Nokia CEO: No shift from Windows Phone Nokia's CEO has insisted the Finnish phone giant's future lies with Windows Phone and no other OS. "In today's war [between] Android, Apple and Windows, we are very clear, we are fighting that with the Windows phone," company chief Stephen Elop told reporters in Oslo. "I don't think about rewinding the clock and thinking …
No Thanks!
I've been in their WP7-pool and it sucks. The supposed to be quality Nokia devices are in reality fragile cheap crappy compal phones with crappy pentile screens. And Nokia's after sales service is plain rubbish as I had to discover first hand!
Proof here (including the phone conversations I had with Nokia Care): http://antinokia.freewebspace.com/
(you need to learn Dutch though as all this happened in Belgium)
And then there's the loss of most features that even a bloody feature phone had (including their own). Like no phone-call recording, no proper multitasking, no full bluetooth transfers, horrible tiny feeble speakers, no notification light etc...
And then they declare Symbian (which has ALL the features that WP hasn't got) "a burning platform" and what happens. 6 months after I had this POS Lumia 800, Microsoft declare WP7 dead. Sure we get one a last insignificant cosmetic upgrade(WP7.8) but that won't solve the crippled BT-transfer, crippled multitasking, the call-recording... all we get is more colours for the fucking tiles! The worst is that this was declared when that bloody POS was in repair for the second time! I didn't even bother to retrieve it!
Elop You SUCK. You single handedly destroyed the biggest handset maker in the world. With premature (bad) declarations, incompetence and greed. EVERYBODY is TELLING NOT to persue Windows Phone, to diversify into Android and to keep Symbian alive (if you haven't got anything else). In fact the sales figures SHOW that Meego was liked by the industry AND that it WAS a capable weapon against iOS and Android (WITH all the features that the older more advanced Symbian devices have, like proper multitasking, call-recording, full BT transfer) and what do you do! You stubbornly NEGLECT to open your fucking eyes!
Alone for such an incompetence alone your company DESERVES to go down. And I will PERSONALLY help in doing that!
Go with Windows Phone and die!
At least their store was available in Malaysia, sold music and videos in Malaysia, and N-Gage is open to Malaysians. Microsoft's problems with Malaysia that they won't launch Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live (and and utterly limited app store) are unjustified.
Someone please just boot Elop out of Nokia. I will never buy another Nokia phone as long as he's CEO.
Assuming Microsoft actually allows the PureView camera on a Windows 8 device, it'll drive some sales. But phones made with this are way too thick... you're really talking about a CAMERA-phone. And even if this is the best phone camera on the market (which seems to be the case), it's still a phone camera. Anyone dedicated enough to photography to consider this might (as I do) simply keep a real camera around most of the time.
The size won't change without some small revolution in optics. Pureview just skirts being diffraction limited on the Nokia 808, and that's with an 8mm, f2.4 lens. The best camera is the one you have with you, and it's great to see Nokia doing _something_ useful and upping the ante on cameras in such a bold way, as they crash and burn on Windows Phone. But this isn't going to save them.
"But this isn't going to save them."
Because they fucked up the 808. They ditched all the good stuff from the N8 to create this plastic blob.
Gone is the gorgeous Aluminum body, Gone is the battery charging led, gone is the 2mm charging plug, micro-simm (there is NO other Symbian phone with micro-simm). MicroUSB SUCKS for charging as eventually the fragile connector WILL break.
I would have bought the 808 if it looked more and feels more like the N8. As it is, they compromised too much and it looks butt-ugly. Not to mentioned that Nokia first said that the device would sell retall for 450 euro (ex. taxes) while it is far more expensive in reality. E.g. 450 + 21% VAT = 545 euro NOT 649 euro. I wouldn´t have hesitated for 549 but its a no go for 649.
Bill Gates to the rescue! His current endeavours are particularly relevant: "At the Reinvent the Toilet fair, hosted at its Seattle campus this week, designs included a lavatory that used microwave energy to turn poo into electricity." Since that's exactly what Nokia is now turning out under Flop, he's already halfway there:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19271061
I really do dislike Apple and all their ridiculous shenanigans.
I do not buy their stuff.
But before I'd ever buy a WindPhone x.xx from Elop and Ballmer, I would stoop down and buy an iPhone.
Microsoft had its chance and hung its customers out to dry by not fixing things for a decade, cause they thought they had the market sewn up. FUM$
In a world where almost everyone else jumped on the Google train and launched black slabs with rounded corners that looked like iPhones, Nokia have dared to try something different, exciting, and frequently beautiful. I have to say, the Lumia 900 looks amazing, and the 'information at your fingertips' concept of WP7 defines what a smartphone is all about. Combined with the pile of cash Microsoft promised Nokia, it must have seemed like a stroke of genius.
