Microsoft 'mulled Nokia buyout, ran away screaming'
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
Yeah, that was because before that Nokia had double the time it takes to get a phone on the market compared to everyone else who has already joined Android.
HTC, Samsung and Motorola can put a "next-gen" phone on the market within 10 months, maybe even 9. So can Apple, but they prefer to keep it on a 12 month cycle. Same goes for Sony Ericsson until more recently, but they've almost caught up with the others now. It's not a coincidence that the former 2 phone manufacturing leaders were the slowest.
Nokia's "last good Symbian phone", the N8, took like a year and a half to get launched, maybe more. The "Meego based" phone, the N9, was also delayed a lot (had different name for a while).
Does this mean they have caught up with everyone else now? I don't see it. Maybe it's because WP7's slow adoption rate for latest hardware, or it's Nokia's fault again, or maybe both. But I still see them using very old hardware in their phones, which means their development cycle for "current" phones started quite a while back. Otherwise they should be able to make phones with cutting edge technology, like most Android manufacturers and Apple can.
The current crop of Windows Phone devices have miserable battery life, where the SGS2 and moreso the SGS3 have excellent battery life. I am profoundly confused by what you are claiming.
I wouldn’t say any of the new Nokia Windows Phones (Lumia 710, 800, 900) use ‘old’ hardware at all. You have to realize the WP OS currently doesn’t support dual/quad-core CPUs and has a fixed screen resolution (800x480); so if that’s what you’re referencing, I’d say that’s not a case of slow development cycles but a limitation of the OS that Nokia must abide by.
And what’s the value in just looking at something purely based on hardware? What should matter is how it performs. WP is optimized to work with the minimal hardware specs MSFT has called-for and is remarkably snappy with it's single-core processers, and gets great battery life, so how would ‘newer’ hardware add-value here?
So, given the above, what ‘cutting-edge’ tech would you have them add? Resolution aside, the Lumia 900 has one of the best screens around, it’s 4G, I’d say it has the best offline navigation around (Nokia owns Navteq after all), and I’d say the phone's design itself is pretty cutting-edge as well.
But if Nokia can't have a say in what display resolution or camera to ship, how can they ever hope to produce _anything_ that differentiates them from other WP7 licensees?
Value-added services such as Comes with Music and Free Maps Forever doesn't help here (or at leat it hasn't in the past). It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
But the number one way to sell more Nokia Windows Phones? Get on the other U.S. networks besides AT&T. AT&T is still the king for iPhone but Sprint and Verizon combined sell about as many iPhones as AT&T does, so Windows Phone is missing half the market by only really being on AT&T. (Yes, there are other Windows Phones, but no serious handsets outside of AT&T.)
http://wmpoweruser.com/intel-android-dual-core-so-poor-havin...
Because the entire smartphone industry seems to have been whittled down to a meaningless hardware spec race by ignorant fools. Doesn't have quad core ? Crap phone. No 5 inch screen ? Old hat.
tl;dr, Thanks to good software engineering and lower specs, you get a phone that is completely up-to-date software wise at a great price point.
http://www.intomobile.com/2012/06/04/uk-nokia-lumia-710-now-...
As to why the fixed resolution, my guess is it’s reflective of MSFT’s desired positioning for WP as sitting in the middle of a Mobile OS spectrum; between iOS (totally locked-down, fully integrated hardware/software) and Android (completely open, fragmented hardware/software). In a sense, I guess that’s where Windows has always been, though with WP, it leans closer to the iOS side. Given that, having strict requirements, like that on screen resolution, go towards providing a consistent experience across devices (regardless of OEM) and ensuring all apps work and display the same on all devices, making development easier as well. The way I see it is you get iOS consistency and security (and some limitations) with the broad device/form-factor selection of Android (less the fragmentation); though, as evident by the resolution limitation, there are of course some compromises made with this approach.
Also, rumor has it [1] that these limitations are largely being relaxed with Windows Phone 8 (aka ‘Apollo’) and the OS will support 4 resolutions. I believe MSFT is holding an event to announce details on WP8 in a week or two.
