Microsoft buys Nokia "Devices and Services" division for $7.2 billion

Via: @jaffa2

Editor: Ryan Abel

In what, perhaps, should not be an unsurprising outcome of the appointment of Stephen Elop to head Nokia, Microsoft will be acquiring Nokia's devices and services division as part of a nearly $7.2 billion deal to be finalized early next year, pending regulatory approval:

Microsoft has purchased Nokia's devices and services unit, bringing the Lumia lineup under the Redmond roof. The move unites Windows Phone 8 with its biggest hardware supporter, giving the company the integrated mobile offering it's been looking for with Surface and other devices. When the deal closes in the first quarter of 2014, Microsoft will pay €3.79 billion for Nokia's business, plus another €1.65 billion to license its portfolio of patents. (The €5.44-billion total is considerably less than Microsoft paid for Skype in 2011.) 32,000 people are expected to transfer from Nokia to Microsoft, including 18,300 that are "directly involved in manufacturing.

The move signals the true end of an era. Nokia's contributions to the mobile phone segment are as significant as, if not more significant than, any other company in the business. Unfortunately, insistence on incremental improvement to their existing platforms while the market's newer players brought fresh ideas and innovation, and Nokia's inability to pursue real innovation despite the expertise, ideas, and products they had available in-house signalled their decline. They hamstrung their innovative products trying to hold on to an ever-shrinking marketshare with Symbian.

Those of us who experienced the heady days of Nokia's forays into Linux will continue to think on the what-might've-been's had Nokia taken a risk and pulled the trigger on something new and innovative. We had a short glimpse into that future when Nokia announced the N9 and MeeGo as their new flagship platform, but the Elopocalypse brought an end to that future. Perhaps the appliances that represent today's mobile device options would include a more open, accessible, and interesting mobile general computing platform had things gone differently.

All is not a bleak future of mobiles appliances, though, as Nokia's fall from grace represents an opportunity for smaller players to enter the market. More open source, and general computing friendly mobile platform have been announced over the past year. Foremost among them, Jolla, with their real-Linux Sailfish platform which is set to ship on the first Jolla device sometime around the end of this year.

Whatever happens to the mobile device market, it undoubtedly will not be uninteresting. On behalf of this publication, your editors would like to wish all of those affected by the transitions taking place at Nokia the best of luck.

Neo900: community-driven successor to the Nokia N900

Editor: Ryan Abel

Using the GTA04 as a base, some members of the Maemo Community are looking to put together a successor device to the N900. Dubbed the Neo900, the device would utilize the GTA04 motherboard design modified to fit into an N900 case. Joerg Reisenweber on the plan:

We're currently in the planning phase about a maemo5/fremantle-compatible successor of N900, with N900 look-alike (aka case) and a processor with more grunt and RAM. This is already beyond the state of vaporware, see www.gta04.org which this will base on. [...] what we're talking about are slight modification to GTA04 board to make it fit into a Neo900, with housing and display etc sourced from the commercial N900 spare parts market.

So it wll look like a N900, feel like a N900 and work like a N900, just way faster, thanks to the DM3730 CPU @1GHz and at least 512MB RAM (1GB depending on chip availability) plus maybe a few GB more of fast RAM-based "storage" as swap.

And - that's our plan - it will have all the functionality you're used to from N900 plus sturdy USB (that won't fall off the PCB) with full OTG support, all sorts of new nice sensors like gyro and altimeter and compass, and a GSM/UMTS, possibly even LTE modem that doesn't break (or when it ever would then you can fix it).

The hardware upgrade represents a modest improvement over the N900 in most areas. In order to reduce the amount of work required (i.e., a complete board redesign) and maintain compatibility with Fremantle binaries it is still utilizing an OMAP3 SoC. The Neo900 won't compete with modern flagship smartphone devices, but for those looking for a faster N900 (resistive touchscreen, hardware keyboard, open source, mobile computer) to keep using the only currently available mobile general computing platform, it fits the bill.

See the thread for more details and discussion, and links to additional threads on the Neo900.