The long awaited Google phone turned out to be just an OS. What does it mean for us, mobile software developers?

Personally, I think this is great news. An open mobile platform is something that was long due to stir up the world of RIM-Windows-Symbian.

Android managed to get many things right from the very beginning, things that took several years for S60. While S60 initially took Microsoft-style approach to development community - with multi-level support, exclusive club membership with access to the source code, signing and licensing, Android is quite open and democratic.

When Google announced Android SDK - my first thoughts were - it’s a smart move to release SDK before devices are available. Google’s name alone would be enough to attract developers and hackers to this new platform, so they can create a developer community by the time devices are shipping. Then Google announced developer challenge with $10mln in awards.

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Nokia’s brand is one of the most valueable brands in the world (MillwardBrown rates it as 12th).
Nokia is quite close to becoming a synonym of a mobile phone. Whenever I tell someone that I work for Nokia, reaction is almost always the same - “oh, so you make phones”. It is very difficult to explain that myself and a lot of other people in Nokia R&D don’t make only phones, but also software products.

Now internet services and software are becoming central to Nokia’s growth strategy.
This change sparkled a lot of discussions about what Nokia actually is and whether this change is for better or for worse.
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Conratulations Tommi, congratulations Nokia! It is really a lucky break for Nokia that someone with such a great track record of blogging and openly talking to community of Nokia users will head Beta Labs.

As Stephen Johnston said “Plenty of improvement ideas are in the pipeline, and the key one for me will be to build up a sense of community of Nokia early adopters and use them as lead innovators to help us know what we should be working on next.”

From my point of view the most important change would be that of the spirit of development in Nokia, so that beta culture really grows roots, and more interesting and innovative projects have a chance to emerge from our own developers and see the light of day.

William L.McKnight, 3M chairman of the board, formulated management principles already in 1948 where he encouraged 3M management to “delegate responsibility and encourage men and women to exercise their initiative.”

This is one principle I see us in Nokia adopting this very moment.

That finally happened. I’ve completely got rid of Windows on my computers.

The last bastion of Windows was my Nokia work laptop, and now there is Nokia corporate version of Linux installed. I would’ve preferred Ubuntu, but that was not an option.

Migration was relatively painless and that’s yet another proof that Linux can be successfully used on laptops in corporate environments. As a disclaimer I should say that moving to Linux was not a sentimental decision or pledging support for Linux community, but a pure necessity of my present job. Using shell scripts and tools like sort, awk, grep, python, perl and running experiments with web 2.0 stuff locally (even without a network connection) is just so much easier.

The only thing I really miss from Windows is Lifeblog. I really hope that soon there’ll be a way to upload complete Lifeblog database to an internet server and access it via web interface. Let’s see what Ovi brings us when it’s ready.