Finns, roamers, Nokia: So long, and thanks for all the phones Finns are in mourning this week after Nokia has sold its mobile phones unit to Microsoft: a decision that weirdly seems both inevitable and shocking at the same time. But they should be proud, for Nokia had an incredible 15-year run at the top of an entirely new industry, making stalwarts like Motorola and neighbours Ericsson …
Yes, looking at home things have gone it seems that did.
Hopefully the fall of Nokia will be a stark warning to other companies, if you don't have good leadership and spend too much time messing around with bureaucracy then you're going to fail and get swallowed up by someone else for peanuts.
I do think under Kallasvuo Nokia produced some of it's most spectacular turds, the writing was on the wall for years thanks to him.
Everyone can argue from 20-20 hindsight, but if Apple hadn't entered the market in 2007 (and in doing so showed Samsung how to make smartphones normal people want to use) Nokia would have been doing very well. I shudder to think of the barely functional monstrosities they would have been making, but they would have been doing well.
Hindsight is an amazing thing, so many armchair CEOs out there who make comments like "well, of course anyone could see that..." when in actual fact they have no knowledge of the upper workings of even the simplest corporation.
In hindsight everyone can see that the iPhone and the Android OS are successful, but most people who are fans of the phones refuse to entertain the fact that these were far from certain products and majorly lacking in their first iterations. Particularly the first iPhone was laughable by European (ie: Nokia) standards at the time, the list of features it didn't have that were standard on Nokia phones is as long as your arm.
"the list of features it didn't have that were standard on Nokia phones is as long as your arm". In fact, the first iPhone was so much greater than all European phones together, that even without MMS support it was _far_ greater than anything else.
You must be still affected by Jobs' RDF.
The first iPhone was a joke; it lacked so many standard smartphone features it wouldn't even be considered a smartphone by smartphone users!
No apps and Jobs saying that there would never be an SDK.
No copy/paste
No MMS
It was little more than an iPod that made calls and had PDA features.
and yet it sold well, and this coming from a company at the time made colourful computers for idiots and mp3 players.
What does that tell you about the general mindset of the public at the time???
Maybe people were so sick of the crap being produced that as soon as someone offered an alternative, even if it was flawed they jumped all over it????
Apple understood there was a different customer beyond the business user. It understood people would like to bring a single device with them, not an MP3 player and a phone and maybe a PDA. Unlike previous smartphone, first iterations of iOS, Android and Windows Phone lacked (and the latter still lacks until the Enterprise Package is released), some business features that are useless to non-business users, like true multitasking for every app, advanced proxy settings or VPN support, which were already available in Windows Mobile, for example.
Apple the usual design touch, and understood also that multitouch would have simplified many kind of interactions a lot, without the need of a stylus, and designed its UI around it - and that was the real killer feature. I found first iPhone and Androids totally useless in my company environment - but it was the right move to sell smartphones to the general public - instead of MP3 players and portable game consoles. PR and the press made the rest - no product get so much attention lately.
There are many things I miss from SE k750i that my iPhone 3G should have, particularly BluePhone Elite compatibility (view and create SMS on my Mac! I suppose that's what Messages is for, but my iPhone 3G is too old for iOS5) and BlueTooth HID remote control for Macs. It was crazy that I could transfer photos from my dad's SLVR (ugh - probably worst phone ever) via BlueTooth, but not from my iPhone.
Browsing the web on my SE k750i was not the worst experience and it was handy in a pinch. I used to read my email in bed with it. Battery life was good, too.
But you're right, Safari was the iPhone's killer app, along with the screen, which was very large at the time.
Jobs even expected Safari to be the app delivery mechanism. All those web developers could have continued their php, but they actually demanded to be able to use obj-C!
Like I said, some people can't accept that the iphone wasn't fantastic from day one.
Off the top of my head, it was missing:
Stereo bluetooth support
MMS
Cut and Paste
Anything other than basic GSM support
GPS
Front facing camera
Any form of voice control
Gyroscopes/Accelerometers
Compass
App support
I'm pretty sure the list goes on.
The idea that products succeed or fail based on tick lists of features is absurd even if you ignore the motivation behind the list selection criteria.
Here's what most people used a phone for in 2007: calls, texts. Here's what they could do with an iPhone: calls, texts, the web. With a usable interface thanks to multi touch. And without sending you bankrupt because Apple strong armed the carriers into unlimited data.
