Nokia: liberated at last

So the "strategic alliance" between Nokia and Microsoft comes to an end, and Nokia has opted out of renewing it.

On the one hand, this means that mobile devices marketed by Microsoft, such as the Lumia line of phones, can no longer be sold with the name Nokia on it, and on the other hand, Nokia itself (the Finnish company, the part that wasn't sold to Microsoft) is free to break away from using Windows Mobile.

Nokia hasn't really brought out any Windows Mobile devices, they just focused on other things besides devices that should run on Windows Mobile, and that was a good decision, given what a huge flop Windows Mobile is, and the fact that Microsoft is compelled to compete on price with the lowest-end Chinese devices to even keep their mobile products on shelves.

With the end of the strategic alliance, Nokia is now free again to use whatever they want, and of course, they want Linux, because they were very active developing Linux machines before the sell-out to Microsoft, their pre-Microsoft smartphones with Linux on them are - despite their age - still outright legendary in tech communities. Devices like the N9 are crazy expensive, despite their age.

While Nokia will not immediately be making smartphones, they are coming out with a new tablet, an Android tablet, called the N1. It will be an 8 inch tablet, with aluminium unibody, made by Foxconn, which also makes Apple's iPads.

With the expertise of Nokia behind it, this might mean the final breakthrough of the post-PC devices in the enterprise market.

I'm pretty excited to see enterprise IT environment certified Android devices, and I think that's exactly what Nokia will aim for.

What do you guys think, do you like the idea of Nokia returning to linux after the Microsoft strategic alliance?

They won't last long by blatantly plagarising Jonny Ives design Apple are going to sue the crap out of them for copying their design language and they would have a much better case against this than they did against Samsung, It wouldn't suprise me is Foxconn did all the design work on it too.

Nokia floundered because of their devotion to Symbian now they are just another Android retailer, meh. At least the Windows phone stuff was something unique.

In Europe, of which Finland is part, courts have long decided that those Apple patents are null and void. This was even decided in Germany on two accounts, and Germany is very "pro-crazy-US-patents". Apple won't sue, Apple has been avoiding to sue in orthodox civil law countries forever, because they knew their patents would be declared null and void. They did risk it in Germany and the Netherlands, but they didn't have any success, and once a patent is declared null and void by any European court, this is pretty much valid for the whole of Europe, since all European patents are administered by the European Patent Agency in Alicante, Spain.

Wouldn't that be just the thing, iPads running Android? More features, more performance, more security, but still iPad-like hardware?

Nokia will be with us for quite a while yet.  They still are one of the best hardware manufacturers around, and if they can settle on a nice selection of Android and pure Linux tablets and phones then I dont see how they wont make it back to the big time.

If I could get android running on a Lumia 930 I would be set for a phone for the next 2+ years.  It's just a shame they ended up with Microsoft for as long as they did.

Interesting comment about tablets with other Linux distributions than Android, because Nokia actually has had this expertise for years, they were the first to market a mobile Linux touchscreen device with Maemo, which somehow has ended up also being adopted by Samsung and Intel, and by the company founded by the ex-Nokia Mobile employees that Microsoft fired after the acquisition, Jolla.

Now that Nokia is liberated from Microsoft, do you guys think that there is a chance that Nokia would join Jolla in the future, thus reconstructing Nokia including smartphone devekopment after the Microsoft debacle?

The more i read about it the more this is just a glorified licencing agreement. As well as the manufacturing Foxconn will be handling sales, distrubution, warranty and customer services. It's a Foxconn tablet with a Nokia logo printed on it and an Android Skin. Again, meh. The main Nokia industrial design team are now part of Microsoft as well.

I wonder if they will do anything with Tizen. Maybe as a side project. I just hope if they get on to something good they don't mess it up like Maemo.

Yeah, like Foxconn does for Apple, HP, etc...

Jolla has come up with a much better industrial design than the ex-Nokia people at Microsoft imo. Microsoft has no choice but to compete on price with the lowest of low budget devices out there, they don't really have opportunity to do much great industrial design lol. Jolla and Nokia Finland do, they are not in the same predicament.

Tizen is all Samsung and Intel now though. Jolla went for SailfishOS from Meamo, which is entirely Android-app-compatible (I know because I have a Jolla), which is a huge bonus, and just what they need to be successful. If it doesn't run Android apps these days, or has the Apple logo on it, it doesn't stand much of a chance in the market. That's the whole problem Microsoft is having, and why they are open sourcing .NET, because nobody cares but for Android apps and Apple logos.

I would love to see them work with Jolla I have a preview of it on my Nexus 5 and really like it. Android apps don't work on it yet though.

Guess the burning platform didn't work out well for them. huh.....

Jolla is actually crowdfunding a Sailfish tablet now, they brought the news one day after Nokia announced the N1... strangely coincidental lol... crowdfunding these days in mass market devices is all about marketing research, not really about prefinancing development and production, look at how Canonical handled the Ubuntu Phone. Jolla and Nokia probably want to find out now whether to go with Google's ecosystem, or whether to focus on Google-independent open source Android-like development.

On my Jolla, I can sideload Android apps, and they mostly work. They're sometimes not really supported by the developers yet, but since I use f-droid instead of the Playstore, most of my Android apps just work, and if they don't, I submit a patch request, and it's most often dealt with in a matter of days. Of course, to get the entire content of the Playstore to work, is quite an assignment, especially the GApps themselves I would imagine.

