Was it bad enough to abandon all investments made into its development and jump to the less successful competing platform instead of incrementally improving MeeGo/Maemo?
Yes. It suffered from the same problem as all of Nokia's home grown software. The performance was shockingly bad - in an era of jelly scrolling, it was still using janky scroll-bars.
It was clearly made by disparate teams who didn't talk to each other. The design language was all over the place, the radio performance inadequate, and there was no sensible way to develop or release apps for it.
Nokia made brilliant firmware, and amazing hardware. But they simply didn't have the ability to design beautiful, usable software.
Personally, I'd have gone with Android. But you don't hire a Microsoft guy for anything other than getting in bed with MS.
I had a N9, and I completely agree with the person above. The funniest thing is that when I got the phone and showed it to a friend who had just received the most recent Nexus at the time, the first thing he did was just scrolling, switching between apps and admiring how smooth everything was. The illusion faded quickly when you tried to open a web page with any javascript.
As far as I know, the code behind the scenes and especially the app store were a mess, but it didn't show to the user. And of course every app could access everything.
The choice to go with Microsoft was reasonable; a way to distinguish themselves from all the other (unprofitable) Android manufacturers. But the whole execution of the plan from both Nokia and Microsoft was terrible.
edent|8 years ago
It was clearly made by disparate teams who didn't talk to each other. The design language was all over the place, the radio performance inadequate, and there was no sensible way to develop or release apps for it.
Nokia made brilliant firmware, and amazing hardware. But they simply didn't have the ability to design beautiful, usable software.
Personally, I'd have gone with Android. But you don't hire a Microsoft guy for anything other than getting in bed with MS.
oriolid|8 years ago
I had a N9, and I completely agree with the person above. The funniest thing is that when I got the phone and showed it to a friend who had just received the most recent Nexus at the time, the first thing he did was just scrolling, switching between apps and admiring how smooth everything was. The illusion faded quickly when you tried to open a web page with any javascript.
As far as I know, the code behind the scenes and especially the app store were a mess, but it didn't show to the user. And of course every app could access everything.
wvenable|8 years ago