A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world | Hacker News Reader

A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

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139 pointsrkwz84 comments

Nokia has a pretty unparalleled manufacturing/delivery/logistics chain for low end phones. They like to claim they can put a phone on a shelf anywhere in africa for less than competitors' manufacturing costs. That's pretty impressive, if true. But we're talking about phones that retail for $35. The smartphones are a joke.

But the software! I sure hope Qt is starting to pay some dividends for them. When i was dealing with native Symbian/S40/S60 development a few years ago, I wanted to stick a fork in my eye.

Just writing to agree.

I have started learning native development at first. That was good experience from the point that you get some inner understanding how Symbian works but overall it is too hard to develop using native code.

As well I am developing actively two Qt based Symbian applications during my free time currently. I really love it because I can in relatively small time develop nice and working applications. There are some problems still (e.g. kinetic scrolling, problems with QtMobility on some phones, like flagman N8, full screen issues and etc.) but it looks like those problems will be solved in the future.

I love that development on Linux is possible as well.

Just yesterday I attended a presentation on the upcoming Qt Quick toolkit and QML, the language for defining UIs. Should have support for both Meego and whatever Symbians remain. QML looked quite nice in itself and a definite improvement but, in historical context, I'm not yet convinced…

I have not considered using QML at all. At the moment samples were unusable or very slow on Nokia E51. Pure Qt from other side was faster than I have expected. Actually I do not feel difference from native applications.

TwimGo is a nice example of using QML: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak-Py3cf_Ac

The big threat there isn't Motorola or Samsung figuring out a way to ship phones around the world more efficiently -- it's local competitors in emerging markets. For example, India-based Micromax is gaining serious market share in the country at Nokia's expense.

This is not true. Micromax phones are just re-branded chinese/korean knockoff phones. There was a craze for these phone two years back because of dual-sim capability. Now everybody realized that the quality is very bad and started buying nokia/samsung/lg dual-sim phones instead.

Lots of local brands have suddenly gained some traction in Indian market. Mostly because of their cheap prices (Micromaxx brought out an Android one for $130!).

Also, if you look at the PR of these new mobile companies, they are mostly targeted at the people living in rural areas. So, they are in fact eating a part of Nokia's pie, but a final verdict can be said only a couple of years later. Micromaxx is going public soon, so, lets wait and see how many of them make it.

That was my thought as well. Anyone have a chart of the margins? Is the 60/40 split inverted?.

Although their smart-phones (which predate the iPhone by many years) have had commercial success world wide that would make any manufacturer extraordinarily jealous.

Nokia is also finally about to catch up on the developer side, which might prove to be a big advantage. If ease of development is in any way correlated with application quality, we might see some action in the Nokia world soon.

For the little glimpses that I've seen, UI development using Qt Quick and QML and is actually pretty nice. Nothing like the Symbian hell, and seemed a good deal more fun than developing for Android. (Can't say it's on par with iOS though, at least not yet.)

This is the first time I'm actually _excited_ by a Nokia technology.

Now is a good time to check it out, since the first phones supporting 4.7 are supposed to come out "soon" (my source at Nokia was reluctant at naming a specific date). And they just put out a new technology preview:

http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-pr...

If Qt / QML Quick seems a bit barebones, there's a library called Qt Components which adds things like checkboxes, progress bars etc.:

http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components

I was in Rwanda last summer teaching a class on programming/entrepreneurship centered on mobile devices. The ubiquity and penetration of Nokia phones there is pretty incredible. Even some of the poorest of people have cell phones. Essentially, they are the only form of computing device for many of them, so it IS their smartphone. There are many services and businesses centered around SMS applications that are very useful. Rather than expensive plans, there are people lining the streets selling prepaid "airtime". Their 3G network is also just as fast as any I've had in the US despite not being connected to SEACOM (although this may be due to lack of traffic on the 3G network, I had a Nexus One Google provided while I was there). Nokia was one of the sponsors of my program because they see how valuable the African market is with their explosion of cell phone growth in the past few years.