The problem is that Microsoft took way too long getting WP7 ready, and it was still only half-finished. Witness how WP8 will run on a completely different kernel, and how WP7 didn't get support for dual-core CPUs. And why are all the tiles on WP7 that horrible shade of blue as a default? Nokia are now at Microsoft's mercy with regard to OS updates, and the fact that they haven't coaxed an update to WP7's copy of Internet Explorer to make it actually reliable shows who's really in charge. I want them to carry on daring to be different, showing up Android's flaws (how bloated it is and the toll that takes on battery life when you need a quad-core processor to get it to run smoothly in particular), but this isn't going to work.
Which was the first plan. It only took a bit long.
But indeed the N9 showed that the wait was worth it!
They've put their eggs in the basket of their biggest Nemesis. It used to be Symbain against Windows Mobile. Symbian won! And now in ONE (1) year they literally THREW it away! They are fucking assholes.
They pushed thousands of employees into poverty. I hope Nokia dies! I hope that Elop gets BANNED from Finland He and HE alone destroyed Finlands biggest employer and Finlands ONLY economic stronghold. I hope that the day Nokia gets into receivership that ALL ex-Nokia employees SUE him for ALL he's got!
They would get my vote and my support!
I hope Nokia dies!
This pretty much sums up the problem so many reg commentators have: they'd hope to see a company like Nokia die than be proven wrong. And it makes no sense, either: Elop is rich, really rich, so if Nokia does "die" then it'll only be his pride that hurts, but not as much as life hurts for Nokia employees.
7 people voted voted this crap up. Not much rational discussion going on here, sadly.
"but not as much as life hurts for Nokia employees."
Tell that to the 10000 whom are already on the unemployement lines.
Nokia should have thought of them BEFORE getting this microsoft mole inside. To me it´s clear. The current (probably non finnish) shareholders want cash PRONTO and they don´t care about the products, what people want or their employees. For all they care Nokia sells their IP to a dummy corp, the factories to some anonymous chinese investor, dumbs all the workforce and get one big retirement bonus. Then THEY are rich while the former largest finnish employer pushes thousands of people into poverty.
And when some disgrundled ex-employees DDOS-attack microsoft they´re probably labeled as "cyber-criminals" by El Reg.
We´re doomed.
From my experience (limited I admit) QT was OK, but was geared towards actual coders (god forbid!), as it was mainly for the (my) c/c++ crowd. MS killed the AppForge MSVS plugin (not more VB/.net etc), then Oracle picked up the corpse and shelved it, in my mind that was pretty much the nail in said coffin. I've been told NetBeans can be used if Java is your preference, but without usable IDEs (yes a small shot at NetBeans) and SDKs, what's a scrip kiddie to do?
To you and me, it's a pile of cash. Microsoft is paying Nokia US$250 million per quarter, currently, to use Windows Phone. And offering Windows Phone isn't the issue... with Microsoft pretty much putting the whole company behind the move to mobile, you could choose a worse place to be in mobile. I would never even consider a Windows Phone, but it may have an audience. Eventually.
The problem was Elop openly telling the world that Nokia Linux and, particularly, SymbianOS devices were going away ... nearly a year before Windows Phone devices from Nokia even shipped, and long before Windows Phone proved a viable replacement (it hasn't). To put this in context, while Microsoft paid Nokia US$250 million in 2Q2012 to use Windows Phone, Nokia lost US$1700 million, largely due to the SymbianOS business collapsing. Think about it... SymbianOS was over 60% of the smartphone business only a few years ago. Last quarter, it was 9%, and falling fast. And the latest version, "Belle"... actually not that bad. There was no reason for Nokia to kill this off.
This is a phenomenally stupid way to run a company, and Elop has bested Adam Osborne and most of the other really infamous CEOs in the race for how to kill a company with a few stupid words. Product life in a company should be organic, not forced. Any company that arbitrarily kills a popular product deserves what they get. Your bottom line, and the duty to your shareholders, is to make money. Plenty of companies support multiple smartphone platforms. Look at #1, Samsung. They're the leader in Android, but they also do a great business in Asia on BadaOS, and they're even doing experiments with Windows Phone. This makes total sense if you're a hardware company... it's not as if each Android, Bada, or Windows Phone have to be designed from the ground up... the same core technology can be applied to all OS markets, even if the little details vary based on target cost and other issues (Windows Phone has feature restrictions not found in Android).
Kudos to Elop for sticking to his plan, regardless of the fact that just about everyone else in the world thinks it is utter stupidity.
Before anyone accuses me, I USED to be a nokia user, with alll the tablets from 770 to N900 and serveral symbian handsets. Now jumped to android as I hate Windows.
Elopolypse - obviously
Does it matter? Are you saying that it's not allowed for someone to boycott a product range from a company they dislike? It's like suggesting that a SCO Phone should be hunky-dory even though it's from a company that has performed some morally repugnant actions in other industries related to computing.
