Comment Re:Did the author completely overlook,,, (Score 1) 289
Maybe a simple way forward is to turn the n900 series into what the G1 was a couple of years ago. With that phone, it became suddenly very simple to download a mobile sdk, plug the phone in, set some options and put a "hello world" application into a phone or even distribute it on that same day. I know further steps might get more complex along the line with android programming, but it's easier than symbian app programming is now. What puts me off android on the other hand is that it's not entirely open source and has that black box thing in there, and it doesn't work on older simpler phones, thereby excluding a huge amount of people in the world from it's use.
What if nokia managed to produce a symbian distro that "just worked" on phones like the n900, or even - magically, on some random cheap older simpler "featurephone", seamlessly recieving newly coded apps from developers and running them, and allowed developers to get programming a symbian app within a day? Perhaps by working on getting symbian stable enough and streamlined enough, and then adding some scripting language over it (there's already python for s60 so maybe something like that) or even a fancy drag and drop ui layout editor etc etc - basically if app creation was easier with symbian than with android or iphone, and there was an easy way to get it on more phones, it would really give symbian it's strength. Or it will do that anyway, slowly via open source, but in 10 years, and we'll still get the benefits eventually. It would be a shame if by that time nokia was irrelevant, so that this job would be up to the small 3rd world kiosks that repair and mod phones illegally, to take two sims at a time, unblock them, upgrade their firmware etc.