Myriad Alien Dalvik allows Android apps on Maemo

Myriad, a French/Swiss software company specializing in mobile phones, has announced Alien Dalvik, which will provide a Dalvik VM for non-Android platforms. Building on the launch of Dalvik Turbo, Alien Dalvik signifies Myriad’s latest Android innovation by enabling Android apps to operate on a much wider range of platforms and devices. As a result, operators, OEMs and application store owners can now easily access the Android ecosystem and deploy Android applications across multiple device operating systems, all without compromising performance. Alien Dalvik enables the majority of Android applications to run unmodified, allowing application store owners to quickly kick start Android application store services by simply repackaging Android Package (APK) files. If reasonably capable, availability of a large portion of Android's application catalog could be a large selling point for other platforms. A demo on the N900 will be shown at MWC and it will, apparently, be commercially available for MeeGo later this year.

CEO of Nokia lays out the problems in internal memo

Ahead of Friday's announcement came the publication of a leaked copy of a memo sent from Stephen Elop. More of a historical footnote now, it notes the problems Nokia have in delivery and in the market: The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.

We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market. The memo mentions nothing about Microsoft - nor would it, they barely register as a competitor - and was, unfortunately mistakenly, seen as a sign that Elop might plough resources into MeeGo to get it out and successful.

Developers already start abandoning Qt

One developer does not a trend make, and we're not interested in whether or not *Nokia* retain developers - instead, Qt is integral to MeeGo and without a vendor in the market, those who have invested time and money in aligning with Nokia's Qt vision have been burnt for the last time: I announced a Qt/N900 version last spring. Unfortunately Nokia has been unable to execute its Qt strategy (that I thought was great) and today they announced that they will drop it. Nokia will go with Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft developer tools. This means that to support new Nokia phones I would have to write RaceChrono again using proprietary languages like Silverlight and C#, which seems totally unreasonable. Also as Qt is dropped, you can forget me ever announcing Qt/N900 version. It will not happen, sorry!