MS should learn that their reputation in some areas will follow them into others. Do you not notice how horrified some people are that their *car* might run Windows? Or that Windows might come onto their phones? Eek.
And are we supposed to discount all history from, say, Windows CE too? Every product release is a whole new ball game and we have to wipe the slate clean? Sorry, it doesn't work that way even if MS want it to. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Or maybe the guy just evaluated the currently available products and found Windows inferior. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy against MS, and even if it is (I tell you now, that I wouldn't buy a phone with MS's name on it) then there's nothing wrong with that.
If MS want to avoid this, they need to clean up their reputation across the board, not pretend that their secondary businesses are somehow running under some improved management that makes them not subject to the mistakes and business decisions they already use in other subsidiaries.
On the other hand, it also works the same way - if you have a good reputation, I *will* try a product on the basis of that reputation. But what you seem to be saying is that's it not okay for someone to boycott a company that has (with them) a bad reputation? How ridiculous.
How about we judge everything on its merits, including previous history of that corporation. Yes, it might have been a Sony subsidiary that enforced a rootkit DRM on its users, but that should equally tar all other Sony products too. Especially if, as history shows, they go on to make more mistakes and more problems under that brand.
Personally, you couldn't get me to touch a Windows phone with rubber gloves and a face mask. Hell, I'd rather try making my own first. Unreasonable? Only if you've never tried any Windows product at all and/or you've never heard bad things about Windows products from others. Otherwise, you're an idiot to think that their reputation shouldn't carry over to new industries and products.
And, besides all that, Windows Phone is inferior if everything I expect from a product on my Phone. And has a certain price tag associated with it. But even if it wasn't, it doesn't mean I *MUST* use it. A philosophy that saved me from Vista, ME, and all manner of other horrors, despite the fact that my desktop OS *is* a Microsoft one.
No you CAN'T try it in a shop. You can only hold it a few moments but you can't really try it.
Just ask the shopkeeper to put a sim-card in it (even your own) and call someone to hear if the earpiece is loud enough for you! You'll get a NJET! So "trying" a phone in a shop is bullshit. The only decision you can make is whether you like the design, feel and screen.
But you can't make a call with it (the prime function of a PHONE), you may not install that smartphone app that you bought to see if it'll work on the (new) model), you can't send the picture that you took to test the camera to your phone/home/email or other PC nearby to see if the camera is actually good.
So telling ppl that they can "try the phone in a shop" is complete nonsense. You can ONLY make a true assessment o/t device if you actaully USE it for a few days or weeks.
In my own case a problem since my Lumia 800 has been more at the repairshop than actually in my hand.
Indeed, there's nothing remotely Windowsy about Windows Phone. The only clues are some of the brands, IE, Office and so on.
But the user experience is good, better than iOS and Android. Of course the fandroids will vote any positive post about WP7, but they've not tried it so how can they know?
I gave it 6 months of use and just couldn't stand it's consistent crappyness (from WP7.0 then 7.1 and then 7.5). There's really no compelling reason to use Windows Phone and a great number of reasons not to. So please don't assume that everyone is ignorant and they just need to "try", some of us have and frankly I'd rather "try" being fisted a la 50 Shades of Grey than pick up a Windows Phone for the rest of my life.
Worked for Nokia. Still bitter.
This post has been deleted by its author
Bought a Lumia 800 in Febraury 2012, went into repair a month later, went into repair again end of June 2012 (got a bill for 326,66 euro's which I wouldn't pay), early juli Microsoft declared WP7 a "burning platform"... Mid-august the phone that I bought 6 months earlier for 499 euro's is gone. I have to pay to get it back unrepaired and I have to pay a hefty sum to get it repaired. When the next big thing comes around withing 3 months from now.
So. indeed. Some of us DID try with disastrous consequences. I'm +500 euro's lighter and have NO phone anymore. THANK YOU FUCKING NOKIA! I'll remember you NEXT TIME!
What a load of nonsense. Nothing Windowsy? You take pictures, they are uploaded to Windows Live Skydrive. Want to identify music? Use the Bing Music Search - no Shazaam here. Make a note about something? Its now on OneNote. Want to play some music? Fire up the Zune player. Want to use an IM? Fire up Windows Live Messenger.
Personally, I've not tried a WP. But then I don't need to. I've already made my choices about where I'm going to keep my contacts, my photos, my music, my files, my security certificates and so on. Based upon 24 years of using products built by MS, I'm quite glad that I have the choice.
Stop talking shit.
"You take pictures, they are uploaded to Windows Live Skydrive."
My WP handset calls it 'SkyDrive'.
"Want to identify music? Use the Bing Music Search - no Shazaam here"
Yup, I press the magnifying glass icon and then the music note icon. I have never seen any branding called 'Bing Music Search'.
