The Dark Furie

The Guardian newspaper has reported recently that Nokia is working on an Android operating system phone, quoting industry insiders as their source. I'd heard that a major newspaper was working on this rumour-based story a while ago and had the Guardian article forwarded to me just before I went to bed this morning but largely ignored it because it's so obviously a great stinking pile of bollocks. Nokia has spent millions buying out the other partners who own Symbian, many more millions transferring that into an open source format, and an undisclosed figure (which I suspect to be in the millions, surprisingly) evolving the system into it's upcoming forms. Would they throw all that down the drain by openly supporting another operating system? The smart money is on no.

And then I came online this morning and checked my feeds...

NOKIA MAKING ANDROID PHONE!

It's everywhere. Almost all the big Symbian and general phone sites have picked up the story and are running with it, taking it as gospel truth. It's a shame really, especially as Nokia released this statement shortly afterwards.

Absolutely no truth to this whatsoever. Everyone knows that Symbian is our preferred platform for advanced mobile devices.

Yeah, here's the thing: when a newspaper prints a speculative piece that ends with them saying that a company was unavailable for comment, wait until the company comments before confirming it yourself and speculating further. That way you lose a few early visits you'd gain from people coming to read such shocking news but you don't look like a gimp when it turns out to be wrong and don't lose readers by printing false stories. The eternal blogging question is whether to be first or be accurate. With so many blogs around, many run by teams it's almost impossible to be first (I think I've managed it about three times in two years) but being right is worth the extra time it takes to go to print.