RIP, Nokia (1865 - 2014)
pandodaily.com
pandodaily.com
> 2003-2008 = back when euro was worth real money.
1 euro was worth between 1.1 and 1.5$. Now, it is worth 1.25$...
> Rather than spend its resources on building an OS that depended on novel interfaces and sensors,
Like the first (and best) GPS phones?
> that allowed for outside development
Like symbian and the nokia owned qt creator.
> If Nokia had gone with Android[...] Windows Phone, on the other hand [...]
Aren't you forgetting the numerous other hands that are symbian and its successors: tizen, meego and meltemi?
> Elop [...] clear-eyed
Humm. Choosing to ditch their own system to use another one may have been a bold and smart move, but still developping 2 or 3 different systems while trying to integrate an external new (and unproven) one seems to me like increasing the problem rather than solving it.
Note the author. All his articles are like this.
No. Nokia could've been Samsung, which has the lion's share of the Android market. And Android Lumia would be the prettiest Android handset on the market.
Instead, it was the way that the phone software UI was put together. It was awful. So bad, in fact, that my friend replaced almost all of the software widgets and components with his own - by the end the phone looked amazing, and virtually nothing like Samsung/Telstra's UI.
And this is where Nokia could win. By producing amazing, kick-arse phones (which we actually know they can do!) and putting on Android, with a compelling feature-set, I believe they'd wipe the floor with Samsung, et al. Probably not so much with Apple, but they could yet compete head to head with them.
The innovation just isn't there. I don't see it with WP8. There's just not enough compelling reasons for me to go back to Nokia. And I was so badly burnt by the last phone I used, that I'm unlikely to go back without a good reason!
Seems like there's a tremendous opportunity for the right group to prosper. I'm not sure that's Nokia.
Apple combines several factors:
- A culture of good programming that works well
- A culture of good design
- A company where the efforts of different parts are well aligned
- The ability to market
The one thing which made the iPhone great was that it finally broke the streak of smart-phones all cloning the horrible, messy and unintuitive Nokia-model which had plagued the industry since the mid 90s.
Take my words for it: Nokia would have fucked up Android just as much as it messed up Symbian. Nothing pretty would have come out of this.
I have an N810 Internet Tablet and the UI is beautiful and easy to use, despite the hardware having drawbacks. (Resistive touchscreen, CPU a bit too slow.)
The N900 and later N9, based on the same Maemo codebase, fixed these problems and reportedly have beautiful, easy, fast UIs.
So no I won't "take your word for it" when the data suggest otherwise. Symbian was fucked to begin with. If it's a pain in the ass to develop for, nobody but NOBODY is going to put in the requisite UI polish.
Both Motorola and HTC's sales and profits are depressing. Motorola was bought by Google for its patents, not because it's such a healthy company.
Amazon and B&N don't share any data regarding their Android offerings, we have no idea if they are making any profit off it. Also, they're not exactly using stock Android — they're building platforms that have nothing to do with Google, its Marketplace, or any other Google services and apps.
Motorola was left for dead before Android. HTC jumped out to an early lead with Android and their stock went up 400%.
> they're not exactly using stock Android
I think you're missing why Google open sourced Android. What B&N and Amazon did with it is exactly the point of why Android is open source. Google would rather have no one "win" the mobile space than have a closed source company like Apple or Microsoft win the war again and get into a situation like Windows / IE was for the last 20 years on desktop.
And they're both in the toilet now. Android saved neither company.
I think you're missing why Google open sourced Android. What B&N and Amazon did with it is exactly the point of why Android is open source
Google cares about selling ads. It shows those ads on websites, in emails, in apps, and in services like search and mail.
Before iOS and Android, smartphones ran Symbian, Blackberry or Windows Mobile. None of those had a decent web browser, which Google needed to attract users and show ads.
So it's pretty obvious why Google bought Android and why they open sourced it.
