The Royal Nokia Screw-Up That Shouldn’t Have Been | Hacker News Reader

The Royal Nokia Screw-Up That Shouldn’t Have Been

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29 pointscoolswan19 comments

> I’m looking for mobile makers that aim for the stars, giving us brilliant innovations—like the Retina display—before others in their class

I stopped reading there. Devices with similar and even better DPI existed before, and even if they did not, is that a "brilliant innovation"? That's the kind of thinking that is ok with patenting every tiny little advancement as an "innovation".

Increasing the DPI on a screen - especially if it's been done before, but even if it hasn't - is not an innovation, much less a "brilliant innovation". It's expected progress.

This is a double standard common in the tech press. Compare (from the same article):

wireless charging, a feature that Nokia isn’t the first to offer, but one that could now be ready for prime time

"Innovative" isn't an objective property of a company, it's a facet of the narrative journalists choose to weave around the current trends.

The innovation was bringing a screen with that high of a DPI to millions of users without an incredibly high cost, and pushing their competitors to follow suit.

"Innovate" and "invent" are not synonyms.

> The innovation was bringing a screen with that high of a DPI to millions of users without an incredibly high cost, and pushing their competitors to follow suit.

Such high DPI displays were actually quite common in Japanese cellphones way before Apple started using them, even in the lowish-end "free" phones.

The main thing Apple did differently was to give it a catchy name ("retina display" is great marketing) and talk a lot about how "innovative" it is...

...and made it standard on a widely selling phone, and got app developers to make their apps with high-res art so users could actually take advantage of it, and decided to push it to their other devices also, repeating the process in other markets. Now there is fire on Microsoft to do the same, and I wouldn't be surprised if the whole industry doubles DPI on tablets and PCs within a couple of years.

I'm sure Apple wasn't the first manufacturer to get rid of floppy disk drives and standardize around USB with the iMac, but they surely had a huge impact in their choices.

Apple certainly has an out-sized influence, and no doubt pushed the state of the art hard in the U.S. (where phones have traditionally been sort of on the trailing edge).

But such high-DPI phone displays were not niche items in Japan, pre-"retina", they were common to the point of being essentially standard.

Granted, HN is basically a U.S. site, so maybe non-U.S. practice isn't considered significant.

[I think the iphone, retina or no, is overall better than pre-iphone Japanese phones too, but its advantages are pretty much completely in software; Japanese phone makers make astonishingly good hardware, but their software is at best, very quirky. The iphone and android are changing that.]

Japanese phones were (are?) kind of a mess, diverse, lots of esoteric features (tv tuners), and when I was there, very WAP based. No one provider had much clout to set industry standards, so each phone was its own island beyond the (admittedly excellent) online services that every phone could access. Now...why iPhone was so popular in Japan while the bleeding edge Japanese headsets were relegated to the home market? Surely it wasn't just marketing on apples part.

> why iPhone was so popular in Japan while the bleeding edge Japanese headsets were relegated to the home market? Surely it wasn't just marketing on apples part.

[Not sure what you mean by "relegated" to the home market -- Japanese phone makers have never shown much interest in foreign markets, because their attention was pretty fully occupied with the huge Japanese domestic market which they understood well.]

Of course the iphone wasn't just a marketing success. As I noted, it really did offer a vastly improved experience over previous (and current non-smartphones) Japanese phones, which were often very functional, but confusing, inconsistent, etc. [This isn't really just a phone thing... Most Japanese software, especially that written by hardware manufacturers, has pretty much always been like that.]

Worse, there was a tendency to try to nickel-and-dime the user to death, attempting to charge for all sorts of little services and features one could access from phones, often without a good indicator of how much the actual cost would be. The iphone/android's concept of mostly limiting such payment to a well-defined place (the app-store) is pretty refreshing by contrast.

Until the iphone showed up, makers concentrated mostly on adding new "functionality," without putting much effort into actually improving the base experience. There was little incentive for them to do differently, because everybody else was doing the same thing, and Japanese companies tend to have both a laser-like focus on constant incremental improvements and an aversion to riskier large scale changes.

The iphone upset this cozy little arrangement, and android has allowed other makers to react to it pretty quickly. Still, smartphone adoption in Japan is only half that in the U.S. or the U.K., which I suppose is due to the more functional nature of Japanese non-smartphones compared to those in other countries.

