Nokia: "Going the Android Route is like Peeing in your Pants for Warmth"

I was quite happily using Symbian on a old nokia and have recently switched to Android since my old phone broke.

I'm loving Android, but to be fair it doesn't do much if anything I couldn't do on my nokia. What's more, is that the actual phone elements of android, the dailer, messaging, contacts etc.. aren't anywhere near as integrated as Symbian.

Nokia sell more phones than their next 4 largest rivals combined, are they trading on their brand? Almost certainly, are they on borrowed time, I don't think so.

At some point they will develop a new OS, whether that is Symbian or called something else, but who is to say that Nokia's new OS won't be the one that everyone is clamouring for?

Trends change very quickly in technology, and with Nokia's resources I doubt they will cease to be a leader in the field any time soon.

To Nokia's advantage they own a lot of the software they use e.g Symbian, Navteq (for maps). Yes the Ovi store isn't as good as the App store or Market, but i'm not sure apps are going to be a major thing in the next 5 year. Really do you want 150 different things installed on you phone? To my mind my phone should come out of the box with an alarm, a timer, a web browser etc.. And while i might want to change them, they shouldn't be considered add-ons.
 
That's actually a very astute observation LizardKing, I hadn't made the connection myself but they're actually in a very similar situation: both make well-built, feature-rich phones, which are however very hard to customise and limited in what they can do apart from the stuff that was built into them by the manufacturer.

The irony however is that their phones are like that for entirely different reasons: Symbian is actually remarkably flexible and very open (you can grab any application off any website and install it, no need to root/jailbreak/whatever), but it's nigh-impossible to find any decent apps for it because the OVI store is a joke, 3rd-party developers are completely unsupported, and it's hard to customize it in any meaningful way cause the interface is such an utter mess and you need to be a bit of a techie to understand what you're doing.

iOS otoh is completely closed, but with decent developer support Apple managed to make their claustrophobic walled garden bloom.

It's easy to say "If only Nokia had realised the importance of 3rd-party app development earlier" now, but we forget what a pain getting online through your phone was before RIM changed the game and strong-armed the network providers to provide unlimited plans without crippling charges. Downloading a simple game over WAP was likely to cost as much as the game itself in data charges. Could Nokia have done what RIM did? Possibly, it definitely had the market clout, but RIM was initially working in the enterprise space where things are very different (your network won't mind giving you unlimited data if your monthly line rental is twice as big as what most consumers pay anyway!).

The only thing I find inexcusable is the way the company is still dragging its feet. By the time a Meego device finally comes out and S^3 has its various little issues patched, the next generation of iPhones and Android devices will be out and they'll make Nokia's offerings look last-gen before they're even out. They're a massively profitable company and could have afforded to staff up and get things done quicker. They could also have afforded to be more aggressive in pushing Qt, lure developers by offering a prize for the most popular applications perhaps, fixing the bugs in the OVI store, completely drop the sign-up fee (I think it's $50 now, but in places like India that's a respectable sum, and there's a lot of coder kids over there who'd love to get in on the app game action!).

They have massive market penetration in a lot of huge developing markets such as India (where they can continue to have massive growth for another 10 years, whereas North America where smartphones are already something like 40% of the market will soon level off), so if they really commited some resources to it and simply copied the app market ecosystem that Google and Apple have created wholesale (and with proper support!) they'll basically have first-mover advantage since Apple only has about 10% market share there at the moment. For the average consumer, it's "Apple who?" and Nokia are letting this narrow window when they're still a household brand slip by them.
 
From what i understand S4 will be released in 2011 for mid level phones and Mego will be release this year too for Nokia's single new high end offering.

Symbian as it is, is a bitch to customise, but it is very usable straight out of the box. On Android you have to install at least 5-10 apps to get the functionality of Symbian.

Don't forget that Nokia own the world's largest software mapping company too.
 
manveruppd said:
There won't be an S4, instead they're incorporating its features into S3 and rolling them out as incremental updates like Microsoft and Apple are doing with theirs.
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Correct. And third party developers will be coding against a specific version of Qt (currently 4.7) rather than a specific version of Symbian/MeeGo.
 
englishpremier said:
I see. The article i read discussed S4 for mid range and S40 for lower end handsets. Again with all aps coded with QT to be cross-platform
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That was the plan before the new CEO came in.

I doubt S40 will ever see a Qt port but Symbian and MeeGo apps will definitely be cross platform. The Nokia Qt SDK can simulate both Symbian and MeeGo phones.
 
Moorestown became z6xx/Lincroft and is still based on the 45nm Atom core (with a powerVR SGX535 gpu)

So yeah, I'd even prefer the 1st gen 65nm snapdragon over the 1.2GHz Atom Z615 for a mobile phone. :)

Maybe your thinking of the new 32nm Atoms? (Edit: Medfield)
 
It'll be interesting to try Meego, if I had half a clue it'd be running on my N900. The hardware will be pointless if the software is useless, a la N8. They are being reasonably clever by getting Meego out to the geeks to get programming apps, but getting mainstream companies on board may prove difficult.
 
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