Now, do you want to guess what would happen if Amazon and B&N added built-in ad blocking to their Android devices?
So instead of being a possible also-ran me-too in a large, successful market, they're an also-ran me-too in a small, uncertain market. I'm not buying the logic.
If they used the Android bit to explain a wholesale adoption of Meego or Tizen or something then sure. But going to WP...that just doesn't make sense.
One of the benefits Nokia has by going with Windows Phone is the relationship it now has with Microsoft. I'd be very surprised if Nokia's tablet offering isn't front and center in just about every piece of marketing MS does.
The biggest issue that Windows Phone has currently is a lack of third party applications. I really do think that standardizing the platform across Phone/Tablet/PC will help in a big way with this problem (not pushing them to higher numbers than iOS/Android, but much, much closer than they are today).
The bigger issue, from my personal experience seeing people pick up and use a WP7 device, is that it's awkward to use compared to the grid of icons in iOS and Android. They're utterly confused and have no idea how to even begin. Metro, as executed by MS, is simply not intuitive. The starkness of the white on black text is cold and unfriendly. Interaction paradigms they learned from iOS and Android are slightly different in WP7, which results in frustration around every corner. The pure icon based menus make it a guessing game on which icon does what. From my personal experience, regular people have a much easier time switching between Android and iOS. WP is just too different.
Yes - http://paidcontent.org/2010/09/09/419-average-number-of-apps...
Any really strong selling app for iPhone, will make it to Andriod which will make it to Windows.
The number of apps in your market is not really important when you have the web.
[ADDED] This may not be as true for Apple users because of the smaller screen size and slower web. For me, I have the LTE Galaxy so I just go right to the web. It is almost as good as my laptop due to the larger screen and LTE. I would guess when the new iPhone comes out, apps will probably become even less important.
The whole assumption of a constant connection thing really gets on my nerves and there are plenty of native apps which are hobbled by it. There's nothing more frustrating than launching a native app which logically should be self contained only to have it sit there with the UI blocking for ages while it tries to access something on a crap data connection. For example, I truly hate the CalMac ferry app because it should just cache the timetable data in a CoreData (or a web app with offline database would work well too), its probably <100k of timetable data and it yet it tries to redownload a PDF for my ferry seemingly every time I try to access it......Grrrrrrr (timetable stashed in dropbox instead).
[1]About 1-3 bars of 2G signal. No 3G signal within 100 miles in every direction from where I'm sitting.
I told you what I do which is what everyone else will do. I don't need to tell them, it will happen on its on.
The vast majority of people who can afford smart phones live in areas where there is consistent internet.
In heavily populated areas the trend toward improving internet connectivity will continue. Eventually the productivity gains from creating apps will only be useful in specific situations.
Areas now that are still hard to use internet are improving in most cities. Places like metros, basements, etc will all have internet some day.
If you are stuck somewhere very rural, you will be increasingly fustrated.
WP7: list of icons with names, which you can pick some that you use most often and pin them to the first screen you see, except these icons then change sometimes to display more information such as weather forecast, Facebook updates, etc.
This is too different how? The icons on the menus are pretty clearly designed to show you what they do. If you're still confused, there's a [...] in the corner which shows text. All of this is completely discoverable, explained in the manual, and should be showcased by the salesman who is trying to help you decide (rather than trying to sell you his favorite phone).
Too different how?
In showing the phone to my family/friends the biggest confusion I have found was the People pane. They thought in terms of the Facebook app and the Twitter app. Once I explained that those apps are all 'in' the people pane and linked to their phone profile things went smoothly. Overall I felt they really liked the look of the phone.
Personally I like the social media integration and the tile interface look. Rather than a feeling of reaching out to Twitter or Facebook those things are delivered to me. I don't have Joe on Facebook and Joe on Twitter, etc. I just have Joe and all his updates are delivered and grouped together in a nice way.
