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.