Another thing of interest, is that Xen is also focusing on mobile devices. As Microsoft's ecosystem gets hollowed out in terms of what Microsoft can keep proprietary, either by laws or by market requirements, it's not unimaginable that smaller, leaner, MS-Windows cores (which are growing in popularity, and are now also available outside of the US since last week), could be made to run in a virtual container on mobile devices. Many ARM-based SoC's from Chinese manufacturers natively support things like DirectX, so there is certainly potential there. For companies like Citrix, that have used community development methods for xenserver for a long time, and that have proprietary solutions for all kinds of mobile applications, it might be a lot easier to work with a company like Nokia Finland to bring these technologies to enterprises, and on to consumers. I stronly believe in the development potential for enterprise solutions of platforms like SailfishOS and Tizen, because through GApps, and the BYOD implementation based upon Google Services that comes with Android 5, Google has potentially closed a few doors and burned a few bridges. Samsung has had an enterprise solution based on Samsung cloud services for a while, which also came with SELinux, even on Android 3, but Google never supported that, they wanted to do their own thing. For a lot of enterprises though, commercial cloud solutions are not quite the direction they want to go, they don't like it from Microsoft, they don't like it from Google, and they don't like it from Samsung. Citrix is all about applying that and more on a private cloud solution, with a very flexible licensing scheme, and they may be ablout to strike solid gold there in my opinion. As an enterprise, if you would know that you would get high quality (iPad quality) devices with software support from the likes of Nokia/Citrix/Novell, and that everything would just work on your own private infrastructure, and at the same time, you'd know that any Android app would just work, wouldn't you be tempted to go for something like SalfishOS or Tizen instead of Google's Android?

Ho so you think the switch to ART over APK will impact theses efforts

To the person that commented above (and the people exploding all over the Internet) about Nokia's tablet being an "IPAD running Android" ... I really don't see what the problem is. Most people I know (myself included) dislike the Apple software experience in terms of how locked down everything is but I have yet to meet a person that had an issue with the sleek, minimalistic, and just flat out beautiful design of many Apple products. I'm not saying Nokia should go on "copying" the tried and tested designs of others but if they are able to produce beautiful looking hardware (as they have done in the past) with decent Android support, it wont be long until they're back at the top.

I did just see Jollas Indiegogo today and I haven't used Sailfish OS YET, but it looks like a good alternative to stock Android,while I have no idea how well the Android application support is, if implemented properly that is a killer tablet for the current asking price of $204. 

I just looked at the Jolla tablet it looks really cool it already beat its goal and tablet perks are almost gone

 

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. If Nokia wants to make a comeback within consumer devices there's nothing stopping them from doing so, they already have the branding and the know-how, it only boils down to finances (patents) and their no-smartphone deal up until 2016. But android? I feel like they're out of their league here, also 5 years too late. Now, even tho Jolla is basically the old MeeGo department which Elop cut off from Nokia, I would've been more excited if Nokia now had brought back Maemo/MeeGo from the ashes and started building up a healthy competition with Jolla & SailfishOS for the benefit of both companies and linux development, rather than throwing android on an iPad and getting all wild about it.

Nokia should innovate like they used to back in the good old days, not distribute other companies products.

I Hope Nokia is able to go get back up on top like they used to.

Let us Revisit our Minds to the time where they made the holy grail phone. the Brick

also speaking on the Tablet that they have coming, it is truly appealing but my issue with it is the LACK of an SD card slot which honestly i don't understand why the Google's Nexus Line of Products continues to Not include this in their tablets and phones. and Nokia is following their footsteps in this regard, i don't really care that the fact it looks like an iPad mini. its an Attractive design, i do believe Apple is going to try to pull some bullshit and sue like they are use to doing with non-sense. but i digress.

overall though, Nokia being unchained from Microsoft is the best thing that could happen to them and i do believe their future will be much more brighter without Microsoft, cause they can innovate i don't think anyone will argue that they don't. I believe if all of their recent Products like their Lumia Line were ALL Running Android. their would be just as big as other "Top Tier Phones". or be viewed as such. either way +1 for Nokia.

ART substitutes Dalvik. Apk is the package file extension.

The abstraction layer doesn't really matter for this.

I was hoping the better implementation of ART on Android 5 would show a huge performance increase, but it doesn't. That might be a long terms problem for Google to be honest, because there are linux-based mobile operating systems out there that don't use an abstraction layer for the whole operating system, and they are fast and also run desktop apps. But they have to make it to the market first, and that's a big problem...

If I understand this correctly the lack of SD card slots by many manufacturers is an attempt to move towards putting everything on the Cloud. A great idea in theory but not so practical when you consider some people have pictures/document that they don't feel comfortable uploading as well as when you consider the absurd data caps many telecommunications companies have in place.

You mentioned the N9. I managed to get a brand new one from a big phonestore chain for only 350 USD this October.

Has the warranty and Swedish consumer law applied to it. It's a really awesome phone. It even has "Made in Finland" on the box, it has root access from the terminal, you can overclock it, works great I love it.

I'll use it until Nokia releases new 4" phones in 2016 using Meego or some other Linux dist.