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I’ve talked about the Maemo platform’s commercial failure in the past, and recent months following the N900 – both on the Maemo.org forums and in Engadget coverage – haven’t exactly convinced me of its longevity in the US market. As a phone the device is limited to AT&T for voice and 2G data, or TMobile for voice and 3G, and as an app platform it has an extremely weak Ovi Marketplace. Seeing Intel and Nokia announce the merger of their mobile platforms at Mobile World Congress, however, has given me even larger doubts about the platform’s relevance.

I can’t help but see this merger as Nokia giving up on Maemo and tossing whatever assets it had left in that fight to the Linux Foundation to merge them into Moblin. As far as I can tell no Moblin product has ever hit retail, and the Linux Foundation Wikipedia entry notes that Intel basically handed off its Moblin project to them some time ago. So far the score looks like this: Failed Open Linux Platforms: 2, commercially successful Open Linux platforms: 0, and both of those failures are now in the hands of the Linux Foundation. Read more »

This January 2010 I will have had my Nokia N800 tablet for two years. It's something of a little Debian Linux device that could, this chunky little internet tablet, since it can do a terrific number of open-source focused things, but it's a complete failure as a commercial mobile platform. Its developer community, however, while nowhere near something I would call "vibrant", is slowly and steadily plugging away at Linux-oriented applications of varying usefulness.

The tablets to date have occupied a rather strange niche, though. Nokia's stance on DRM -- namely, not shipping any way of locking software on the device, and not even providing any kind of central storefront for selling applications for the device -- made commercial developers never give it a shot. One of Michael Mace's quotes I like to keep in mind when it comes to mobile devices is (source):

Symbian happens to be Nokia's older phone OS now becoming open source. Maemo is considered its successor, but the lesson still applies. Read more »

Wired magazine ran a couple of articles recently where they painted Apple and its proprietary vendor lock-in business models not just in a positive light, but in a congratulatory tone so nauseatingly over-the-top that I can't just stand by and ignore it. The articles in question basically centered around how breaking all of "the silicon valley rules" of getting ahead in the tech sector made Apple succeed. The comparisons with other companies were just ridiculous as well. Let's see some examples. Read more »