[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/windows-phone-8-details-...
Despite all of this, it's the worst phone I've ever used. The software was so dire that at one point, phone calls couldn't be made - even where other, older, Nokias could. I actually had to download Ovi, their app store. It wasn't preinstalled! It constantly froze, the touchscreen interface sucks, it's unresponsive even when it does work...
Nokia cannot do smart phone software properly. Here's hoping that Microsoft can do better, but I can assure you that if they do not, Nokia phones won't mean a damn to mostly anyone.
(Not only has the iPhone always used it, not only was it the first phone to ever use it, Steve Jobs was the one who convinced Corning to invent the stuff, if his biography is to be believed.)
Skype effectively can't work on WP7.x. It is an almost useless app as a function of the limitations that Microsoft has imposed because of the hardware that they chose.
In fact that is true throughout the platform -- the sort of powerful, feature rich apps on other platforms simply don't exist on WP because they are strangled by the limitations of the platform.
As a better-than-featurephone email device WP7.x is excellent. And yes, if you focus on flipping between home screen sections the performance is excellent, as it was on WebOS devices. That isn't what people generally use their device for, however.
Skype is fairly poor on WP7.x I agree, but it does the job for voice calls in the interim while Microsoft work on making the carriers into even dumber pipes than they are already.
I think it would be wise not to underestimate Microsoft's vision, even if they do seem a little chaotic at times.
Windows 8 on the desktop will be a serious adjustment for consumers and very early reviews seem to indicate that. The perception of Windows 8 on the desktop could adversely affect WOA.
the main benefit I see in Win8-tablets is that you finally get a real computer for the price of a real computer and not an oversized smartphone you can't use to make phone calls for the price oy a computer. But that's just my opinion.
Of course, Apple has had this for years, but I think that WP holds some pretty good cards for the long run ...
I've been to the developers conferences and tried to build products for their launch devices. There is no grand plan, word on important issues come down the pipeline in real time, are later taken back or only addressed when a developers brings up a serious issue.
At close range, it often appears as if the Windows 8 team has no idea what they are doing, and actually two silo'd communities of Mobile and desktop.
It is to the marketing dept.
Suppose you are a huge and stupid corporate or government customer.
Your users want to have smartphones. A MSFT rep convinces you that using Windows is the safe and reliable choice and with Windows 8 you have the same OS 'brand' on your desktop.
The same argument has kept IBM's mainframe salesmen in new cadilacs for decades.
That was arrogant! Ecosystems are more than just markets.
It seems to have forgotten that platforms are bootstrapped on the basis of killer products, and sustained by interop between a continuous stream of great products. For so long, its platform play was based on extending the Windows platform ("windows everywhere"), and it seems to have institutionally forgotten that the only reason this worked is because WORD AND EXCEL ARE KILLER PRODUCTS. If Word ceased to be the way that 99% of business users interfaced with text of any significance, and if Excel ceased to be the way that 99% of business users capture and analyze data, then the Windows platform "advantage" would evaporate overnight.
So, Microsoft's DNA is to attempt to create "ecosystems" because it considers itself a platform company, whereas most smaller or saner companies look to build great products. Heck, even Apple has to do this. Could it have created an iOS ecosystem if the iPhone was a dud?
(An aside: Android might seem to be an exception to this, because it's not a killer product in the way that iPhone and iPad were. But that's only if you think that phone subscribers are the customers of Android. They're not - the carriers are. Which is why Google's acquisition of Motorola is so interesting and yet so expected at the same time. They've gotten as about as far as they can get on the back of an "OK" product, and need to make a stellar product in order to build an ecosystem of users instead of partners. The carriers don't have it in their DNA to deliver stellar software, and the hardware guys don't either, so Google has to buy a hardware company so it can build a great integrated device.)
Thing is, it's a telco company, they are all horrible.
Otherwise, the margins are going to be slim, non-existent, or in the red on those phones.