But, anyway, yeah, the iphone changed things; my point was only that Apple's innovations were mostly in software, and less so in hardware.

Apple doesn't innovate on features, but on experiences. Apple is rarely the first to release a feature but is often the first to release a features in a non craptastic (invoking my inner fake Steve jobs here) package.

So yes your point is us right about feature, but apple (and consumers) doesn't care, and you just can't call that good marketing.

What is the state of the Japan phone market today? Is it becoming more Korean? Or are the local companies adopting android cold turkey and not messing it up? I haven't been to Japan for a couple of years now.

Impact on the industry != innovation.

Making something popular and widespread is popularization. It's very important! But making something hugely popular is not a "brilliant innovation".

No, the main thing Apple did was make it available to me (and hundreds of millions of people around the world). To buy and use, in a great form factor, with great battery life, and accompanying software.

It's still pretty expensive. But even if it were cheap: reducing the price of something is not "brilliant innovation", unless it involves some amazing under-the-hood new technology - which this does not.

Ironic, considering how he dismisses Samsung as "as innovative as the spec sheet allows", when Samsung is the one making those Retina displays.

And the RAZR MAXX is somehow a "wasted opportunity", when Motorola fit a 3300mAh battery in the same profile as the iPhone(9.3mm)

> What’s more, as Ars Technica’s Peter Bright points out, that release date is looking shaky because Microsoft has been delaying the release of its SDK for third-party developers to build apps for the phone.

That's perhaps the scariest portion to me- Windows Phone 8 is a fairly significant change from WP7 (whole new OS, many new APIs). Normally the SDK is released a good number of months ahead of the release to allow time to incorporate bug fixes from developers.

If they are to release in late October then they go into serious lockdown by late September. Almost no time for any developer feedback. Plus, slipping past late October puts holiday devices at significant risk.

Unless they are withholding it to keep new features under wrap, but this makes no sense as it is sure to impact the quality of the release.

I agree that this launch was mishandled. When I watched the announcement, I was excited by the phone and considering switching to Windows Phone 8. I went searching for a launch date and more hardware specs about the phone, but I couldn't find anything. Then we found out that the video was faked, then the photos were faked. All of this together has made me classify this phone as vaporware in my mind. Why hold a product launch event if you aren't able to launch?!

nobody will care about this stuff when the phone launches. which isn't to say it will (or won't) be successful, but whether it is will have nothing to do with the launch event or what they did or didn't have ready then. the press and pundits put way too much stock in this sort of thing.

> Microsoft has been delaying the release of its SDK for third-party developers to build apps for the phone...

Oh thank you so much for giving me an evil flashback to a dim and distant time, nearly 30 years ago, when I was trying to create a book on programming for OS2 (look it up, children) using Microsoft's developer "documentation" which was never updated as the alpha code changed. Ended up reverse-engineering every system call to correct their mistakes and omissions. Never, never, never, I swore then, make your career dependent on Microsoft for anything; they'll always let you down.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, it would seem.

> I swore then, make your career dependent on Microsoft for anything; they'll always let you down.

Yes, your one 30yr(or 20?) old anectode invalidates all the tens of thousands of profitable programs, games, and literally millions of people who made and still make their living with Microsoft technologies.

>But the company only showed off low-light shots, prohibiting any testing of the touted image stabilization for video. There’s only one thing to conclude from that: Nokia may have gotten the image-stabilization for video working in its testing, and it may well be ready when the phone launches, but it’s not working well enough yet. And if it’s not working well now, it’s not working.

Not exactly true, here's a live demo of the image stabilization:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlT8qk2ZoGM&feature=playe...

The Verge themselves tested the hardware in low light and here are comparison shots: http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/7/3299784/nokia-lumia-920-pur...

A live demo of low light pictures with other phones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFhhBJ1URCg&feature=playe...!

And a real(ha! this time?!) demo video shot with this contraption.

http://cdn.wpcentral.com/sites/wpcentral.com/files/imagecach...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6...

So looks like they made a mistake with trying to make ad quality videos to depict image stabilization and photos but minus the standard disclaimer like you see in ads and the media won't give them a break, with articles like this insinuating that the feature doesn't work at all.

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