

The availabilty of wireless connectectivity in the UK can be a bit sporadic as I have learnt over the week I didn’t have it in the house, and I relied on my phones for internet connectivity. A lesson this need has taught me is that handset designers need to remember that the goal of wifi is wirelessness. Its pointless to replace the need for an RJ45 with the need for powerlead.

i.e. energy efficiency and battery size and life become noticable if you use a modern mobile the way it was intended. HTC…I am talking to you. …

Evangelising Opensource in Edinburgh

I was stood in for Simon Phipps at www2006 in Edinburgh, and paid Edinburgh a visit. I wrote up my notes on my sun/oracle blog. AS with other posts originally made there, I copied them to this blog in March 2016, but in this case, I have merged them into a single post.  I The conference was opened by John McConnel, Scotland’s first minister who spoke of a Scotland’s e-University, and was followed by Sir David Browne, (Chairman of Motorola) who told an interesting story about mobility and the network, from movable devices, via luggable laptops to today’s phones, although the fashion for Zoolander style tiny phones was probably on the wane by then. His story provoked the though that the critical technology for mobile computing was the development of the portable (and rechargable) battery. …

Musings on wireless information

I’m not one who believed that WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) was going to take over the world; the phone screen is too small to deliver useful content. How long this will remain true is questionable. I went down the shops recently to get a couple of phones and while the screens seem no larger, they are now multi-coloured. (You need to bear in mind, that I’ve just started to use glasses,  …