Comments on: Is Nokia Toast?

By: Nokia’s N8 Hands On: The Game of Catch-Up Continues

Nokia’s N8 Hands On: The Game of Catch-Up Continues — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:10:01 +0000

[...] By Harry McCracken | Posted at 5:09 pm on Monday, June 14, 2010 If you compiled a list of the biggest big-bang moments in tech history, Apple’s January, 2007 introduction of the first iPhone would rank mighty high. Three and a half years later, the companies that dominated smartphones back then are still scrambling to compete with Apple’s phone. Especially from a software standpoint, and none more so than Nokia, the Finnish giant who has struggled to build even vaguely plausible iPhone competitors on its long-in-the-tooth Symbian OS. [...]

By: Jabberwocky

Jabberwocky — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:13:13 +0000

Nokia has a solid base of business customers for its smartphones outside of the U.S. The iPhone is much less of a threat to Nokia’s dominance in that market than are BlackBerry phones (how in the hell did RIM/BlackBerry never get a single mention in the article or any of the comments up ’til now?!). Just because it’s early attempts to compete with Apple don’t measure up doesn’t mean it won’t learn from those mistakes.

By: Old Operating Systems Don’t Die… | Technologizer

Old Operating Systems Don’t Die… | Technologizer — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:06:04 +0000

[...] Some of you are probably sick of hearing me wax rhapsodic over the Psion Series 5, an amazing PDA from the 1990s which would still be amazing in some respects if it were re-released today. Much of its amazingness came from EPOC, the mobile operating system which it and earlier Psions ran. For reasons I still don’t fully understand, Psion got out of the PDA business early in this century and spun off its software operations into a company called Symbian, which concentrated on OSes for cell phones. Eventually, Symbian ended up being acquired by Nokia, and its OS has gone open source and continues development. There are still glimmers of the Psion genius in Symbian-based phones such as Nokia’s N97, but overall, the OS not only failed to keep up with the times but actually lost some of the clever interface touches that made Psion’s products so wonderful. I was so emotionally attached to EPOC that it hurts to type this, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Nokia should probably put Symbian out to pasture and adopt Google Android as its primary phone OS. [...]

By: Condensed Knowledge – July 12, 2009 – Lists - Raoul Pop

Condensed Knowledge – July 12, 2009 – Lists - Raoul Pop — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 09:30:59 +0000

[...] Is Nokia Toast? [...]

By: John Doe

John Doe — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:31:39 +0000

Android brings s**t. I have an Android phone and trust me, it is not usable. I give all due credit to iPhone but I have nothing to give to Android. Even in a world without iPhone, Android still has nothing to offer. No innovation, no design, no wow factor in UI, no decent hardware … nothing. Boring from the sales package upward. Android was born dead and now Google is already replacing it with a new OS, in fact with yet another Linux distro. This time browser based, aiming at disrupting Pre’s pale attempt to claim an innovation niche.

I don’t mind waiting for the smartphones war to be over, and I will buy the best phone for me on the market, from HTC or Nokia it does not matter as long as I am satisfied with it.

I’m just sick and tired of lousy bloggers and dumb readers.

@Observer: How cool must be to be you. So sharp and wise, able to see everything that Nokia’s management has yet still to grasp. To bad you don’t know what Ovi is …

By: Observer

Observer — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:00:03 +0000

Nokia has made major level mistakes in very short period of time and wasted literally billions of dollars yet same top management is still on board. Ovi has probably been the biggest failure in mobile history. Service was launched globally, but even after a month it was launched it’s still not working and the content is pure crap. Just read users comments on S60 and you get a pretty good idea it’s not what they want. Apple came and changed the game with iPhone. Android brings Apple’s super usability to other makers touchscreen phones. Android is here now and it works.

Nokia can keep on selling those cheap poor man’s cellphones to China and India, other major players will dominate the smartphone market soon.

By: John Doe

John Doe — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:12:37 +0000

@Daniel: I said already that iPhone is great, but it is not the ultimate phone and the end of the world is not coming yet just because iPhone exists. And WTF is an JDK if iPhone, do you know what you’re talking about?

@sfmitch: Nokia’s market share can go up an down, it is not a monopoly. The other companies though have a lot more to lose and some of them barely exists anymore.

One more thing to consider is math and statistics. iPhone is the apparent grower in the market but they are winning on a market that Nokia never owned, a market which in fact never existed. The phone is a success in US where you freaks used to call Motorola’s Razr a smart-phone. A entire new customer segment was added to the smartphone market and that of course changes the figures.

But Nokia has the resources to transform in a clearly changing market. To say that Nokia is doomed is to oversimplify and to hyper-estimate the value of the opposition.

Only one thing only can at this point “doom” Nokia and that is iPhone OS becoming available license free to any Chinese phone cloning shop. And as we know that will never happen.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:50:23 +0000

@john Doe
Don’t hate on Apple because they make a compelling product. What makes Apple a product for the rest of the consumers is the fact that one can easily use their product with very little training. The apps that are there are ones they will actually use. Apple never said that they invented anything, but they advertise that there product is compelling to use.

Nokia window to put a compelling platform for consumers was closed the moment the iPhone 3G with a JDK for developers. Nokia had the time and the resources to do Symbian right, but was too slow. Now they are begining to see that are relagated to watching while others pass them up. By the time they get back up to speed it will be too late. Sorry to see this happen as I really had high hopes for Symbian OS.

By: sfmitch

sfmitch — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:08:27 +0000

@John Doe

So, Nokia has everyone just where they want them? Their plunging market share in the smartphone market doesn’t mean anything?

Wake up and look at how things are, not how you want them to be.

By: John Doe

John Doe — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:36:25 +0000

While iPhone is a nice device with a fresh UI (not good UI, just fresh) it has yet to prove that it can control fragmentation while users’ demand for new features puts pressure on them to diverge their hardware. They can’t pretend to invent MMS and Cut/Copy/Paste next year as well.

Android on the other hand is a curious story. It has the Linux geeks on his side because it is … Linux. It has the idiots with it because it is … Google. The UI is ugly like hell and the only way HTC was able to create something cool on top of it was by breaking the platform compatibility. The hardware is ugly, the software is ugly and the companies using it are ugly, small and (some of them) dying (SE, Motorola).

Symbian on the other hand seems to be the ugly duckling. It is blamed for everything and anything by any idiot that has a blog or can write a comment to one. Why? Some say that it is old. True. Some say that it is ugly. Not true, Symbian’s inner design is very elegant. The UI is old (as in proven, reliable) and different (as in driven by function and not by form) but I for one prefer it.

Some idiots pick on Nokia. That they’ve made a wrong bet with Symbian and that they should go with Android. So what if Nokia does both? What if the mistake Nokia made was to bet on that Maemo thing they still develop for their internet tablets? Replacing Maemo with Android would be really easy if only one would have a reason to do that. But as said, Nokia has nothing to gain and Android nothing to offer.

To conclude: the one doomed is Android, that’s why they tried to get associated with Nokia, they need a big name. Their current big names, Motorola and SE, might release an android phone but that would be among their final acts before selling the business to some Chinese dude. And Googe Maps needs Navteq. And Nokia’s Ovi takes Google’s clients away from the basic services such as mail, media sharing, maps, cloud storage.