What is laughable is the preceding interfaces for the web, full of modality and fixed-level zooms and web pages reduced to the system font, and the idea that people would pay 50p/mb for the privilege.
Apple opened the door, Google charged through it.
"Hindsight is an amazing thing, so many armchair CEOs out there who make comments like "well, of course anyone could see that..." when in actual fact they have no knowledge of the upper workings of even the simplest corporation."
True, but when people who *do* claim to know the workings of corporations can run a company that anyone here would have regarded as unassailable much less than ten years ago onto the rocks, and without any outside assistance, one is forced to wonder whether the wrong people become upper management.
The article starts with the words "... Nokia has sold its mobile phones unit to Microsoft: a decision that weirdly seems both inevitable and shocking at the same time." It *is* shocking - this shouldn't be happening in a sane world - but, ever since Elop took over (which brings us back to questions over the actual abilities of upper management to find their own arses with a map and torch), this situation *was* inevitable, and not in a good way. The smartphone world needs more competition amongst platforms, not less. I hope the good folks at Jolla Oy can take over what should be Nokia's place in the world ...
Did you ever try using the web on a symbian phone with a 0-9 keypad?
Did you ever try using the web with a stylus and no "pinch to zoom"?
I did, it simply was agony. Multitouch brought us the mobile web in a usable form, simple as that.
People wanted mobile internet more than they wanted a million features they were never going to use.
That's the wrong question.
WP lacks apps, it lacks YouTube, it lacks Instagram, it lacks a lot of the big name apps but it has a wealth of unofficial apps that provide the same functionality if not better (YouTube vs MetroTube).
>I *really* want one of the Nokia imaging units in my next phone... ... but there's no way I'm moving to Windows Phone
Sony has your corner. Basically they've stuck the important internals (lens, sensor, processor) from the very-highly rated RX100 M2 compact camera into a smallish unit that uses your phone's screen.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/09/06/sony-qx10-qx100-preview_n_3878299.html
It doesn't lack a YouTube app. The MS app has been blocked by Google, but there are others working. It lacks Instagram, but there is plenty of Instagram-like apps. And high-end Nokia phones have excellent cameras and camera apps.
But what people look for? An app name or an app functionalities? If there is a different app from a different company performing the same functionalities or even better, what's the problem? Here Map and Here Drive are far better than Googles and Apple ones, and allows to download maps locally - should WP user complain there's no Google Maps? They would be fools.
I don't have a Win8 phone, but I have a tablet, and I will tell you which app is missing in Win8: a decent browser. One that can reflow text, so you don't have to scroll around. That's why my 3 year old Android tablet gets more use than the new Win8 one.
Basic fail.
Windows Mobile had a browser that did reflow and many sites became mostly unreadable, today most sites are designed with a given graphic structure in mind and can't be "reflowed" well.
But you say you don't own a WP8 phone thereby you don't know how it browser works: for example *double tap text* and it automatically zoom it to the margin width - no need to scroll around, just scroll up and down.
Can't understand what tablet you have - which anyway may run Win8 RT or Win8, not WP - but usually tablet screen size is enough to read a site without scrolling, unless your sight requires a large magnification.
>and not a game, please.
Yeah because games never drive hardware sales especially in the consumer space huh? There probably wouldn't be a windows monopoly on PC in the home if not for DirectX. I remember a lot of people sticking with DOS instead of W95 due to a lack of gaming prowess.
Because games can be very specific to a single platform. Even porting games from DOS to Windows required a deep rewrite and that is why you see very few games on Linux or OSX. Do you mean Linux and OSX are inferior platforms for lack of games?
Do you select a smartphone because of games? I hoped adult people select them for productivity apps, not games.
That's how competition works - not all devices are created equally, you pick and choose what you want.
Incidentally, which apps aren't available on WP that you consider essential? This is a genuine question as I'm not really an App person, outside of the basic linkedin, ebay and something to track excersie sessions. Or is it just that there aren't that overall many apps realative to the other OS ecosystems that puts you off?
Yes, some people like to say "my app store has one billion apps" - the fact are
1) Most of them do the same thing, or are rubbish or never updated.
2) You can't install a billion app on your phone
3) If a great share of those apps are apps you don't need or use, is the sheer number so important?
OSX has far less apps then Windows, and nobody says it's an inferior OS because lack of apps - and yet there are many tasks you can easily perform on a Windows machine but not on OSX for lack of software.
