Maybe my wording was incorrect, 5000 actual, active devs tops. I know for a fact, that they had plenty of people on idle state and used certain subcontractors to do absolutely nothing. And had teams around the world to do the same job all over again. A lot of the devs thrown to Accenture were excess baggage and that should have been done in any case. There were btw a lot of external resources working on Meego as well.

The ULM case may have been another mistake by Nokia. Some anonymous Nokians have said that ULM was given a job they could not fullfill. At the same time Nokia re-recruited Linux/Qt devs in Finland back after firing them.

My main point is that with few thousand devs, who would cost a lot less than half a billion a year, Nokia would have secured plan B, put pressure on MS, possibly sell the whole operation and ensured that they can work on future disruptions. You have said yourself that you are no fan of corporations,but interesting tech. Maybe my understanding is too limited, but how on earth can Nokia innovate new product categories, if they are stuck to WP only. Nokia wont be launching interesting things like Google glasses with WP and Metro UI. They first need to get an idea, get MS to support on OS side, hope that MS does not copy the idea… I want something more from Nokia than just gradual improvements on their cameras or the plastic around the hw components. I doubt that will happen with S30, S40 or WP.

5000 devs would have easily been enough to silently escort Symbian to its grave. I have a rough idea how much and what the subcontractors (eg. Digia and Ixonos) did. They still would have needed to downsize, everyone knew it. There are plenty of houses build by (ex)Nokia personnel in Oulu, Espoo and Tampere by people who had nothing to do.

Without knowing enough of the state of Meltemi, Id still think that would have been a clever move by Nokia. They would have disrupted the whole mid-priced smartphone market. Optimized, affordable phone with Swipe UI and Qt. The hype would have followed just as happened with Jolla, who are group of 50 people. Asha touch is selling millions and there would be a significant installed base quite soon.

Ill try to quit commenting as well. And only revisit this topic after BB10 first results and (if) Jolla device is out.

Due to business solution choises, WP seems a no-go for me atm and N9 serves me well enough. Also, if there will be Qt support for Android, we might be making some Qt based apps. We’ll see what happens in few years.

This is strange to me that Nokia didn’t classify them smartphones in Q4 results. As Ashas continue to get more capable, at what point then will Ashas be considered smartphones and not simply mobile phones?

Ashas are a lot more capable than low end Blackberries for example, yet they are classed as mobile phones by Nokia, yet Blackberry classes their low end models as smartphones.