Isn't there quite a bit of data though to make this very static picture of the market somewhat irrelevant? I'm not trying to spread FUD. I would seriously like enlightenment if I'm wrong, but these are the conceptions that I have with respect to the more fluid nature of the market:

-The trend, throughout the world, is going heavily against Nokia

-Nokia's margins on each unit is a fraction of the competition

-Nokia's relevance is largely in a market (phones) which is being overtaken, faster in some parts of the world than others, by SmartPhones

-Profits for 3rd party developers of Nokia products are smaller than profits for 3rd party developers of the competition.

I'm sure there was a point in history when horses were more popular than cars in most of the world and we all know how that turned out.

Yes the penetration of smartphones is increasing, but I personally know a lot of people who don't want smartphone. For example, 2 out of 3 of my friends who owns iPhone said to me that "...but my previous nokia [dumbphone] was better", and are not planing to buy another smartphone. So it's still an open question what the ratio between smartphone and dumbphone will be in the future. But Nokia's dumbphones are certainly not going away anytime soon.

Wait until the internet capabilities on smartphones get realised.

On a bus for 30 minutes? Use the phone to browse HN. etc

Almost any phone can browse the web today.

Yeah, but not in a way that approaches the usefulness of a desktop browser.

Yep, Nokia N900 is the only phone accomplishing that :-)

For example, Android and iOS browsers skipped the rather useful contentEditable functionality. On my N900 I have it.

what does it do?

Edit: OK, not that I know what it does, what do you use it for on your N900?

http://html5demos.com/contenteditable

Suffice it to say, this is not the reason why smartphones are so much better at browsing the web than feature phones.

The N900 also has the only implementation of Firefox Mobile. Adblock Plus is in my pocket.

Actually, it's on Android as well. I haven't tried it for a few versions (it...needed some work then), but it is available.

Install Opera Mini.

There are many things you can do on the phone. Not that many you want to do, given the experience.

If browsing the web on the phone is as easy as on iOS or Android it’s not a dumb phone, it’s a smart phone.

Its a better experience on some phones than others; "Surfing the web" in Blackberry's browser is closer to "drowning the web" and rendering nothing correctly.

You can do that with old phones that have WAP browsers. OK. Someone needs to write WAP proxy for HN :)

That's what I do every time I'm on a bus :)

I do the same on the Phoenix light rail; This site's layout performs really well on mobile devices; Loading a beast like Digg on my N900 would make me twitch for kill -9.

Betting against high-selling low-margin products would be like betting against Wal-Mart. You can co-exist with them but you can't beat them at their own game, and their game is around to stay.

Betting that learning an app development framework plus Mandarin to sell apps on $35 phones probably isn't the best strategy for developers is more reasonable though.

Why not? Long before the iPhone, several people got rich by selling J2ME apps to low end phones.

Can you name one or two J2ME apps that you ever purchased? I can't and I don't know anybody who did. It was a disaster trying to publish back then.

I published a J2ME app that was bought 20000 times. I also worked for a J2ME games company for a while.

Not sure if I ever bought a J2ME app myself. But then I have only bought one app for iPhone/Android so far: Monkey Island.

China has developers that already know Mandarin.

Makes sense. But there's a difference between staying and growing, especially in financial terms. It's the reason Nokia's shares have dropped 70% in 3 years.

Android phones are getting pretty cheap, too.

I agree with that, but I'm not sure Nokia's going to remain the king of the low-end phones. The barriers to entry are lower and competition even at the low end is increasing.

Smartphones won't be Nokia's nemesis - indigenous innovation will.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/hardware/nokia-...

A new generation of feature phones by Indian brands, at mid-low price points, with features designed specifically for the rural Indian consumer is kicking Nokia's butt in the fastest growing mobile market. The story can easily repeat itself in Africa and the Middle East.

Some of these features include dual sims for patchy coverage, bigger battery to feed 2 sims, flashlight for when the power goes out every day, FM radio which doesnt need headphones because Indians dont mind loud music and saris don't have pockets for them anyway.

- The trend is against Nokia when it comes to US tech-blogs and web sites or US analysts.

- Nokia's margins vary depending on the model. I would expect margins on the N8 to be entirely different from margins on 5230 and both of them are smart phones.

- Nokia has been making smart phones since before Android or iPhone were invented, their relevance is in communication technology.

- iPhone is the king here. I've heard of success stories both from Android and Ovi.

