Does meego have a future?

Well nokia has turned their back on meego.  But does this mean the end of the mobile open source operating system?

Without nokia i reckon it might stand a better chance of succeeding.  Nokia has changed direction so many times in the past 3 years that there was the chance that they would destroy or cripple meego before it took off.  They had symbian as their top priority.  They created maemo.  They open sourced symbian.  They merged maemo with moblin and created meego.  They dropped meego and symbian and are now going with windows phone 7.  Headless chickens have better direction.

• Meego may survive as a distro especially for low powered hardware. It is considerably more open than android and not encumbered by java or the patent wars that seem to haunt android.
• Meego may survive as a embedded systems os.  There is talk of it as an in car computer system.  A niche market but one that resists change.
• Meego may survive if it can be put in place of android os on any of the tablets that come out and be shown to be superior on the same hardware.  It was designed with tablets in mind so it wouldn't need much in the way of alterations.  If enough hackers adopt it on cheap android hardware it may gain a community independent of hardware manufacturers.
• Meego may survive if instead of android it gains traction in the chinese cheap mobile market.

That's 4 ifs to start with.  It would only take one of them to come to pass to ensure the survival of the os.  Open source software has a habit of sticking around as long as there is a use for it.  It's not dependent on a single company to keep it alive.  If it can survive it can thrive.

The straw that broke the camels back

So i bought a nokia e71 in 2008.  On paper it was ideal.  Faster, smaller with more features.  Camera with a flash, FM radio, no more pop port.  Greater than 2gb memory card support.

I found the first problem when i added 300 notes from my old e61i to the e71 notes app.  The global search when started would load all the data it was able to search into memory to speed up the search.  This is ok if there is only a few notes.  When you have 300 or so this took nearly a minute before you could actually make a search.  The old version would start and be instantly be ready to make a search.  There was no way to replace the crap version of the software with the old working version.  It's a smart phone with loads of memory.  Somebody at nokia must have tested the device with lots of data.  Did they not realise that prefetching the data was bad?  It was a disaster on Windows Vista, why would it be better on a mobile os?   Why no option to disable that feature?  Strike 1

I used to leave the search application open to avoid the startup wait.  However if I ejected the card to transfer data which I did a few times a week it would shut down all the apps meaning that the damned search startup was waiting for me the next time I made a search.  It also meant that when I started the music player application it would realise the card had been ejected and automatically search the card in case I had added new music.  There was no way to stop this 3 minute delay.  Strike 2

I hate noise.  If you had me and a ninja living next door to you the ninja would be the noisy neighbour.  I can sneak up on cats.  I hate mandatory camera clicks.  It is a stupid requirement in some countries.  It is a bad law as it makes a low vga quality camera on a camera phone make a click when a high end camera phone shooting 720 high definition video can be silent.  It is security theatre at it's worst.  In Ireland thankfully it is not a requirement.  So when i bought my nokia e71 I had checked in advance to see that I could make it silent.  And it was.  A faint beep when it autofocused.  Annoying but tolerable.  Then in Feb 2009 I updated 3 nokias at the same time.  An e71, an e61i and old n70.  All had been silent and I had carefully read the update notes.  Afterwards they had all gained that stupid camera click noise with no easy way to eliminate it.  €1000 of phones destroyed by nokia.  Strike 3 and I'll never buy nokia again.

My iphone can be silent.  My htc hero could be silent.  My sony xperia x10 mini can be silent.  Why the hell did nokia do this without warning?

Moreover I don't recommend nokia anymore.  I reckon I easily convinced about a dozen people a year to buy nokia.  Not any more.  I provided free tech support to friends and family and now almost none of them have nokia whereas it used to be almost all had nokia.

Dumb move nokia!