Have you ever heard of Nokia’s Meltemi operating system? If not we don’t blame since the Finnish company hasn’t really officially announced this Linux-based OS. The point of this new operating system was to run on Nokia’s upcoming phones that were more affordable than the Windows Phone ones but offering more functionality in company to the traditional Series 40. However, it seems that Nokia has ditched its plans of developing this new OS.
During a conference call on Thursday, Stephen Elop who is the company’s chief executive said that the firm never really came out with something wearing the Meltemi moniker, but he did admit that Nokia is planning to discontinue some of its development projects. Needless to say, he didn’t give any names and he had no reasons of doing so since Meltemi was never really announced.
Nokia Meltemi OS
There are big changes going around at Nokia as it seems that none of the executives which were the core of the company are now part of top management as Elop fired Niklas Savander who was the market unit chief, along with firing Mary McDowell who was responsible for Nokia’s feature phone department. What’s more important is that the Finnish company plans on axing no less than 10,000 jobs, closing its manufacturing plant in Salo and they’ll also be doing major restructuring in the company’s research & development component.
As you remember, back in 2011 Nokia announced that they will discontinue the development of the Linux-based MeeGo operating system. This year they confirmed that the company is sticking to Series 30 and 40-running feature phones while smartphones will only get Windows Phone as Nokia still stubbornly refuses to team up with Google for Android, a decision which had a huge negative effect over the company in the last few years.
Unless they launch an impressive flag ship device, way better than the current Lumia 900, Nokia has a very rough future up ahead and even with a killer smartphone they still won’t be able to get back in the game right away since Samsung launches lots of new models every year, Apple is going strong as ever, HTC is still a big name in the smartphone business while Motorola has done a lot of progress in the last couple of years. In addition, let’s not forget about LG and other smartphone manufacturers, such as Huawei.
At least, they are still doing great in emerging markets where the need of feature phones is big. However, since smartphone prices are going down, the price gap between feature phones and smartphones will be narrowed even further in the years to come so Nokia might end up losing a lot of money since probably the market for feature phones will go down as smartphones get cheaper, even in emerging markets where people don’t have a lot of money to spend on a phone.
One of the very few clever moves that Nokia has made in the last few years is launching cheap touchscreen-enabled feature phones. One fine example of such a phone is the Asha 311 which was announced several days ago. However, we’re not sure how much money they’ll make with this Asha lineup as lots of people want powerful smartphones.
Source: All Things Digital
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