Published on March 13th, 2014 | by Igor Rebenko

Why I think the Nokia X is more than just a “Nokia Android Phone”!

Prelude:

Before I begin, I would like to add that this will be a matter of opinion and not a review, preview, hands-on or anything like that. I have not used or even seen a Nokia X in real life and any of what you’re about to read is purely speculative. I have not trawled the internet or contacted Nokia or Microsoft for guidance, information or facts. This is just an interpretation using common sense, logic and intuition, combined with what I’ve learnt over the past 10 years or so.

Meet Nokia:

As many of you might already be aware of, Nokia has been acquired by Microsoft for a metric truck load of cash, not as much as anyone would think Nokia’s mobile empire would be worth, but a good sum nevertheless. I also don’t believe that I need to justify to anyone what a large empire Nokia once had. This empire nearly monopolized the mobile industry and repeatedly revolutionized the way we used mobile phones for a pretty long period. It released a plethora of great phones which are still remembered today.
This enormous empire came slowly crashing down with the release of mainstream touchscreen mobile phones. It all started with the iPhone and slowly progressed to other manufacturers including Nokia itself. Nokia’s stubbornness and ill-sighted vision of “touch screen technology is just a fad and physical buttons will always be king” was their first trip down to failure. They eventually lost the war and became putting all their efforts into making a worthy contender in the touch smartphone market. They released phone after phone, each was as mediocre as the next. Arguably, not one would stand out. (*Well, maybe none but their Maemo/MeeGo series of phones, which I will explain about at the end of what this article is about.)
Symbian died and Nokia, being as stubborn as usual, did not want to follow suit and be one of the sheep to fall toward Android’s direction. What they did was join a smaller trend, a trend that only just begun when Nokia was going down a downward spiral.

Meet Microsoft:

Microsoft had their own mobile OS, Windows Mobile (WinMo). WinMo was a very ambitious OS. It had lots of potential to be one of the best mobile OS’es out their. But it had several major flaws that were compounded to one conclusion: it was way ahead of it’s time. WinMo was clunky, it required you to use a stylus for touchscreen phones and was not optimized for people with fingers, rather for Captain Hook. It was also very resource hungry. Those were all flaws that were hidden by the fact that WinMo was a very good OS with lots of freedom and future potential, even though it was not an open sourced environment. As development of WinMo continued, it was never a match for the ever evolving Android and iOS.
Eventually, WinMo was dropped completely. Microsoft covered all their bases and started a new mobile OS from scratch, Windows Phone (WP). WP was a clever project. It combined the code of a fully fledged, full featured OS and made for a familiar environment to the already abundant collection of developers of programs for Windows, and brought in a new finger friendly graphical environment called Metro (now called Microsoft Design Language), which introduced a lot of new and interesting features.

Microsoft – Nokia Partnership:

As Nokia’s OS, Symbian, came to the point that it was only bought on sub $100 handsets. The company was hemorrhaging money, they and everybody following Nokia started biting their nails wondering what was to happen to Nokia’s mobile empire. So as a natural instinct to save the company, Nokia partnered up with Microsoft and told everyone that they will now be concentrating primarily on WP and pretty much nothing else. It’s was a bold move which just slowed down the downward spiral to failure. With the slow sales and a mild reception to WP, nothing could be done to boost sales of Nokia phones. Nokia was a dying name in the household and was spoken about like it was already finished. This partnership was then turned into an ownership when Microsoft bought out Nokia’s mobile division and the Nokia legacy was turned into just a name, nothing more. Nokia’s production of phones was slow and it stayed out of the lime light after this sellout.

Meet Nokia X:

Something happened. Something that no one expected. Something that only Nokia supporters dreamed about. Something that was only spoken about like it was a myth. Nokia introduced an Android phone! After all the speculations, supposed leaks and rumors! Everybody OOOOO’ed and AAHHHH’ed and the name Nokia became remembered again. But what most people forgot is that Nokia is not Nokia anymore. Nokia said that they will be primarily working only on WP and now it’s owned by Microsoft but why would they release an Android phone?

The master plan:

It’s quite a simple question to answer. And like I said in the prelude, I will not bring facts into this. Microsoft are not stupid, they’re actually quite clever. They probably sat down with a panel of people and worked out a plan on how to destroy the competition. As they do. And what better way to destroy the competition then to make them look bad. Samsung has been doing this to Apple for years, and so has Nokia in that fact.

Microsoft have formulated a plan to use Android’s biggest advantage over any other mobile OS and turn it against them. That is, Android is open source. So Microsoft has taken Android and stripped it down to it’s underwear. They’ve used a fairly secure but old version of Android with old hardware and bring it to the public via the Nokia name. Excuse my language. This was a ploy to “crap” all over Android. The plan is to bring such a bad Android experience under a well known household name in hopes that people will look elsewhere other than Android. And if they’ve not already been duped by Apple there are not a lot of other places they could go for a reasonable price tag other than WP. They literally killed 2 birds with one stone. Publicly destroying Android and Nokia in one go. Yes, some might say why would Microsoft do that? Why would they frame their own child company? But that is why Microsoft bought Nokia. They had an agenda and it really shows how business is just business to them. There is no compassion when money is to be earned.

So there you have it people.

Bonus:

For you people who have read all the way to this section. As I promised, this will be about Maemo/MeeGo.

Nokia had a “Hail Mary” which could have saved them all this embarrassment. But as Nokia is and always has been stubborn, they were too stubborn to realize that the answer to their problem was already in their grasp. Maemo, what later became MeeGo, could have saved their company and also could have been a very good contender for the number one spot in the mobile OS war today. It was a mobile OS based on Debian/Linux. If you don’t know what Linux is, then I suggest you go and find out for yourself the wonders that Linux is. They had in their hands a mobile distribution of “the mother of all open source software” already ported and implemented properly on a mobile phone with fully working phone and messaging features and they were too stubborn, and too stupid to realize what they could have achieved. And with that bombshell I conclude that Nokia was it’s own downfall. And as they continue under the rule of Microsoft, whatever is left of Nokia as a mobile company, and as a legacy, is now gone. What’s left of Nokia is all but a shell, a zombie or a ghost waiting to be freed and finally rest in peace.

Tags: Android, Maemo, MeeGo, microsoft, nokia, Nokia X, Symbian, Windows Mobile, windows phone, WinMo, WP