Seamless conversations between text and IM is another feature picked up from WebOS that I feel is invaluable once you start using it.
as an example (yes I read the anecdote article :) ) I spent the weekend with extended family who were going on and on about how great Instagram was and how they couldn't understand why anybody would even think about a phone that didn't have it. I'm sure when I see them again in 6 weeks or so, the argument will be the same, with only the specific app that changes.
While MS will have whatever "the" app is at a current moment from time to time, due to it's marketshare, iOS will almost always have it.
That being said, I own a phone I have to root in order to get a decent system only because of the app base. Even average non-tech user browses sites and stumbles upon mobile apps every day. There is always an iPhone app, most of the time Android one and very very occasionally a Windows Phone version.
So windows seems to be an obscure choice in mobile market nowadays. Even though it's probably superior to Android.
There was a story recently that Microsoft already had considered taking over Nokia but walked away from the deal after looking at their books, which may mean that MS is just waiting for an opportune moment to take over Nokia on the cheap.
If the failboat called RIM has managed to stay afloat for so long, I cannot see Nokia failing any faster.
At least Nokia has (finally) released something which belongs in this time and age, while RIM still insists it will release BB OS 10 "real soonish now", like it has for the past year. Or is it years? Plural? I don't know. I just know that their current premium product is something which was hard to sell 3 years ago. They're so dead.
Where I live, the Blackberry-stores have started stocking iPhones and Samsung Android-phones just to sell something. The Nokia-stores are at least still selling Nokia-phones only.
I have no doubt that Nokia tanking is a very real possibility. But RIM is going down first. Unlike Nokia, they have absolutely nothing.
"Toronto-based original device manufacturer Celestica on Monday announced that it will stop producing hardware for struggling mobile device vendor Research In Motion. Celestica stated that it will wind down manufacturing services related to BlackBerry devices over the next three to six months, and it expects restructuring charges to be less than $35 million"
http://www.bgr.com/2012/06/18/celestica-dumps-blackberry-rim...
Nokia has nothing like this in terms of stickiness for customers.
Fast forward to 2011 late/early 2012; virtually NONE of the techies I interact with recommended a Nokia. Infact, I haven't heard even one of my friends/acquaintances purchase a new Nokia; it is always Samsung/HTC/iPhones or rarely Blackberry. On the lower end, the flood of cheap Chinese phones in the Indian market means no cheap Nokia's.
Nokia was a name many people swore by in India, now not so much...I am afraid the end is near for them.
No. Just... no.
I'm really pleased that Symbian is dead (or on life support). It is, so far, the worst platform I have ever had to deal with. Eclipse-based IDE for €300-1300, partner-only premium APIs, completely unusable multi-gigabyte emulator (if you needed to run two instances, you had to install... two copies in different directories!), awful documentation, terrible system libraries, and quirky Symbian C++ dialect... it was quite an experience, but I will never miss it.
Anything we have today is better than Symbian.
They burned through cash getting the Lumia phones ready, gorgeous as they are, which is a gamble not yet to pay off. They're using the third horse in the race, a platform which it's creators have yet to successfully manage into the mainstream consciousness. Too many flaws to stand next to Android and iOS, but not completely down yet.
Lets not forget Nokia is still one of the biggest mobile handset companies in the world, they've got a solid brand name appreciation in areas of the world yet to be opened up.
Essentially they've still got chips left on the table, it just depends on the next run of cards whether they grow their stack or not. But lets not get in the way of a snappy headline.
Flash their back catalogue of 800s with stock ICS, call it the Nokia Lumia A, sell them for $200 a pop (sans contract). That'll stem the bleeding and give them time to come up with their real Galaxy-killer.
Also, I would be sad to see Nokia go - I always liked their well-built (dumb) phones.
and saying 'RIP Nokia' is very bad...i feel Nokia is still the best with its hardware and looks..i like Nokia 900 looks n hardware rather S3....
Android would have been better option...but they can switch to ANdroid as well when Windows 8 is not helping..there should be no worries about that...