[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] OS2006 roadmap

[From: Jani-Matti Hätinen]

First of all, sorry for the mish-mash quotes. Just trying to make a
somewhat coherent whole of this thread and the subject.

On 1/10/07, Ted Zlatanov <tzz at lifelogs.com> wrote:
> I think the 770/N800 break with OS support from ITOS2006 to ITOS2007
> is reasonable.  The 770 was a first-generation device, really the
> first of its kind.  I hope the N800 doesn't get deprecated in the same
> way

I hope so too because you know, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...

Carlos.Guerreiro at nokia.com wrote:
> The 770 with OS2006 is still supported by Nokia. OS2007 will not be
> released for the 770. Unfortunately we are not at the point where
> we can ship the same OS release for multiple hardwares, though we
> are moving in that direction.

Ok, so right now you can't ship OS2007 for two separate devices. But
what will happen when you can ship OS2007.1 for multiple devices? Will
the 770 still be left dead in the water? What about the N800 after the
N850 (or something) has been announced?

Kimmo Hämäläinen wrote:
> It would be easy if we would already have the perfect OS API in place :)
> But the fact is that we have to do improvements and remove some old API
> at some point. It does not make sense to keep all the old API for ever,
> because it would 1) generate lots of extra work, 2) make the API hard-
> to-use for developers. And the longer we keep the old API the harder it
> becomes to drop it. Basically we thought that after OS2006 it's the last
> chance to drop some old API.

Sorry, what?
  Ok, so deprecating parts of the API was necessary at this point.
That's understandable and happens all the time. But could someone
please tell me why that means that new parts of the API can't be used
on the 770?

2007/1/10, Dave Neuer <dave.neuer at pobox.com>:
> What's amazing to me is that someone in charge at Nokia thinks that
> independant developers are going to flock to develop a market-creating
> software ecosystem for a $400-$500 half-open platform [SNIP]

IMHO that's not amazing. What's amazing is that someone thinks that
they can screw 400€ out of the developers and early adopters and think
that developers will still flock to the platform.

2007/1/10, Dave Neuer <dave.neuer at pobox.com>:
> In short, I think that fully opening the platform (both n770 and n880)
> now is the only way Nokia's going to be able to compete when the
> iPhone comes out in 5 or 6 months.

IMHO opening the platform and competing with the iPhone have very
little in common. The iPhone (and Apple products in general) aren't
exactly appealing to those of us who value openness and freedom.
  But opening a single platform to different devices (even if all of
them were made by Nokia) has a lot to do with competing against
Windows-based UMPCs, which will during this year reach a form-factor
and a price point that is actually comparable to the IT range.

All in all I would say that at this point in time (just after the
release of N800) the break in compatibility is understandable. After
all, getting the best possible stability and feature-set on board the
N800 at launch isn't important only to the success of that device, but
also to the success of the whole device category. (Just remember what
happened with N-Gage.)
  However, going forward, I can't see any justifiable reason for not
maintaining a single unified codebase for all devices in the IT
category. As Frantisek already said, it's better for everyone (users,
OSS developers, ISVs, Nokia) and the technical side of it isn't
exactly rocket science.
  The other option for Nokia is to stick with it's current smartphone
business model (ever tried getting a software update for your Series60
device?) and hope that other companies won't come out with better
options. Fortunately for us end-users that shouldn't take too long.

-- 
Jani-Matti Hätinen