Nokia chief rules out more MeeGo even if N9 takes off
updated 12:50 pm EDT, Fri June 24, 2011
CEO reemphasizes Windows Phone focus
This week, Nokia unveiled the N9 smartphone, the company's first smartphone to run the MeeGo OS. The Finnish Newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reports in an interview with Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop that it will also be the company's last. Nokia will be focusing all its efforts on the Windows Phone OS, no matter how successful the N9 might be.
In the interview, Elop touted the technology advances of the N9. At the same time, he attributed much of the product's rich feature set not to MeeGo, but rather to Qt, the cross platform app development environment that Nokia uses for with its MeeGo, Symbian and Maemo projects. Nokia does not use Qt in its Windows Phone development efforts, which need Microsoft's own tools.
Nokia had announced an agreement with Microsoft in in February that it was making Windows Phone its primary OS for future smartphone development.
The decision could jeopardize sales of the N9, as even a runaway success would give no incentive to developers to support a platform expected to live and die on the one phone. Nokia has partly mitigated the problem by including apps for Angry Birds, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and others out of the box.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jul 2010
It's all about Qt
Frankly, even a single N9 meego device will be able to take advantage of the Qt development environment. Nokia has clearly stated it remains fully invested in Qt and has demonstrated this recently by including the massive S40 platform under this development framework.
In the end, Nokia seems to have a very positive UI in the Harmattan layer that sits on top of Meego. Between Qt and Harmattan, expect some very interesting things from Espoo in the near future.