Android on Nokia? ‘No Plans’ or No Way?

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By Mike Browne on July 6,

2010 at 00:00,

New Nokia boss in charge of smartphones, Anssi Vanjoki, has been outlining his plans for his division in the ongoing battle for smartphone dominance and sit seems that Android won't be playing a part. Nokia is strictly a MeeGo, Symbian focussed company. Read on to find out why Nokia has 'no plans' to use Android OS on its smartphones.

Anssi Vanjoki, the new boss of Nokia Mobile Solutions, posted a starkly honest and interesting piece titled 'The Fightback Starts Now', where he outlines his plans for making Nokia smartphones leaner, meaner and fighting fit.

This means sticking with Symbian OS, albeit it on more mainstream devices, why MeeGo will be placed on high-end devices. At the moment Nokia has no plans to use alternate operating systems, namely no Android any time soon.

The reason behind this seems to be one of familiarity, in that Nokia wants to continue to deliver an interface that users are used too, and trust, so it seems MeeGo, which we saw Day 1 screenshots of last week, will aim to have that famous 'Nokia look' to it.

Interestingly, the blog post over on Nokia Conversations has now garnered over 240 Comments, so clearly Anssi's thoughts and fighting talk are resonating with a lot of Nokia fans, both old and new.

What do you think, would you like to see Android running on Nokia hardware or are you excited by the prospect of what MeeGo can bring to the smartphone market? Let us know what you think in the Comments below.

Via: EuroDroid

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mariog

If “the fightback starts now” there should be less talk and more action. I get why Nokia might want to tempt customers with grand smartphones with early prototypes and little bits of news on future phones, but Nokia has a thing on turning most peoples curiosity into frustration and apathy. They should only start advertising phones at max 2 months ahead of release.

It’s a pity Nokia doesn’t want android on thier hardware. Show me an android smartphone that is as good as a mid range nokia with a 1 Ghz cpu and doesn’t suck the battery dry in a day. The two would have made a macth in heaven.
mjoa

Adopting Android would mean throwing several years of software development down the drain, namely the ongoing Qt-ifying and harmonisation of MeeGo and Symbian. Android without Qt is a total NoGo and using Android would mean Nokia would turn into a zombie manufacturer like Moto/HTC/SE (and Samsung to some extent).
Andrew

@mariog It’s Android which is sucking the life out of the battery on all Android devices. Maemo 5 is the same, so is (cough) iOS.

For all it’s grumbles, Symbian is light on battery use and easily runs on slower processors, so you get much longer battery life on Symbian devices at the expense of raw power and complexity. I’ll be very interested to see how the N8 and the N8 style device with a keyboard manage power, when they finally get released.

mjoa is right about Android. Nokia need to continue to develop their own market for Qt applications, however awful they seem to be doing it right now. On my N900 most of the applications are free and absolutely fantastic, but this is bound to change when the Ovi Store expands with multitudes of Qt apps for a growing range of devices.