They can cut all the r&d budget if they want as long as they can spend the money on releasing the frikkin n900 sometime this week. C'mon Nokia. RELEASE the phone already. I've been stuck with my HTC Tytn 2 for 2 years and I no longer have a screen that is touch sensitive, a keyboard that is able to type, or a phone call button pad attached to the phone anymore.
GRRRRRRR!
Penguin, cos this'll be my first.
Is that they can often detract from the viewpoints expressed by the staff journalists and undermine their editorial line.
I suspect that this more nuanced treatment of the state of Symbian is rather more realistic than el Reg's normal outlook on it.
For too long Nokia have had too many models all vaguely similar. The R&D costs must be enormous to say the least. You can still buy 6 different N series phones from Nokia's web site when really about 2 models would do.
Build a platform which can be extensible and offer the components people want. Make it flexible. Then focus the product line on big differentiating factors and not little ones. Size, weight, class of functionality.
Build small phones that are just phones.
Build medium phones that do what commercial customers want.
Build the Business phones that do what business types want.
Then build the prototypes for the next generations.
Simple formula, but hard to implement because all designers what to show the mark they made on the phone. At Apple its all about Jobs so designers focus on tweaks not the basic product.
But yeah, I'd like to see and play with the n900, can't even do that and we have a flagship store in Chicago down on Michigan ave.
I won't be in the market until my e90 dies because to get the n900, I'll have to buy it unlocked.
This is exactly the reason I gave up with Nokia and reluctantly spent a fortune on an iPhone. My E66 is great and does just about everything I need, but the Nokia Ovi store or whatever it's called carries hardly anything that will work with it. Plenty of cool stuff on there, but "Not for the likes of you" unless you have a certain phone with a certain OS with a certain version number.
Cutting their smartphones? Considering Nokia are one of the very few major brands NOT to so a Windows Mobile phone, they're already missing out big time in the business world. So halving nothing isn't really much is it!
