Nokia's Present & Future

[Mize]

Looks like Windows phone is growing well in china , 7% of the market puts it over apple there.

I doubt nokia's story is over the nay sayers will have to eat some crow later in the year me thinks .

Considering 90% of the Chinese iPhone market is grey this figure is absurd, but, please, forward the spin.

What fascinates me is how incredibly bad WP7.5 is once you look into it. No multitasking, no accessible filesystem, no bluetooth file transfer, no custom ringtone settings, etc. You can't even download attachments on email that aren't predetermined file types or access its flash over USB. Basically it's a diced up CE kernel with a phone applet on top. Crazy that anyone's buying into it, but, then again, it's targeted at consumers who don't really need or want a "smart" phone - just a snazzy one that makes it easier to send SMS and update Facebook.

For reference: http://my-symbian.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=392156#392156

What is interesting is how limiting this is for a user. Two weeks ago I found out - on my way to the airport - that I had two additional customer meetings in China and needed to present stuff I didn't have with me. I had a colleague email a few PPTs which I retrieved on my phone and then transfered to my laptop at 37,000 feet over Canada on the way to China to work on. With WP7.5 this is simply impossible. Perhaps it would have let me save the PPTs (or perhaps they exceeded its allowable attachment size), but I'd have had no way to get them to my laptop from my phone.

Why would any new OS *reduce* the number of standard features available?

 

[Mize]

Looks like Windows phone is growing well in china , 7% of the market puts it over apple there.

I doubt nokia's story is over the nay sayers will have to eat some crow later in the year me thinks .

By the way, there has to be a translation error here. For this to happened (WP to capture 7% of a market in just 2 months) would mean sales of over 10 million phones per month - nearly 100% of all smartphones sold for those two months would have to be WP.

I think the claim will be revised to 7% of new phone sales during those 2 months were WP, not that WP has captured 7% of the smartphone market.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

What fascinates me is how incredibly bad WP7.5 is once you look into it. No multitasking, no accessible filesystem, no bluetooth file transfer, no custom ringtone settings, etc. You can't even download attachments on email that aren't predetermined file types or access its flash over USB. Basically it's a diced up CE kernel with a phone applet on top. Crazy that anyone's buying into it, but, then again, it's targeted at consumers who don't really need or want a "smart" phone - just a snazzy one that makes it easier to send SMS and update Facebook.

For reference: http://my-symbian.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=392156#392156

What is interesting is how limiting this is for a user. Two weeks ago I found out - on my way to the airport - that I had two additional customer meetings in China and needed to present stuff I didn't have with me. I had a colleague email a few PPTs which I retrieved on my phone and then transfered to my laptop at 37,000 feet over Canada on the way to China to work on. With WP7.5 this is simply impossible. Perhaps it would have let me save the PPTs (or perhaps they exceeded its allowable attachment size), but I'd have had no way to get them to my laptop from my phone.

Yap,
I convinced my father to purchase an Omnia 7 in order to replace his previous Omnia 2... gawd, how wrong I was..
All of the sudden, he couldn't download files, he couldn't sync anything from his computer, he had to go all the way to the settings in order to make it silent, I had to create a live account, transfer all his contacts to the cloud and make Outlook work through it (and damn, it was mighty difficult to get Outlook to sync with a simple live account.. what gives?)..

The hardware was, and still is, pretty good. But the O.S. is a constant pain in the ass for the lack of so many functions we've taken as granted in smartphones for years..

Why would any new OS *reduce* the number of standard features available?

I think (and hope, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of Microsoft and Nokia employees) that WP7 was only a brief study on getting something to work well on the user interface.
I also think WP8 will be pretty much Windows RT + phone functionality.

Steve Balmer has stated many times that his (and Microsoft's) long term plan is to bring the "Personal Computer" to the pocket, and not to axe on the functionality of a pocket device.
My guess is he hates WP7, as well as most folks over at Microsoft, but they needed to get the elephant in the room that is the friendly interface out on the market and they needed people to pay attention to it.

IMHO, WM6.5 already had a nice UI (when coupled with a 1st-gen Snapdragon), but people were so afraid of anything WM that the OEMs themselves rejected it before it could be given a chance. Somehow, they figured the only chance they'd get was to break the upgrade paths and launch something that is just a little more than a very friendly but very shallow UI that is WP7.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technolog...ft-lumia-comments?cat=technology&type=article

Ouch..

 

[warmi]

What fascinates me is how incredibly bad WP7.5 is once you look into it. No multitasking, no accessible filesystem, no bluetooth file transfer, no custom ringtone settings, etc. You can't even download attachments on email that aren't predetermined file types or access its flash over USB.

Sounds like the original iPhone - not exactly a recipe for disaster.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technolog...ft-lumia-comments?cat=technology&type=article

Ouch..

Is this newsworthy? Even if forgetting that it's from last year.

 

[Gubbi]

I think people are being overly harsh.

What fascinates me is how incredibly bad WP7.5 is once you look into it. No multitasking, no accessible filesystem, no bluetooth file transfer, no custom ringtone settings, etc. You can't even download attachments on email that aren't predetermined file types or access its flash over USB. Basically it's a diced up CE kernel with a phone applet on top. Crazy that anyone's buying into it, but, then again, it's targeted at consumers who don't really need or want a "smart" phone - just a snazzy one that makes it easier to send SMS and update Facebook.

The Zune software that automatically installs, hides the phone as a USB device. You need to edit the registry to allow mass storage access. I agree with you, it is stupid. Why mass storage isn't an option in Zune, or even default behaviour, I don't know

You can use any mp3/wma/whatever as ringtone as long as these requirements are met:
1. Maximum length of 40 seconds.
2. Maximum size of 1MB

That's in the manual

My girlfriend went from an Android 2.3 to a Lumia 800 four weeks ago. For her use it is a *vast* improvement. The integration of social networks (plural) with existing contact lists, messaging and email is better than any other phone. So is the speed and responsiveness of the interface and camera.

Build quality is second to none.

I'm waiting for WP8 before ditching my LG Optimus 2X piece of crap, - unless iPhone 5 turns out to be miraculously better.

Cheers

 

[Mize]

No doubt WP is attempting to mimic the iPhone "keep it simple, stupid" approach and phones like that are probably great for a large segment. They're the "feature phones" of smart where your ripped blu-ray won't play because it will find a DRM violation and where your background torrent app won't run because, well, there is neither multitasking nor a torrent app, and you can't ssh over VPN to your server because, "what's that?"

Such products have a place, but the key think is MS is, once again as they did with Zune, chasing Apple instead of breaking out something better.

As to ringtones, what I understood is that I can't have a different ringtone per contact. Is this wrong?

 

[Mize]

Oh, also, WP's social networking integration is almost as good as that from the now dead or orphaned webOS and MeeGo, so they are truly following an Apple-like path

 

[Pressure]

Sounds like the original iPhone - not exactly a recipe for disaster.

Which was fine for a phone released in 2007.

It's not like the competition were any better, phones sucked prior to 2007, especially smartphones which were only something the "geekiest geeks" had.

They were anything but smart.

 

[Mize]

LOL, my first smartphone was a Kyocera 6035 in 2001. Had some form ever since

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Sounds like the original iPhone - not exactly a recipe for disaster.

It is, given everyone who wanted an iphone already has one - and at the same time it gets the world's largest mobile developer mindshare.

 

[bdmosky]

As to ringtones, what I understood is that I can't have a different ringtone per contact. Is this wrong?

This isn't true as of the Mango update.

 

[eastmen]

I think people are being overly harsh.



The Zune software that automatically installs, hides the phone as a USB device. You need to edit the registry to allow mass storage access. I agree with you, it is stupid. Why mass storage isn't an option in Zune, or even default behaviour, I don't know

You can use any mp3/wma/whatever as ringtone as long as these requirements are met:
1. Maximum length of 40 seconds.
2. Maximum size of 1MB

That's in the manual

My girlfriend went from an Android 2.3 to a Lumia 800 four weeks ago. For her use it is a *vast* improvement. The integration of social networks (plural) with existing contact lists, messaging and email is better than any other phone. So is the speed and responsiveness of the interface and camera.

Build quality is second to none.

I'm waiting for WP8 before ditching my LG Optimus 2X piece of crap, - unless iPhone 5 turns out to be miraculously better.

Cheers

My epic 4 g (galaxy s phone) has been a horrible experiance , its now taken to freezing all the time and lasts only 3 hours or so. I've now picked up a htc arrive. I will play around with it and post my findings. It seems like there are alot of haters in this thread. I have andriod and while i could do alot with it , the OS was holding everything back. I would hard reset the phone and each day after that i can see the phone getting slower and more and more errors would pop up.

 

[Miksu]

he had to go all the way to the settings in order to make it silent

You can click the "volume" icon in the phone's status bar to make it silent. This works from every screen.

 

[Miksu]

No multitasking, no accessible filesystem, no bluetooth file transfer, no custom ringtone settings, etc.

• Multitasking
  
  Windows Phone got the multitasking in Mango-update. Though the apps are only left in the memory but don't get any processor time.
  
  
• accessible filesystem
  
  It's quite likely that Windows Phone will never get this. Windows 8 doesn't have it nor the iOS.
  
  
• bluetooth file transfer
  
  Yes, this would be great.
  
  
• custom ringstones
  
  Windows Phone got the custom ringstones in Mango-update.
  
  
• etc.
  
  The ability to take screenshots with your device?
  

 

[Mariner]

People who encounter problems with battery life on Android phones tend to do so due to rogue apps more than anything. Plenty of apps and widgets are poorly coded and stop the phone from sleeping when idle and this, of course, can drain batteries like there is no tomorrow.

That said, I doubt that there is an Android phone around which couldn't be improved by use of one of the enthusiast ROMs which abound for most devices. The manufacturers have little interest on updating older phones to newer releases - Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4) has been out for over 6 months but few older devices have any official support and many, including the Galaxy S, aren't going to get it. Samsung have spouted some bullshit about the reasons for this but the theory that the hardware isn't capable of supporting ICS is just ridiculous and there are, in fact, many very stable enthusiast ICS ROMs for this and much less powerful phones. ICS works pretty well on the crappy and cheap ZTE Blade which I bought over 18 months ago thanks to a few dedicated developers.

The fact that groups of enthusiasts (and often individuals) can produce excellent and stable ROMs despite an almost complete lack of assistance from the manufacturers indicates how relatively easy it would be to keep these phones updated with the newest versions of Android or even just produce more reliable and stable releases of the older versions. It seems too many manufacturers are just happy to hack up a barely functional release of the software (invariably adding a load of bloatware) instead of employing a couple more competent coders to do the job properly.

I'd never stick to using the stock ROM on an Android phone as I know you can improve your experience significantly with little effort.

 

[Mize]

I believe the lack of filesystem access has to be some feeble anti piracy thing, yes? I mean why can't I create my own directory structure, locate my personal stuff there and then password protect it for when I loan my phone out? It's all about not letting me copy or email or Bluetooth media to my phone imho. Apple, Microsoft and the carriers want to extract every possible dime from my wallet and if I can rip a CD or DVD that I own and freely move it to my own devices, that's money they could get selling it to me for each device or, at the very least, forcing me to use their software to move it about so they can try to limit me to devices hey approve of.

I'm not faulting their greed specifically, but when that kind of protection leads them to lock me out of the filesystem so I can't

mkdir ./.selfshots_in_drag
mv ./*.jpg ./.selfshots_in_drag
chmod 000 ./.self*

Before loaning my phone to my Mom, then something is just wrong in the world.

 

[Gubbi]

I believe the lack of filesystem access has to be some feeble anti piracy thing, yes? I mean why can't I create my own directory structure, locate my personal stuff there and then password protect it for when I loan my phone out? It's all about not letting me copy or email or Bluetooth media to my phone imho. Apple, Microsoft and the carriers want to extract every possible dime from my wallet and if I can rip a CD or DVD that I own and freely move it to my own devices, that's money they could get selling it to me for each device or, at the very least, forcing me to use their software to move it about so they can try to limit me to devices hey approve of.

I don't think it has anything to do with piracy. After all iTunes/Zune whatever seems centered around moving media files back and forth. Ripping a CD in Zune and transferring to a Lumia takes two clicks and five minutes.

IMO, It has more to do with a general trend of 'simplifying' the user experience (market speak for dumbing down). Flat libraries for music/video/images, documents for everything else and indexing+search replacing proper folder organization.

Regrettably

Cheers

 

[Deleted member 13524]

You can click the "volume" icon in the phone's status bar to make it silent. This works from every screen.

But then you have no vibration call..
At least that's how it was pre-mango in early 2011. Terrifying..

• Multitasking
  
  Windows Phone got the multitasking in Mango-update. Though the apps are only left in the memory but don't get any processor time.

• 
  
  If the apps aren't getting CPU time then it's not multitasking, no matter what pretty name you give to saving the app's state in the RAM.
  It might be more convenient for low-pwerformance mobile devices, but you cannot for example download a file, zip/unzip a large file or process the editing of a picture/movie while doing something else (note: I already get that in Android).
  
  It's this kind of "limitless functionality" that I have in a PC and want to put in a pocket.
  
  

  [*]accessible filesystem
  
  It's quite likely that Windows Phone will never get this. Windows 8 doesn't have it nor the iOS.

  Of course Windows 8 has it:
  http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/1122#14
  
  And Windows RT will have it too:
  

  Using WOA “out of the box” will feel just like using Windows 8 on x86/64. You will sign in the same way. You will start and launch apps the same way. You will use the new Windows Store the same way. You will have access to the intrinsic capabilities of Windows, from the new Start screen and Metro style apps and Internet Explorer, to peripherals, and if you wish, the Windows desktop with tools like Windows File Explorer and desktop Internet Explorer.

  
  If Windows Phone 8 is Windows RT + phone, then it will have it too, for sure.