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Comment by nobody_nowhere | Hacker News Reader

Nokia is a great lesson in the failure of checklist-based product development.

Better camera? check. Better battery? check. Better speakerphone? check. Better antenna? check. Better supply chain? check. Better margins? check.

And they're still getting their clock cleaned in smartphones because of what's missing from the list: user experience, software quality, developer ecosystem, etc.

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Well, they did sell 21.5 million smartphones last quarter, up 57% from the year before. That's nearly as many phones as Apple sold last year.

Nokia is certainly a massively successful company. But three years ago, nobody could TOUCH them in smartphones. The mobile computing market was theirs to lose. And they lost it to Apple.

Sure, but look at their financials. They're selling 'nearly as many' phones, but making massively less money.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of Symbian^4. As the 10+ year old Symbian UI framework is tossed out of the window and replaced by a Qt graphicsview based new one it requires all the app UIs to be rewritten there's a good chance to see some real improvements i.e. a real touch based UI instead of touch glued on top of dpad UI.

What comes to the developing environment Nokia has taken a huge leap (ok ok any improvement of the late atrocity is a huge improvement :)) by adopting Qt and their tools. It's hard to find people who will put Qt down.

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