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Does anyone really care about apps?
The problem with windows phone is that it just doesn't do a lot of basic stuff yet that could be done on symbian ... it feels like a beta version waiting for improvements, but has been forgotten about
They just set up a site to ask for comments and ignored them all
http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/forums/101801-feature-suggestions
Seems like the government petition site - a place for people to vent rather than for advice on what to do!
But then that was a problem with nokia after a while as it would ask people too much - and people always want the same thing just bigger or faster rather than something innovative
Sure, WP has still some missing features (some added in GDR2) and can be improved. But that petition site has some laughable request as well, as the request for a "notification screen" - forgettng that Live Tiles are already capable of delirivening excellent notification in a far better way. Sure, in a different way than Android/iOS, but that's a great feature of WP.
Why? Maemo was a half-baked smartphone OS - and surprisingly for Nokia, it was even weak at phone tasks. For example the N900 IIRC could not assign different ringtones to callers. It was a a little Linux PC, but not a *smart*phone. Too much was left to external developers, hoping they would plug the OS holes, but it didin't happen.
I understand Linux hardcore users were happy with a phone where you could open a shell, but most users don't care at all about opening a shell on their phone. iOS first and Android later showed that the best way was to remove most "PC features" from a mobile OS because most user need a device simple to use, not something to hack to run a Cron script to merge your local address book with a remote one via SFTP....
Maemo was a developer OS, not a user OS.
If you look at any Nokia product, including the Communicator and NGear, you see they are phones attempting to do something else *also*. But basically they are designed like phones. Nokia was a phone company and tried to add other features to phones, not add phone features to handhelds PC, which after all was simpler but requires a different design, you no longer need a phone UI attempting to let you access more features, you have a handheld UI that gives you access in some situations to the phone UI.
That was what Handspring made with the Treo line - take a PalmOS handheld, and put a phone within. And they did it at the end of 2001. Apple took later its iPod player (after the Newton failure it left the handheld market), and put a phone inside it. Unlike Treos which were mostly aimed at the business market - the target market then for handhelds - Apple was able to target the larger consumer market (and that's why it needed a graphic processor - games for the GameBoy generation!) and thereby got the headlines.
"But basically they are designed like phones. Nokia was a phone company and tried to add other features to phones, not add phone features to handhelds PC"
And designed like Nokia phones. They never made a decent flip phone or clamshell; And their continuous obsession with thick candbar formats even in the initial smartphone era meant that their head on product versus the original iPhone was the Nokia 5800. So although functionally comparable in many ways, and with better multimedia hardware (sound quality, camera, screen colours), it was too thick, the screen too small, and it carried a ghastly resistive touchscreen. Put them side by side, try a capacitive glass screen and there's no comparison. Even the succesor Nokia X6 still had a smaller screen and thicker body than the then current iPhone 3GS. Nokia's choice of higher resolution on a small screen applied to both 5800 and X6 versus Apple, but at around 3 inches, absolute size trumped resolution every time.
Nokia's glories of pre-smartphone design were mainly in simplicity and robustness, never in stylish design. Nokia's smartphones had a non-simple UI thus losing the simplicity, they weren't (like any other smartphone) robust, and you then have to ask why people would prefer them?
“their head on product versus the original iPhone was the Nokia 5800. So although functionally comparable in many ways, and with better multimedia hardware (sound quality, camera, screen colours), it was too thick, the screen too small, and it carried a ghastly resistive touchscreen”
I think that summed it up, Nokia had the better phone, but the iPhone was pretty…
The 5800 a better phone? It was what finally drove me away from Nokia having been a loyal customer for about fifteen years. It was crashy, its updates were never-ready, the user interface was inconsistent, it was plasticey, it had a resistive touch screen which had all the resistance to scratch of warm butter. When updates finally arrived they changed the place to get apps from about three times in the life of a phone. The protective case for it nearly doubled its size, it was a horrible, horrible phone.
On the up side, it had better battery life than the iphone.
I always thought that a big mistake Jobs made was to kill off the Newton, with a typically Jobs line which went something like "PDAs are all awful, ours is the best, but they're all awful". He totally missed the potential for the future and it held Apple's development of things like the iPod/phone etc back. They could have been putting phone hardware into Newtons around the same time as Palm, had they continued developing what was a pretty good product. Everyone loves to hate the Newton in hindsight, but the people I know who actually owned one (myself included) really liked them.
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