Ah, it finally happened. I didn't think it would, but I was wrong. Nokia is taking on Windows Phone 7. Great! Finally they'll have a working platform with great development tools!
There are millions of people that are probably yelling NOOOO! at the moment. Shut up, I tell them. If you have some anti-Microsoft thing, it's your problem. If you'd just take your head out of your nether regions, you'd understand that Nokia has been so bad for developers, their UIs have been crap and they can't even make a decent browser in several years. Not even if they have WebKit and others available.
I would've thought that Nokia would've possibly made a new UI for the phones (not a good thing, taking account their track record), or at least gotten Qt to work in it. But no, they're keeping Qt for Symbian, Meego etc.
What about Symbian? They say they won't throw it out, yet. But they aren't telling us what it will be used for. And Meego? They'll release "a device", but what? I think Meego probably will work for tablets etc, but there's no point in making another UI for phones. Since that's what it would be.
I'm very interested to see what happens next. When will the first phone come out, what will Nokia's hardware knowledge bring to the table.
And for those that are saying "Microsoft is taking over Nokia." The whole point for taking on Elop was to get Nokia to go to another direction. It's been going downhill for so long. Why can't you just accept the fact that maybe, just maybe, a partnership (not a takeover) with Microsoft is exactly what they need?
Also, how many of the people whining about Windows Phone 7 have actually used it? Developed for it? I personally have not held a device in my hand. But I have developed some test applications for it. And I can say that in the time that it took me to make a mockup version of Telkussa Mobile for Windows Phone 7 was 15 minutes. No previous knowledge about WP7 development (and not much about WPF development either). It's just so simple to do things and the development tools actually work!
I've done the application for Android too, to some extent. Most of the time went to fighting with Eclipse and ADT (they're quite unstable, also some x86/x64 stuff etc). I did get it done, but it's slooooooow. Horribly so. Since there is lots of data handling when loading TV guide data in the beginning.
I'd like to do it for Symbian, Qt, Qt Quick too. But I'd kinda in need of a minor braindamage (major in case of Symbian). The development tools are alien to me and don't seem as mature as I'd like them to be. In case of Symbian, Carbide.c++ is crap. Even after years of development. Qt Creator is probably less crap, but it's complicated. It took me a while to even find out how to change the target of compilation. Could be just my inability, but still. And also, the applications that are produced by Qt look different on the devices. Not nice to use that kind of a platform.
The only platform that actually has that application out in the wild is iOS. It took me quite a while to get it done, since XCode is horrible and iOS APIs were alien to me. They're not horrible, but it takes a while to get into a platform, know how to use iOS's memory handling (quite awful), threads etc etc. But it's much less horrible than Symbian. Android, I'm not sure. I don't have enough experience about it. But the XML crap UIs don't tickle my fancy, at all. WPF/Silverlight did it right since you don't need any getControlById() and casting etc that you need with Android.
So, I'm intrigued. Very much so. If Nokia needs a developer for WP7 stuff, I'm interested. You didn't get me to work for you previously, but now you can call me ;)