Horses vs cars has nothing to do with iPhone/Android vs Nokia. Nokia high-end devices might not have the nice iPhone UX/UI, but they compete more than adequately on other features. And that's just Symbian, the OS that is "supposedly" dying. I'm curious to see what happens when/if MeeGo is done.

Nokia's quarterly profits have dropped 40 percent year-on-year. Symbian lost 10% of it's marketshare in one year and Android's worldwide marketshare is now quickly approaching that of Symbian.

I think the future (and the profits) are undoubtedly in smartphones and that's an area where Nokia has, so far, been unable to compete and they don't seem to have a working strategy going forward.

"Nokia's relevance is largely in a market (phones) which is being overtaken, faster in some parts of the world than others, by SmartPhones"

Nokia's 40% slice is of the smartphone market, not the overall phone market. The article's whole point is that nokia is the biggest smartphone seller in the world, and everybody's pretending they only make feature phones.

Nokia makes smartphones. Sure, they make (a lot of) dumbphones, but they also make (a lot of) smartphones. That graph was of app store visits, and thus only counts smartphones.

I've not heard an agreed definition of smartphone, but by all the various definitions I've heard, Nokia devices like the N8 are smartphones:

* Downloadable apps? Check.

* Downloadable apps written in a language that can segfault? Check.

* App store? Check.

* Large colour screen? Check.

* Touch screen? Check. (This one's a pretty debatable requirement though.)

* Desktop-equivalent web browser? Check.

* Flash? Check. (Hehe.)

* Sends and receives email? Check.

* Share your 3G connection over USB, Bluetooth or wifi? Check.

* Called "iPhone"? Ch... ah, damn.

I'm not trying to get into an argument about which device is a better smartphone, but I cannot understand when people say things like "Nokia can't compete against smartphones".

The definition of smartphones has gone to hell ever since the iPhone came out.

It's like comparing an Audi to a Rolls-Royce: - Four Wheels? Check - Electric windows? Check - Radio? Check and so on...

It's not about the features - it's about the polish. Before iPhone came Nokia was the best (IMO) producer of the phones in the world. But today? They are far behind Apple and far behind any producer that uses Android. Their phones are buggy, their OS is a crap, software development for Symbian is a hell, and the market..

Well - I don't know about the market. Numbers show that Nokia has 57% in China, but what about sales? Apple brags that they've put something around $1.5bln in the hands of developers. What about Nokia?

Nokia sells alot of dumbphones right? Nokia sells more smartphones than dumbphones. Oh, and they've also been the most successful in transitioning customers to smartphones (60-70% of nokia dumbphone users become nokia smartphone users). Reading the US-centric blogs and tech-sites makes it seem like only the US companies are in the smartphone market (Google with Android, Apple with iOS, etc)

While I understand the need for a metric to see where you should allocate R&D resources, most of these types of articles(as in not just this one, most of the iOS or Android as well) seem to be more interested in a branding popularity contest than providing any sort of useful info. Personally I dont care if swarms of people love or hate the device I use as long as it serves my needs. It just seems sorta tabloid-y to me.

Whenever I read an article like this, I wonder what exactly they'd like me to do. Build software for customers whose markets I'm not familiar with, languages I don't speak, and customs and tastes I'm ignorant of? Sounds like a recipe for failure to me.

they want you to have a perspective

What is the chart measuring? The article implies that it represents App Store visits. Do they buy anything, though? That's the metric that's important to developers.

Heya, author here.

That's the tricky thing. As far as I can tell, the graph shows what percentage of phone users (or mobile Internet users?) regularly access the stores.

Basically, it suggests that about 9% of app users have iPhones in China (which still seems very high -- but I guess they're all in affluent areas), 13% have Android phones, and the rest have Symbian/Nokia phones (65%ish).

Most of the top apps in the China Mobile Mobile Market seem to be Symbian/S60 apps, too: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&...

Agreed. There is obviously a huge Nokia/Symbian user base, but it would be interesting to learn more about the demographics/buying habits/Internet-usage habits for those users. If many of them are in rural or developing areas, their ISP may only offer a capped bandwidth plan which may cause them to shy away from using data-intensive apps, or they may just not be as motivated to use some apps that ultimately lead to revenue generation (either directly through app purchases or down the line via upgrades or services that compliment the initial app download).

