Comment by kb101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kb101 | Hacker News Reader

It is definitely noteworthy that the N9 and the N8, both examples of excellent hardware running competitive software, have basically been sandbagged by Nokia.

Contrast this with RIM, who just released a slew of stop-gap phones until QNX (BBX) is ready... but they still are promoting the hell out of those phones and are getting decent sales, keeping the company viable. And those aren't even world-beating phones.

Meantime, the N8 with its pentaband radio and Zeiss camera, and the N9 showing off the best of Meego, get no promotion at all... really does make you wonder. Microsoft-hatred might indeed be a disease, but Nokia threw out Symbian and Meego for an OS that is (for all its positive reviews) unproven.

Symbian Belle and Meego are definitely competitive options and offer a lot. Any tech site (engadget etc.) reviewing the N9 basically wound up mourning the premature death of Meego and wondering what might have been. In the case of the N8, the common assessment was it was stellar hardware with an OS that was almost there... well I think Belle pushed it over that line to being something competitive.

This is the same madness that Apotheker brought to HP, trashing established businesses just because they weren't sexy enough and then immediately trying to import the business model of the last company he worked at. I don't think Elop is a mole but he definitely has yet to do anything except destroy value at Nokia.

Calling RIM viable is a stretch. They were steadily losing marketshare before the new iPhone (the first on all US carriers) and ICS phones were launched. We may easily see iOS 6 and the iPad 3 before BBX sees the light of day - I'm skeptical that a company with a 4 P/E ratio can survive the year they're about to have.

Better to be in Nokia's position and have a complete, focused operating system relaunch before the year end. Nokia will have a line of interesting, desirable products before the end of 2011 and RIM will be in serious danger of a buyout/reorganization.

The N8? Which didn't have a QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode until a year after release? That would randomly lock up when interacting with the UI?

That OS was nowhere near the level of its competitors.

Symbian Belle. Basically, it's on Android level now. They did the whole interface from ground up using Qt and GPU acceleration. The earlier versions were really horrible though.

Well actually, the N9's been promoted a bit around Australia, as far as I can see. I've been seeing ads for it on public transport, both in buses and at major train stations.

Makes me wonder why they'd be bothering with throwing these advertising dollars around if the N9 ecosystem is pretty much doomed anyway.

Makes me wonder why they'd be bothering with throwing these advertising dollars around if the N9 ecosystem is pretty much doomed anyway.

They need to sell high-end phones to try to prop-up their revenue until the Windows phones are ready. It's pretty consumer-hostile, though.

Except why only push it in their smaller markets?

I just used an N8.

My pocket review: absolutely not ready for prime-time - number pad shrank and grew a couple of pixels every time I touched it during a call, with associated delay for the redraw.

The hardware seemed ok (although I'm no fan of their design language now, and yet their first WinPhones will have the same?), the display crisp and the telephone functionality was entirely fine.

But the clunky software, as well as the user interface just reeked of something rushed out by amateurs in the mid 1990s. Competitive? Nope.

As a current Android user, I await with interest what WinPhone can offer. Nokia's homebrew? Not so much.

Your opinion matches the consensus when the N8 came out loaded with Symbian ^3 (generally deemed to have been rushed out the door); but I am curious if you had the opportunity to see which version of Symbian was running on the phone you tested. Were there three homescreens by any chance?

I'll check tomorrow; I simply used it as a telephone and was forced to interact with UI features to do so: first impressions are sometimes quite important, and it really did the opposite of wowing me.

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