By Lee Mathews
In the middle of 2011, a leaked video captured Nokia chief Stephen Elop talking about Meltemi, a mobile OS project they’d managed to keep secret. Nokia was working on Meltemi as an option for the kind of low-end phones that have made the company such a dominant force in emerging markets around the world. Now, however, they’re pulling the plug — just as they did with Meego after announcing the new Windows Phone partnership with Microsoft last year.
Rumors first began surfacing last month that Meltemi’s end was near. With Nokia’s profits dropping and belt-tightening the order of the day, several research and development projects had been called into question. With Nokia set on sticking with S40 as its platform of choice for phones like the Asha Touch line pictured above, Meltemi was deemed expendable. The unreleased, Linux-based OS isn’t the only thing Nokia is cutting. There are also some 10,000 jobs on the line, with talks currently under way in Finland to figure out who stays and who goes.
It certainly looks as though things are going to get worse before they get better for Nokia. Recent reports suggest that the Lumia phones aren’t selling as well as hoped, and sales are no doubt being hampered by the recent announcement that Windows Phone 8 is on the way this fall and that current phones won’t be receiving the update to Microsoft’s next-gen mobile OS.
It’s important, then, for Nokia to narrow its focus. As nice as it would have been to see the company bring Meltemi to market on at least one device, it simply can’t spare the necessary human and financial resources to make that happen right now.
More at Reuters
Source: Geek
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