This article[1] suggests that the Ovi store gets 2.7 million app downloads a day. The Apple App store gets 17 million app downloads a day with less than half the marketshare.

[1] http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/11/09/10-reasons-why-you...

Maybe Nokia has 41% of the market today, but back in 2006 they had 76% of it (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian). They're losing ground like an avalanche, Symbian is quickly becoming irrelevant in this world.

Any tales of HN-ers experience with Symbian?

The only way to do productive Symbian development in a non-deprecated environment is to use Qt. Run away from anything that says "Symbian" but isn't Qt.

The latest Symbian ships with a version of Qt (4.6.3) that isn't the cutting edge, but is good enough.

In typical Nokia manner, they've managed to make a dog's dinner of the SDK options: there's a regular Qt SDK, a Nokia-branded Qt SDK, a Symbian^3 SDK, a technology preview of Qt 4.7 for Symbian, etcetera ad absurdum.

AFAIK, the "Nokia Qt SDK" is the one you want. (If you make the mistake of choosing the wrong download and ask about it in the forums, prepare for condescending replies from Nokia employees who seemingly can't come to grips with the idea that they should provide a service to developers. I hope the new management will be able to do something about the innovation-hostile, inbred, not-invented-here cultural factions at Nokia.)

- -

Despite the confusing options and cultural issues, the Nokia QT SDK is really quite nice. There are a few other very good things about the new Symbian^3 platform:

- It has GPU acceleration as a standard, so you can rely on advanced features like OpenGL ES 2.0.

- The platform is more than merely a single high-end device. There's a very nice mid-range option available already (the C6-01). The total sales of this platform should turn out quite impressive over its lifetime.

- Nokia has promised to ship new features as free updates to Symbian^3, rather than baking them into firmware on new devices only as they used to do. AFAIK, these updates will include Qt 4.7 and a rewritten browser.

- -

Unfortunately, Nokia is also shipping devices with the older Symbian versions. Qt is also the best way to write software for these platforms.

There's a "Qt Smart Installer" that is sort of a package manager. It's supposed to ensure that 3rd party applications can easily depend on Qt by simply packaging the Smart Installer with their apps. I don't know how well it works in practice, but if the alternative is to write to the crusty old Symbian C++ API, I'd take my chances with Smart Installer any day...

Smart Installer works with old phones indeed. At least with Nokia E51 which is S60 3.1 and is almost 3 years old.

Edit: What's fun. E51 does not have Qt support officially while works like a charm.

Easier of cross platform development is a good reason to use JavaMe in lieu of Qt when developing for Symbian because Android does not fully support C++ development.

[edit] eSWT provides access the GPU under Java.

JavaMe is not that cross-platform from what I've been told. Qt runs on Linux (including embedded), Mac, Windows, BeOS and Symbian/Maemo.

Only one of those operating systems, Symbian, is used on phones to any extent. JavaME runs under both Symbian and Android - and that's a lot of Mobile platforms. So if one is developing a mobile app on Symbian, Qt may not be the most flexible option once other currently available mobile platforms are considered.

From what I've seen, all Android phones do not have JavaME installed as default. My Samsung Galaxy I5700 did have it, but another phone my college tested with didn't have it.

This killed "hey we can just use our current MIDlet for Android users" -idea for us.

If anyone knows better, please let me know. Working on porting a MIDlet to Andoid right now. :)

I don't think this is true anymore. Just check out http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gingerbread-n...

There's an unofficial Qt android port too. http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/

The smart installer is like the .NET or Java runtime installers. It works in practice.

Preloading the framework in the firmware works even better though...

I used to work on Symbian (C++ code) for a few years, and the fork and eye comment from nobody_nowhere sums up my experience. [ We did have quite a nice product, http://prosessiongolf.com/, but I guess it was too much too soon in terms of people spending money on applications for mobile phones. ]

More recently (last year) I wanted to test an app concept, and built it with PyS60, i.e. Python for S60. Working with that platform was really nice, very good for rapid testing, but getting the installer right for some beta testers around the world was already a pain -- wouldn't want even to try a full commercial release. Also the UI APIs are quite lacking. But still, really nice working in an environment where you have the Python console running on the phone, connected to your PC via Bluetooth for running commands directly.