Oh - but just in case the built-in music search fails I DO have the Shazaam app installed too. You know, because I can.
"Want to play some music? Fire up the Zune player."
Not on my WP handset I don't. I touch 'Music & Videos'.
"Want to use an IM? Fire up Windows Live Messenger."
Nah, I don't have anyone on WLM. Does anyone even use that anymore? I use Facebook IM - which is integrated into the messaging application natively, along with Twitter, LinkedIn etc. Or you can not use any of them.
"Personally, I've not tried a WP."
No shit?
"But then I don't need to."
See above
"I've already made my choices about where I'm going to keep my contacts, my photos, my music, my files,..."
I'm pleased for you. My previous handset was a HTC Desire running stock ROM as well as a few custom ones such as Modoco. As such a lot of my contacts are on Facebook and GMail. Thankfully Windows Phone will connect to these address books and copy to the local device and continue to sync from the "cloud" service. The same as Android, and I presume iOS do. Microsoft don't have anything that Google and Facebook don't already have in terms of data. My files aren't kept on Skydrive as I don't want them too. Neither to my photo's. My contacts are kept in GMail including new contacts I create on the phone. Calendar is GMail too.*
*Actually my shit is stored on SkyDrive, although I still have most contacts on Google and Facebook still. But that's because I have made my choice. My choice is that Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple are all fuckers but the convenience of essentially having a backup copy of my data in case I lose or break my phone is worth the trade off. But that's MY choice. Your choice of making statements about a product you clearly know nothing about however is a poor one.
I require a LOT MORE than a "user experience" from my phone.
For one thing the Lumia 800's audio is so crappy that you barely hear when someone is calling (especially when you pack the phone in a protective case or have it in your coat or purse) and because there isn't a bloody notification light you can't even SEE that you missed that call. How stupid is that!
As for the "good" user experience. It's so bloody good that it can't connect to my hidden MAC-address-protected WIFI-router. Or that I can't send a picture that I just took to ANY other phone (without spending on a data-account). It sucks. It's NOT because it looks new that it is GOOD. In fact Nokia's Harmattan also looks NEW and that IS a LOT better. Nokia should have sold it Microsoft instead of the other way around.
... if there is nothing remotely Windowsy about Windows Phone then why did Microsoft call it Windows Phone. Was it purely to cash in on the name?
Given than Windows 8's Metro, er, Modern UI or whatever its called today is supposed to be consistent across platforms then it must be Windowy, mustn't it....
Or am I losing the plot?
"I got a WP Nokia a few weeks ago - I think it's great. When you say "I hate Windows" do you mean you hate Windows desktop so you refused to even try a totally different OS because it had the same name, or that you tried and hated WP?"
This is why some people don't buy Windows Phone: http://my-symbian.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=44034
Personally, I don't like iOS and/or Android either, since they are crap as phones.
That's why I still use E72.
P.S: I mean, even my old shitty 30$ Samsung phone has 'multi select/delete' feature for SMSs. How Microsoft could release a phone without that basic feature is beyond me. Unless Lumia 900 (only one that I haven't tried) has that feature, in which case I'd laugh even more.
I have currently 2 Nokia's. One I hate with all my heart and the other which I love.
The Lumia 800 is AGAIN in repair (the bloody morons charged me OVER 300 euro's to repair it!!!),
It's pure crap. I'm not even gonna bother to get it when it'll be returned UNREPAIRD (especially after Microsoft last announcement NOT to supply WP8 to current devices). A horrible screen, fragile body, speakers that you barely hear and no notification light (not only do barely HEAR when someone has called, you don't even SEE that you've missed that bloody call!) and whatever more that's crippled. It's even a fucking dog to put a ringtone on it.
And there's the complete opposite. The Nokia 701. It's fast, easy to use, easier to navigate and has more (usefull) features than the Lumia. There's the automatic call-recording (3rd party app), the full bluetooth transfer (including syncing with Outlook), the fantastic FM-transmitter (invaluable with my olde 2001 Merc C220 wagon with it's ancient becker radio w/o BT nor aux-input). It has an micro-SD slot, fantastic free offline navigation suite which even works with the phones addressbook and agenda.
In fact when I install an app it nicely asked to get installed on phone-memory, internal storag (8GB) or the SD-card (16GB). Unlike android where such a trivial thing is a complete mess. that 701 is the very best phone I've ever had. The ONLY achilles heel on the h/w is the EDoF camera which is fantastic for video but is unusable for macro-shots and low-light situations (IMHO they should have inserted the N9/Lumia800-camera in that device). And the only achilles heel on the software is webbrowsing for everything else this phone is fantastic.
Its killing to see a company creating both the worst and best all-round smartphone. And to drive me both to anger (lumia 800) and joy (701). It's such a shame. They had it all!
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