They're on a downward spiral and they had better swallow their pride, ditch Symbian, lose the Not Invented Here mentality, and have that Android phone in the works already.
Nokia has already Maemo which is far older and more linuxy. Its actually based on debian and afaik it's userspace is largely based on typical GNU userland.
I for one would prefer Maemo to take over world instead of Android.
> Its actually based on debian and afaik it's userspace is largely based on typical GNU userland.
I'm a "dyed in the wool" Linux user, but I just don't see the value of bringing along all that user space stuff. Android is slimmer, which hopefully means it will be in more phones sooner, as it requires less in the way of resources.
From the application developer's point of view, Android is fairly resource-intensive because it doesn't support compiled applications. All the public APIs are only provided within Dalvik, an interpreted Java VM.
This is a major break from Linux tradition. IMO Android doesn't qualify as a "Linux" when it only uses the Linux kernel without providing API access. Android is more like an extension of the traditional Java Mobile Edition approach to mobile platforms.
They'll get Dalvik to JIT the bytecode eventually when they need it. I wouldn't worry about that.
About the major break: what's funny is that Android is probably the first Linux that is both a viable platform and that also isn't GNU/Linux. So strong is the grip of FSF...
By the way, Android is more than JavaME -- underneath the Java level Google has their own system libraries, such as Bionic-the-libc-replacement. It's really a new Linux userspace that runs the high-level Java stuff.
With no APIs except the standard C library and Zlib, it's just not particularly useful (yet).
If you've got some performance-intensive number crunching code in plain C with no dependencies, then the Android NDK will allow you to expose that to your Dalvik app... But the NDK doesn't help much in porting the overwhelming majority of existing C/C++ applications.
J2ME is actually pretty good at 'limited environments' - my first Java phone had a size limit of 64k or something for jars, and you could actually do some interesting stuff in that size.
You'd definitely have to measure things to get the details, but what I meant was the Linux runtime - all the various libraries and shell and whatnot seem like a lot of stuff to have, whereas with Android, you only really need the Dalvik runtime and its accessories. It just seems like a smaller target to work with (also making work to optimize it pay off quite a bit).
They're on a downward spiral and they had better swallow their pride, ditch Symbian, lose the Not Invented Here mentality, and have that Android phone in the works already.