Few points to note about meego:
- MeeGo is NOT owned by Nokia. They simply develop phones using it.
- MeeGo was originally designed to be a phone-capable ARM and Atom platform tablet OS. And this will continue. We could see MeeGo tablets from other companies in the future.
- As long as it has a good community backing, which MeeGo apparently does, there will be constant software releases for both MeeGo ARM and MeeGo Atom (x86) versions.
- As long as MeeGo releases updates for its ARM stream, all MeeGo ARM devices capable of having their firmware updated, externally or internally, there is no fear for MeeGo owners.
So if Nokia shuts down production of MeeGo devices after N9, the phone is still a worthy buy because of its awesome hardware and the fact that MeeGo itself will be supported for a long time.
Anyway, this seems to be the Nokia strategy at the moment:
- Add more features to S30 to make it more "sellable". For instance, Nokia X1 is a S30 phone capable of supporting a memory card and has a music player with the maximum playback time in any nokia phone.
- Make S40 feature phones cheaper and better since this seems to be the only platform so far in which nokia is the market leader in its segment. Nokia will continue to use S40 6th edition in its cheap sub-5k phones.
- Use the lowered-priced versions of their Tube-based designs (the family of the 5800 XpressMusic like 5233, 5230, etc) to keep the over-5k market in check since the dead-cheap androids from Micromax and co seem to not be good enough to threaten Nokia
- Use Symbian Anna as the platform for sub-20k phones. This is their mainstream range. Classic example here is N8.
- For their high end phones use MeeGo till Windows Mobile 7 starts shipping. Ditch MeeGo users the moment Windows Mobile 7 comes out.
Out of the above 5 points, the first two seem to be working rather well. I guess we'll soon see S30 pushed up and maybe S40 could get some multitasking in the future to cover the range under 10k.
If S40 upgrade does not happen (point 3), then Symbian Anna will come down to cheaper 7k phones to cover up the void left by the demise of older S60 9.4 based tubes. Otherwise Nokia will decide to continue with S60 9.4 based phones though this seems unlikely.
Due to the obvious fact that Symbian is a rock solid tested platform, Nokia cannot ditch it and it definitely WILL be the platform of choice in the 10k-20k range for some time to come and when hardware gets cheaper, could be pushed down to 8k-14k range (point 4).
Microsoft is not the kind of company people back out on deals from, and it looks like Nokia's high end phones WILL be Windows Phone 7 in the future. And MeeGo devices will become cheaper and IF unlocking their bootloader is possible, they would become favored modding gadgets (point 5).
Personally, here is my preferred way to replace mainstream touchscreen phones:
1. Get a decent 5-7k canon/nikon Point and Shoot. These kill any camera phone.
2. Get a Nokia X1 (price around 1.6k) for a phone. Its a phone with mp3 player like battery life.
3. Get this: Sakshat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for 3k when it launches (1.5k for college students) which beats any other tablet in cost/price.
Total cost: 10k well spent :clap: