[warmi]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

....
Just.. why? Because of this, developers will be dropping all their current QT projects, they've killed their own online store, their own market and there's no possible replacement.
Just... stupid.

Where are they ? Where are their applications ? How many developers can invest their time in a software platform without popular hardware behind it ? It is one thing to work with some lead time to have your app hit the market when the hardware is finally out but here we are talking what ... more than a year now and still no viable device on the horizon.

Sure, it is a big gamble but it is not like XNA or Silverlight 4 are an entirely new kids on the block - I would say there are more people familiar with it than there are people working with Qt ( and I am quite familiar with Qt - I have been working with mobile Qt apps since 2003 - still have an old Zaurus page up http://www.warmi.net/zaurus/)

[hoho]

Originally Posted by warmi

Where are they ? Where are their applications ?

Dunno but they've been talking about selling millions of apps on ovi per month. Not sure how it compares to others though or when were those numbers counted.

[Lazy8s]

Windows Phone 7 will now play in the big leagues with no problem, and Nokia at least has a mid-term strategy on which to execute. Amazing how much potential was squandered by Nokia in order to arrive at this, though.

I thought Texas Instruments had made it plenty obvious that Qualcomm wouldn't be the only Windows Phone 7.x app processor in town. Shouldn't have to wait for OMAP5, either.

[Tap In]

Response form HTC

Jason Mackenzie, president of HTC for North America and Latin America has commented on the Microsoft/Nokia partnership to Seattle Times.
"Nokia’s following a similar lead to what HTC’s been doing, in not investing in our own platform, taking solid platforms and filling the gap to deliver a solid experience to the end user," he said, calling it "a validation of what we’re doing."
He did not however express any concern about the looming competition.
"I feel confident in what we’re doing," he said. "We’ve got a fresh brand that’s resonating with consumers." It’s "one more competitor," he said.
He admitted that HTC would not have any new Windows Phones to show off at Mobile World Congress, but said several will be announced later in the year.
"Obviously Windows Phone 7 is a platform we’ve invested tremendously on" and "we’ll continue to support that," he said.
When asked if the Nokia deal would be good for Windows phone 7 he said "It broadens the ecosystem, which is good for everyone. We’ll see.”

Also Re: WP7 app store: chart

Windows Phone 7 marketplace just crossed another, its first 8000 apps. This is significantly faster than the Android app store, which took more than 11 months to cross 10,000 apps in September 2009, after launching in October 2008. It is also running at around the same pace as the iPhone app store, which was launched in July 2008 and took till December 2008 to cross 10,000 apps.
Marketplace also added more than 1000 apps over the last 2 weeks

[Miksu]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

Today's Nokia share prices are still plummeting. It's now nearing a 16% fall -> in 10 hours. What does that tell you?

That it's now extremely easy do some nice profit by buying Nokia and waiting a year or two?

Like I mentioned before, this was the move I hoped Nokia would do and they delivered. So here's at least one person who is happy about this. It's the developer tools which will eventually play a big part in the "smartphone war" and this where Microsoft excels.

[silent_guy]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

Today's Nokia share prices are still plummeting. It's now nearing a 16% fall -> in 10 hours. What does that tell you?

It tells me that a number of stock holders have decided to sell their shares and that an equal number of non-stock holders have decided that the lower price was a nice opportunity to buy.

Instead of asking the question, you should have explained first what conclusion you make out of the 10% drop?

Let me guess:
- investors are great at predicting the future of a platform and have a long history of doing so?
- Analysts have an excellent track record predicting the future of the mobile market?
- Major stock market moves are a fail safe predictor of a companies' long term future?

I don't care how intelligent one's arguments may be, if a person uses short term stock movement to prove a point one way or the other he deserves to be put on mute.

[ToTTenTranz]

Originally Posted by warmi

Where are they ? Where are their applications ? How many developers can invest their time in a software platform without popular hardware behind it ?

You've got to be kidding...

The OVI Store had 4 million daily downloads, that's more than Android market and only second to iOS.
Over 90 app developers had seen their software passing the 1 million download mark.
There are 200 million Nokia smartphone users out there, with 5 million using the latest Symbian^3 devices.

The N8 alone sold 3 times more than all the WP7 phones combined, and you say there's no "popular hardware behind it"?!

Originally Posted by silent_guy

It tells me that a number of stock holders have decided to sell their shares and that an equal number of non-stock holders have decided that the lower price was a nice opportunity to buy.

The market closed with Nokia dropping 14% in the day of the announcement. Go 2 days before that (before the "memo" appeared) and the drop goes to almost 20%. In 2 days.
Before that, Nokia had been climbing slowly (but steadily) for the past 2 quarters.
EDIT: meh.

Originally Posted by silent_guy

I don't care how intelligent one's arguments may be, if a person uses short term stock movement to prove a point one way or the other he deserves to be put on mute.

So you think the sudden plummeting following the announcement was what? Pure coincidence? You don't think the shares represent the trust the investors have in the company? A 14% drop is "trivial"?!

[rpg.314]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

How do you get to the conclusion that the number of sold stock is equal to the number of purchased stock?!

Good .. God....

[ToTTenTranz]

Originally Posted by rpg.314

Good .. God....

Sleep deprivation does these things.
Mental note: do not post in B3D after partying with booze.

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

You're right: Nokia couldn't wait any longer.

How much time until WP7 devices are out from Nokia? A year?
Would MeeGo come after that? Later? At the same time?

They just cut their own balls at the high-end, until WP7 devices come out. No one will ever want a Symbian^3 device from now on. They may still sell loads of Symbian^1 "smartphones", but is that enough to hold the company until then?


People here know that very well from nVidia and ATI\AMD battles: being in the market while losing some marketshare is a lot better than not being in the market at all.

The thing you have to understand is that WP7 is out today with an app store that is growing. Even if nokia takes a year to ship phones with wp7 on it , it will come out to an app store of 50 thousand apps or even 100 thousand apps at the rate the windows apps are growing.

Even if meego came at the same time as a wp7 device from nokia a year from now they would be starting from scratch. Its not a good postion to be in and then they will have an even smaller market share and it will be even harder to get developers to make apps.

besides the rumors point to upcoming phones that are able to run wp7 just fine. So if thats true we may see phones announced in a few weeks instead of ayear

[ltcommander.data]

Originally Posted by eastmen

The thing you have to understand is that WP7 is out today with an app store that is growing. Even if nokia takes a year to ship phones with wp7 on it , it will come out to an app store of 50 thousand apps or even 100 thousand apps at the rate the windows apps are growing.

Well Nokia in doing this deal is obviously hoping on jumping onto a growing platform. But the question is how important is this deal to Microsoft, ie. did they foresee future WP7 growth stalling without access to Nokia's customer reach? If the later's the case than Nokia is going to have to do a lot of their own legwork in promoting the platform and time to market for phones will be important not only to Nokia but also for the platform.

Personally, I'd be interested to know how many of those WP7 apps are just ports of older apps available on iOS or Android. With a standardized hardware set and a well maintained app store enabling ease of porting, rapid app support for WP7 may just be developers looking to make a quick buck rather than direct interest in the potential of the platform. iOS App store growth was more pure original growth where developers pretty much started from scratch designing new apps to fit the mobile, touch-screen paradigm, Android app growth then instilled the importance of portability in coding practices, and with these things in place, WP7 app store growth should be brisk. Rather than being considered a tier 2 or 3 platform and receiving ports of existing apps, it'd be good to know how many apps are WP7 exclusive or released simultaneously on WP7, iOS, and Android. Certainly Nokia wants to be jumping on a platform that is among the first on developer's mind rather than a secondary consideration.

[Tchock]

Silverlight's perhaps the best platform to prototype interfaces for, but I don't see the innovation coming in until there's at least a substantial consumer base.

Well Android lived through 2.0 with ports, and it was really till post-2.2 that quality apps started coming in regularly, partially because of Eclipse and partially on the lack of monetization opportunities.

For now, ports and free apps alongside XBL games and a few service-specific custom apps (Kindle/IMDB/IGN/Flickr etc) will have to do.

[silent_guy]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

So you think the sudden plummeting following the announcement was what? Pure coincidence? You don't think the shares represent the trust the investors have in the company? A 14% drop is "trivial"?!

Where do I say 14% is trivial?

All I'm saying is that short term movements are useless to make a point other than that the average stockholders has decided that the company is 14% worth less today than it was yesterday.

So what?

The average stockholder also decided on august 31st, that the stock was $8.50. A week later, after the appointment of Elop, it was at $9.70. Today it's at $9.50.

I'm sure you'll agree then that the value of choosing Elop is still a net positive of $1.00 per share for Nokia?

Short term, a lot of people (*cough* Tomi Ahonen *cough*) still seem to think that Nokia is the greatest mobile company in the world with just an execution problem, based on numbers that still look ok because it requires effort to overcome the inertia of a market leader and because it's hard to do really bad when the overall market is exploding in size.

But the longer term trends have been bad for a long time (market share, profit share etc.). And this is nicely reflected in the share price which, coincidentally has gone down steadily since the introduction of the iPhone and friends.

[ToTTenTranz]

Originally Posted by eastmen

The thing you have to understand is that WP7 is out today with an app store that is growing.

Sure. It's just that the OVI store is already an order of magnitude bigger and was growing faster.

Originally Posted by eastmen

Even if nokia takes a year to ship phones with wp7 on it , it will come out to an app store of 50 thousand apps or even 100 thousand apps at the rate the windows apps are growing.

Well, that's where OVI is right now. What exactly are they gaining here, apart from losing all the smartphone developer share during that same year, and not increasing any when the WP7 are out?

Originally Posted by eastmen

Even if meego came at the same time as a wp7 device from nokia a year from now they would be starting from scratch. Its not a good postion to be in and then they will have an even smaller market share and it will be even harder to get developers to make apps.

No. I can't stress this enough: all the Symbian^3 development was being made in QT. Any software made in QT is compatible with both Symbian^3 and MeeGo.
By the time MeeGo came out, it would have available pretty much all the existing library for Symbian^3 --> which is already bigger right now than WP7!
Almost all my friends who are programming engineers and tried QT say it's the best framework they ever worked with. Many companies that develop for embedded devices are switching to QT because of its quality and because it's free.

Any MeeGo\Symbian^3 released until yesterday would already be several months ahead of any WP7 device in developer share, app amount, app sales and app quality.

Originally Posted by eastmen

besides the rumors point to upcoming phones that are able to run wp7 just fine. So if thats true we may see phones announced in a few weeks instead of ayear

Really? The rumours I've heard are that they couldn't even get a working prototype ready for the announcement, or even MWC.
All they could come out with is a few renders and a couple of dummy devices.

[Tchock]

Problem is, most Symbian smartphones are not Symbian^3. Even with the announcement of the N8/C7/C6, Nokia itself was still selling Symbian^1 phones. C5 for example.

Not to metion the bestsellers 5800XM/X6/N97/mini and all that comprise the majority of the Symbian touchphones they've sold in the years...

The new Nokias might have some apps, but I doubt the majority of the Ovi store actually contains Qt, ^3 specific apps instead of the traditional S60 stuff. Ovi also considers content as submissions, which further dilutes the credibility of its largeness.

[shyam335]

IMHO this the end of Nokia as we know it.
Slowly we'll witness its transition to a OEM.

I'm more disappointed with MeeGo,Qt and concerned about its future.

Originally Posted by Tchock

Problem is, most Symbian smartphones are not Symbian^3. Even with the announcement of the N8/C7/C6, Nokia itself was still selling Symbian^1 phones. C5 for example.

Not to metion the bestsellers 5800XM/X6/N97/mini and all that comprise the majority of the Symbian touchphones they've sold in the years...

The new Nokias might have some apps, but I doubt the majority of the Ovi store actually contains Qt, ^3 specific apps instead of the traditional S60 stuff. Ovi also considers content as submissions, which further dilutes the credibility of its largeness.

qt libs exists for symbian^1 also,although not as tightly integrated as S^3.
but good enough to make apps work.

Ovi store just started accepting qt apps,So i'd say there were beginning to see the results.

[Tap In]

concept art

[Entropy]

Originally Posted by hoho

Dunno but they've been talking about selling millions of apps on ovi per month. Not sure how it compares to others though or when were those numbers counted.

iOS app store is at roughly a billion apps per month.
It's growing very quickly, so numbers get outdated fast.

[ToTTenTranz]

iOS isn't iPhone exclusive. It's for 4 gens of iPhones + 4 gens of iPod Touches + 1 gen of iPads.

[silent_guy]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

iOS isn't iPhone exclusive. It's for 4 gens of iPhones + 4 gens of iPod Touches + 1 gen of iPads.

How many phone SKUs are supported by Ovi?

[ToTTenTranz]

Originally Posted by silent_guy

How many phone SKUs are supported by Ovi?

You cannot compare the hardware uniformity between iOS devices and all OVI-supported devices..

[Ailuros]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

You cannot compare the hardware uniformity between iOS devices and all OVI-supported devices..

What the heck has that to do with application sales figures between one and the other?

[Tap In]

full reports on app stores for 2010 here, select Dec 2010 PDF from drop down

[hoho]

Originally Posted by Tchock

Silverlight's perhaps the best platform to prototype interfaces for

Guess you haven't seen what QTQuick can do.


Also QT apps worked pretty well on WM5, 6 and 6.5 platforms, though I'm not sure how popular it was there. At the moment I'm working on something that runs on all three of them and it doesn't require any other per-platform settings besides default window size.

I'm fairly certain if I'd claim that QT is a generation or two ahead of any other similar toolkit/API there won't be many developers arguing against it. Scrapping it like that from their roadmap is a HUGE mistake for Nokia.

[Tap In]

Nokia press briefing at Mobile World Congress 2011

17:40: Stephen Elop has come on the stage, and spoke about the decision to go WP7 or Android.

17:42: With Android already so big, this would create a duopoly between iOS and Google. With this move a new challenger is created.

17:44: Android is the main target, Blackberry not a competitor.

17:45: Nokia confirms they will be paying royalties to Microsoft, but will save money on R&D. They will also contribute Ovi Maps, Ovi Store and new advertising related to mobile services.

17:50: Microsoft will contribute billions in value to the deal, and Nokia will also get advertising revenue. Microsoft is as dependent on the deal going well as Nokia.

17:52: Jo Harlow from Nokia says they love Windows phone 7. They are already working on devices. The concept device leaked is real.18:00 No QT on WP7. Nokia will carefully manage the transition from Symbian to Windows Phone 7.

18:02: Nokia will invest in the Windows phone 7 developer community.

18:03: Nokia will invest in moving Symbian developers to Windows Phone 7. They have now focussed from 4 development environments to only one. Windows Phone 7.

18:04: There was discussion of Microsoft buying Nokia. Nokia + Microsoft together have a remarkably strong patent portfolio. This will be used fairly.

18:05: Microsoft did not buy Nokia, as it had parts they were not interested in.

18:07: Nokia investment in Meego is real, and insurance against future disruption.

Q&A time.

18:10: There will be a single infrastructure for the OVI store, with all devices available, supported by operator billing. Apps which are available in the OVI store will also be available in the WP7 marketplace.

No date for when Nokia WP7 devices will be released, but “a little bit” of pressure to release ASAP.

Operators very invested in making sure the deal is successful. They want 3 main OS’s, not just one or two.

18:14: Asked about employee walk-out. Nokia is going through journey with employees. Intellectual and emotional journey.

18:16: Nokia sales team are positive about the WP7 move, anticipates stronger, easier sales. R&D team (who will be cut) are much less happy.

18:19: Developers will be able to make more money on Windows phone 7 than Symbian, and Nokia will help them transfer.

18:20: Asked about “monetary value transfer from Microsoft to Nokia”. Microsoft will pay for services which they get from Nokia. No direct payments however.

18:21: Elop asked about his Microsoft shares – could not sell those shares legally, due to inside info. Had to stop selling shares due to deal, but when the deal is concluded and he is legally clear he will sell shares again. He will soon receive Nokia shares also, but it is not legal yet.

18:23: Asked if he is a Trojan horse. Denies this, saying the board of directors and management were very involved, and the board of directors made the final decision in the end

18:25: Q&A ended. Applause.

also:

BARCELONA, Spain -- Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at research firm Flurry, recently released information that shows that not only is buzz building for the new Microsoft and Nokia partnership, but thousands of games and apps are going into development for Windows Phone 7. The analytics company found that there was a 66% increase in the number of games and apps started this week, compared to last week. The only difference is the confirmation of Nokiasoft, which was announced just before Mobile World Congress 2011 kicked off..... snip story and vid...