Just to throw some water on some of the ridiculousness that is surrounding a single job call by Nokia this morning, we’re going to address this just once.
Evidently Nokia placed a job posting on the site LinkedIn that called for a “Principal Software Engineer, Embedded Linux Middleware”. A few tech sites (who should really know better) said that this is “consistent with Nokia making a tentative, exploratory move into Android territory” and another site headlining “Is Nokia Planning an Android Handset? New Job Listing Suggests So”.
No, it does not...
First off, the idea that hiring one guy is enough to kick off Nokia making an Android phone is a bit much. That’s just not how these things work, folks. Nor is the job requirement consistent with such an endeavor. If we see Nokia hiring large Linux teams spanning various job ranges, including some hardware engineers, then we may raise an eyebrow.
In science there is law of parsimony aka Occam’s Razor. It’s where you choose a hypothesis with the least amount of assumptions and it is fairly standard in regular everyday reasoning (or at least it should be). Following that logic, Nokia is most likely hiring a “Linux guy” to help bring their mapping HERE services to Android or FireFox OS. And if not HERE, other cool things Nokia is working on like Pulse or media sharing capabilities. After all, that’s what they said they were doing—making a HERE app for Android (just like iOS).
Let’s look at what we wrote just a few weeks ago on the matter:
“The Finnish company has also announced a strategic partnership with Mozilla to bring the location experiences to Firefox OS and plans to debut a mobile web version of HERE for the new OS next year. If Apple's iOS and Mozilla wasn't enough then behold more news with Nokia planning to support Android too.With a location-based application in the works for Google's mobile platform, Nokia will make available a HERE SDK for Android OEMs in 2013. “
Gee, why would Nokia hire a Linux guy? Yes, it must be because they’re going to make an Android phone. Ignore everything they just said a few weeks ago about HERE.
It should be clear to many readers of this site that Nokia is more than a hardware company who makes phones. They’re putting a lot of emphasis on their mapping technology and general services—just look at all the augmented reality and photo apps they’ve created recently, including just this morning with PhotoBeamer. And Linux is a broad sword—sure Android is based off it but so aren’t a ton of other embedded systems.
Look, we get it. Android is the most popular mobile OS in the world but what they’re lacking is some killer, sexy hardware. The Nexus line tap dances around that goal but they don’t have any Lumia-type phone to fawn over and that drives Android fans nuts. They want Nokia and they want that sweet, sweet hardware as they have been dreaming about it since June 2011.
But sorry folks, you’re not going to get it and hiring one Linux neckbeard ain’t going to change that fact no matter how hard you want it to. This gets a 1 on our Rum'o'meter.
Update: ...and even Nokia became tired of this rumor as the head of their media relations has put an end to it via a series of Tweets:
