New Gadget 2011

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announce partnership during press conference at Nokia Strategy and Financial Briefing on Friday February 11, 2011



Wow, we have to hand it those Nokia social media types, they're on top of their game. A mere couple of hours after Stephen Elop and Steve Ballmer took the stage in London, the video of their joint announcement of a Nokia-Microsoft partnership is up and ready for repeated consumption. For those of you just catching up now, Windows Phone 7 has become Nokia's "principal smartphone strategy," MeeGo is getting transformed into an experimental "learning" platform, and Symbian... well, maybe you should sit down for this one, Symbian's being killed off. There's more to the strategic alliance unveiled today, including the WP7 Marketplace subsuming the Ovi Store and some Bing and Ovi Maps interaction, so why not press play above and let the men in charge tell you about it?

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Hitachi subsidiary Hitachi Displays yesterday announced [JP] that it has developed a new LCD display for smartphones whose quality reaches the “limit of what is discernible to the human eye”. And a look at the spec sheet reveals that big H is indeed prepping quite a display. Here are the main specs:

* 4.5-inch IPS LCD (16:9)
* 720 x 1,280 resolution
* 329ppi pixel density
* LED backlight
* 500cd/m2 brightness
* 1,100:1 contrast ratio

By way of comparison: the iPhone 4′s Retina display features 960×640 resolution, 326 ppi pixel density and a 800:1 contrast ratio (at 3.5 inches).

Hitachi currently plans to mass-produce the display starting October this year. The company is also expecting cell phone makers to use it for touchscreen and 3D-enabled handsets. SID 2011 attendees can have a look at the display in May this year.

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An "IcedRobot" project aims to develop a version of Android that will be beyond the reach of Oracle's lawsuit against Google regarding use of the Dalvik Virtual Machine. By adopting the OpenJDK implementation of Java, the project will further separate Dalvik from Android and create an Android variant that will be suitable for running on desktop PCs.

A team of savvy Java developers is working to fork Android to have a safe and open implementation of the Android stack in case Oracle prevails in its litigation against Google for allegedly infringing Oracle's Java patents in the creation of Android.

In a project known as IcedRobot (logo at right) Mario Torre, a software developer at JPMorgan Chase, and David Fu, an engineer at Opera Software, are leading a small team to build a Java Virtual Machine (VM) for Android that is based on the open-source OpenJDK implementation of Java. Android's Dalvik VM -- which acts as an intermediary of sorts between Android apps and the underlying Linux kernel and other Android code -- instead uses the Apache Harmony codebase claimed by Oracle.

Fu and Torre presented their IcedRobot ideas to a packed crowd at the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting 2011 (FOSDEM XI), which ran Feb. 5-6 in Brussels, Belgium. Blogging about IcedRobot in a Feb. 8 post, Torre lists two goals for the project.

First, IcedRobot wants to separate Dalvik from the usual Android infrastructure so that it runs as any other UNIX program in the Linux environment, and possibly other UNIX variants such as OSX and QNX.

Second, the project aims to "avoid Dalvik and Harmony as much as possible and put the Android stack on top of the OpenJDK class library, and run the whole thing in Hotspot (this is cool, isn't it?)," writes Torre. "The second goal is the most interesting because it means basically that Android will run on any desktop finally: one environment, one specification, one JVM."

Essentially, IcedRobot is an attempt to bring the Android API onto the Linux desktop, Torre goes on to explain. The project wants to "decouple Dalvik from the custom Linux kernel that Android uses and at the same time to port the extra APIs (and especially the graphics stack) so that I can run this thing standalone," he writes.

In a description of the IcedRobot talk, labeled as "IcedRobot: The GNUlization of Android," on the FOSDEM website, Fu explains that the IcedRobot project consists of the GNUDroid and the GNUBishop subprojects. GNUDroid intends to create an Android implementation using FOSS components borrowed from GNU Classpath and OpenJDK, to be called the IcedRobot Micro Edition.

GNUBishop, meanwhile, will augment the standard features offered by Android with typical desktop functionality, and will be called the IcedRobot Standard Edition. The slides for the FOSDEM talk also list a third subproject called Daneel, described as a "pure Java Interpreter VM for Dalvik."

Florian Mueller, founder of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign and author of the FOSS Patents blog, lauds the IcedRobot idea, but appears to have some reservations about the project's chances for success. "By integrating Java code available on GPLv2 terms they hope to be safe from legal attacks on Oracle's part, but this depends on what exactly they do and how the implicit patent license contained in the GPLv2 would apply," Mueller writes.

"The more they modify the OpenJDK code, the less likely they are to be covered by that implicit patent license," he continues. "But just the fact that they see a need to act and don't trust that Google will defend itself successfully is interesting. Those are skilled software developers who apparently concluded that they have to take their destiny into their own hands."

Mueller applauds the IcedRobot team for "embarking on such an ambitious project," but notes that Google and Oracle both likely "secretly hope that the IcedRobot idea never materializes."

He goes on to note that, "Google's strategy with Android is to avoid the GPL to the greatest extent possible. Google wants to accommodate proprietary extensions that Android device makers may consider valuable for differentiation purposes. Oracle, however, looks at the mobile market as a key area in which it seeks to monetize Java. In this area, Oracle insists on one of its field-of-use restrictions for third-party Java implementations."

Other bloggers cited IcedRobot, including Simon Phipps, chief strategy officer at ForgeRock and former chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems. Phipps, who attended and spoke at FOSDEM, writes that there "were plenty of interesting talks, most notably Mario Torres and David Fu talking about their IcedRobot project to get Android apps to run on OpenJDK (and thus on any desktop)."