[HN meta]

Btw, why is the parent comment being ranked as the second-to-last? It's got enough upvotes and discussion that, intuitively, it should be higher.

Has something changed about the HN comment ranking algorithm lately?

[/HN meta]

I think it depends on commenter karma (mass) and is inverse (square?) proportional with time elapsed. Comments with the highest 'gravity' float to the top.

Child comments don't modify the parent's gravity, do they?

It's not about the current data, it's about the trends.

This is like saying that "90% of people still uses horse-powered vehicles to make their trips" five years after the invention of the steam engine.

I don´t know if that´s fair, as the Nokia smartphones I´ve used are really quite nice. Their high-end options like the N8 and N900 are phones I would rather have than my Droid 2.

This is basically the default avid-tech-blog-reader response :)

The only real trend is that Android is gaining ground -- which is no surprise, given that Android phones are the cheapest to make, and will only get cheaper!

Nokia/Symbian phones have just as many 'rich' features as their iOS/Android cousins. They're just not marketed as well, and they don't have the orgiastic support of the tech blogs.

nokia is ubiquitous in India.heck the subaltern has a song about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpKodZMQr8

About 3 years ago in the UK, business people had Blackberrys and everyone else had Nokia or Sony Ericsson phones. Fast forward to now and business people have iPhones or Blackberrys while teenagers tend to use Blackberrys (they're cheap and good at messaging). Others have iPhones or Androids with the exception of people who haven't upgraded their phone in a while who still have Nokia or Sony Ericsson devices.

Nokia has very little presence here in North America for reasons I haven't been able to fathom.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that most people in the UK will have have owned a Nokia at some point in the last 10-15 years. The brand really is that common. It's the cheap first phone you get, or a fast replacement if your smartphone dies and you still have a contract to uphold, or the phones parents buy their kids 'for emergencies'.

Nokia owns much of the GSM standard, and thus dislikes making CDMA phones. This limits their major models to the AT&T network in the USA.

Nokia also dislikes selling phones trough carriers -- they prefer marketing directly to consumers, not tying their phones to carrier-specific plans.

Together, this means that in the US there is only one carrier where their major model phones work, and that carrier considers Nokia's strategy to be openly hostile to them.

So no wonder they don't sell much.

Nokia also doesn't cut deals with carriers to subsidize the cost of their phones like many Android phone manufacturers do. "$520 for a phone? I can almost buy a laptop for that!"

My coworker from USA couldn't believe that I have paid 200$ for smartphone. I'm from Europe.

You can comfort yourself with the fact that after comparing the contracts, he probably paid a lot more for his.

Never thought that the word 'subaltern' would ever turn up in tech discussion. Good one. :)

While Americans carry dogs around in handbags, Koreans eat them.

This is racist shock-talk aimed at Americans. Yes, this happens in Korea. My understanding is that some older people believe that by eating a dog, you gain the creature's vitality. I know that the majority of Koreans who live in the United States do not do this and their only involvement with the practice is to find such talk embarrassing. In many european countries, people also eat horses, which many Americans would find just as shocking. In parts of Louisiana, a lot of people will happily cook and eat just about any mammal.

Personally, I find this hypocritical, as many Americans happily (likely unknowingly) feed their family dog the processed meat of other dogs.

http://www.bukisa.com/articles/294021_is-there-dog-meat-in-d...

Nokia is still pretty popular with the average person here in Italy, I think. The OVI store is a big ugly hairball though and unless they seriously fix things up, I've given up on trying to get my applications into it. The signing process is extremely bureaucratic.

Hey, we still keep a prepaid Nokia around for basic phone calls. If you're just needing to call someone, they still get the job done, and oddly enough, the calling experience is often better (better sound) than on a smartphone.

Plus, it has a built in flashlight. Who can argue with that? ;)

The article doesn't consider India where Nokia is the dominant player. But most of the phones they sell here are low-end to mid-range. They aren't that popular for smartphones. I don't have any statistics to show for this just my experiences.

Are those percentages of users? How about market share of revenue?

Until I can get a proper asian localization (on a shoestring budget) Nokia can have 100% market shere over there. It won't be of any use to me :(

I believe that Android does a pretty good job if you can find a good 3rd party soft keyboard. I havent used done much more than kick the tires in hangeul but Android seems to be pretty popular here in Korea.

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