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* No specific announcement for when we'll see the first Nokia Windows Phone. Ballmer mentioned that the engineering teams have spent a lot of time together already.
* Elop also confirmed that Nokia is a Finnish company and always will be -- they will not be moving to Silicon Valley or anywhere else.
* Ballmer said that the partnership is "not exclusive" but some things that Microsoft is doing with Nokia are "unique" allowing Nokia to differentiate itself in the market. Elop added that it's important for the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem to thrive, which means that multiple vendors must succeed.
* Elop didn't believe that Nokia could create a new ecosystem around MeeGo fast enough.
* Nokia will "substantially reduce" R&D expenditures while increasing R&D productivity moving forward.
* Nokia did talk with Google about adopting Android but decided that it "would have difficulty differentiating within that ecosystem" and the "commoditization risk was very high -- prices, profits, everything being pushed down, value being moved out to Google which was concerning to us." Microsoft presented the best option for Nokia to resume the fight in the high end smartphone segment.
* Elop clarified that MeeGo will ship this year but "not as part of another broad smarpthone platform strategy, but as an opportunity to learn." Something that sounds very similar to position Nokia took with its so-called "experimental" Maemo-based N900 last year. After the first (and apparently, only) MeeGo device ships this year, the MeeGo team will then "change their focus into an exploration of future platforms, future devices, future user experiences." Trying to determine the "next disruption" in smartphones.
* Responding to "hope for a broad MeeGo-based ecosystem," Elop said that Nokia simply wasn't moving fast enough to effectively win and compete against Apple and Google. Windows Phone makes it a "three-horse race," something that Elop says is pleasing to the carriers he's been speaking with.
* Nokia has different options for its tablet strategy including using something from Microsoft or something that Nokia has developed internally.

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Nokia and Microsoft today announced plans to form a broad strategic partnership that would combine our complementary strengths and expertise to create a new global mobile ecosystem, one we believe would have all the elements needed to fuel innovation – including search, location, advertising and exciting new devices.

As part of this, Nokia plans to adopt Windows Phone as our primary smartphone strategy, helping drive the future of the platform. This has not been a decision taken lightly by Nokia and we wanted to share some of the key points with our developer community.

Nokia and Microsoft together

The Nokia-Microsoft ecosystem would aim to deliver differentiated and innovative products and have unrivalled scale, product breadth, geographical reach, and brand identity. With Windows Phone as our primary smartphone platform, we would help drive the future of the platform by leveraging our expertise in hardware optimization, software customization, language support and scale.

Microsoft would make available the existing free Windows Phone Developer Tools; Visual Studio 2010, Expression, Silverlight and the XNA Framework to developers. Together, we will provide guidance for developers wishing to port their applications to Windows Phone.

Nokia and Microsoft would also combine services assets to drive innovation. Nokia’s Ovi Maps, for example, would be at the heart of key Microsoft assets like Bing and AdCenter, and Nokia’s application and content store would be integrated with Microsoft Marketplace for Nokia Windows Phones, to deliver a great single commerce experience for developers and consumers alike.

The Qt ecosystem

Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same. With 200 million users worldwide and Nokia planning to sell around 150 million more Symbian devices, Symbian still offers unparalleled geographical scale for developers.

Extending the scope of Qt further will be our first MeeGo-related open source device, which we plan to ship later this year. Though our plans for MeeGo have been adapted in light of our planned partnership with Microsoft, that device will be compatible with applications developed within the Qt framework and so give Qt developers a further device to target.

Nokia Mobile Phones

Nokia Mobile Phones will drive Nokia’s ”web for the next billion” strategy, leveraging Nokia’s innovation and strength in growth markets to connect the next billion people and bring them affordable access to the Internet and applications. This represents a further opportunity for developers. Nokia will leverage our proxy browser technology on mobile phones, as well as continuing to enhance Java support and SDKs, with developers and publishers able to deliver their applications to consumers through the Nokia store.

Supporting our developers

As part of the change in Nokia’s organization announced today, the Services and Developer Experiences (SDX) unit will be responsible for Nokia’s global service portfolio, developer offering, developer community relations, and integration of partner service offering. Forum Nokia will be part of that unit and will continue to support developers for Symbian smartphones and Series 40 mobile phones.

We will strengthen our ability to support developers both globally and in local markets, ensuring that we can work with you wherever you are to bring your latest applications to our store and help you leverage the global revenue opportunity with Symbian and Series 40.

For Nokia Windows Phones, Microsoft would provide tools for application developers to easily and rapidly leverage Nokia’s market reach. The integration of Microsoft Marketplace and Nokia’s content and application store would provide scalable infrastructure and compelling consumer engagement for applications for Nokia Windows Phones.

The combined stores would offer unparalleled distribution. The Ovi Store already delivers content in 190 countries, with local specific content in 90 of those. We are now seeing 4 million downloads a day, with 300,000 users signing up daily and 400,000 developers now working on applications for Nokia on Symbian. In addition to offering operator billing with 103 operators in 32 countries, we plan to support the widest range of business models for our publishers and developers.

We plan to make it easy and profitable for all developers to thrive in the ecosystem, taking advantage of the enablers (API’s) offered by ourselves, Microsoft and other partners - including location, search, monetization and advertising.

What’s next?

As we said, this announcement is about our plans to work with Microsoft and the planning will continue. Our aim is to keep you informed as plans develop, through our Forum Nokia and Ovi Publish websites, newsletters and in person. In the meantime, we want to help you maximize the existing business opportunity, developing for the approximately 50 million Qt capable Symbian smartphones already in use and approximately 150 million more that we target to sell, as well as hundreds of millions of Nokia mobile phones.

We think this is going to be an exciting journey and look forward to having you with us!

Purnima Kochikar

Head of Forum Nokia & Developer Community

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