Nokia's Present & Future

[Mize]

It helps that the Lumia 900 was free with a coupon or $49 without.

And then today all these rumors are flying around the internet that the next Apollo based Nokia's are going to blow the Lumia away! Whoops, there go Lumia sales...

I'm surprised Elop himself isn't toying around with one in an interview alluding to how great it will be like the way he killed Symbian sales before he had WP7.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

It helps that the Lumia 900 was free with a coupon or $49 without.

In many ways that mirrors what happened with the iPhone in Japan. After having no success trying to sell it, the only carrier taking a chance on it in Japan ended up giving them away for free in order to attempt to boost adoption. It may have taken them a bit over a year but that promotion finally made it a viable alternative in the Japanese market.

In that case it was the carrier and not Apple that absorbed the majority of the losses associated with it, IIRC.

Without knowing how the deal is structured it's hard to tell whether Nokia or AT&T is footing most of the bill for the pre-sale promotion. Nokia's next quarterly report may or may not shed some light on that.

Either way, it's not an uncommon business practice in order to gain some traction in a market completely dominated by entrenched players. Android phones also had some pretty sweet promotion deals when they launched in order to spur adoption.

Until now, WP7 hasn't had anything. No significant promotions. No carrier pushes. While both iPhone and Android devices had significant carrier/handset maker pushes at their launches, WP7 devices never have. At least until now. AFAICR, this is the first major promotion of a WP7 device in the world. I could obviously be wrong about that as I only superficially follow the smartphone market.

Regards,
SB

 

[Mize]

Nokia stock downgraded to sell...new Feb data shows MS still losing smartphone market share (went from 5.x to 3.x%)...definitely a long up hill battle.

 

[Florin]

Fitch downgrades Nokia's credit rating to junk.

Nokia burning more than 1 billion dollars per quarter in efforts to prop up sales.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Ahonen clearly does not understand software platforms and ecosystem importance. He claimed Nokia had much better ecosystem than Apple with Symbian QT in 2011 even when it was clear Apple was dominating and Nokia had no developer mindshare.

You're blatantly wrong and yes, Ahonen is right.
Your first mistake is in the "Symbian QT".
It's not "Symbian QT". It's "Symbian+MeeGo+Windows+Android+Linux" QT.
To even think all these won't surpass the amount of iOS developers even now is simply ridiculous.

At the beginning of 2011 Nokia did have a very large and very strong developer mindshare. The world's largest, by far.
Yes, fragmentation between S60v3, S60v5 and S^3 was (still is..) a total mess, but it still did lots of money to thousands of developers.

You can replay the engadget's/gizmodo's utter lies about Nokia already being in a downward spiral in the Q1 2011.. but it won't make it any truer.

In Q1 2011 sales weres rising, ASP was rising and profits were hitting records.
Of course if one only goes looking for information from tech-news sites situated in the only country in the world where Nokia didn't have a crystal-clear dominance of both feature and smartphones, where all they do is complain how Nokia handsets fail at copying the iphones (as if they ever tried to do that), then yes, that person will get the exact same opinion as you do.

All the innovation was happening on other platforms. Bizarro world.

What innovation happened in other platforms that didn't happen in Q4 2010 Symbian^3 devices?
Capacitive screens? Check. Touch-friendly interface? Check.
RGB AMOLED screens? Check. Social Integration? Check.
App store? Please.. they had it years before the "app trend".

Carrier billing for app purchases? Even today, only Nokia has that.
A smartphone camera? N8 is pretty much unrivaled even today.
NFC? That's only recently being implemented in Androids, whereas the mid-range C7 launched 2 years ago already had it.

So what exactly is this huge lack of innovation that you mention?

All he takes in to account are hardware features..

This is simply a lie.
Try to actually read any of his blog entries and none of them will mention hardware features exclusively.
Even that accusation is downright ridiculous, as the man is a world-class pioneer in mobile services.

Basically Tomi is a prime example of the old Nokia management that doomed the company. Except he actually was there...

Tomi was in Nokia during their golden years and left way before the piss-poor hardware/design decisions for the S60v5 models were made.




Again: Nokia's problems were ones of execution. All models were coming out later than predicted and that could be dangerous on the long run. They just needed to reduce the number of decision layers inside the company and churn out new models faster.
Instead, the BoD decided to destroy the company's value in order to dismantle it and sell it for cheap to Microsoft.

 

[babybumb]

Oh, hi Tomi. You are hopeless. The guy talks of himself in 3rd person.. enough said.

At the beginning of 2011 Nokia did have a very large and very strong developer mindshare. The world's largest, by far.

We just have to agree to disagree then. Nokia was not leading there at all. You can just use bare numbers from their respective stores and even not taking in to consideration much more important quantities. Apple IOS developers were leading the future apps innovation on mobile platforms.And users just loved it.. Instagram worth 1 billion what?

What innovation happened in other platforms that didn't happen in Q4 2010 Symbian^3 devices?
Capacitive screens? Check. Touch-friendly interface? Check.
RGB AMOLED screens? Check. Social Integration? Check.
App store? Please.. they had it years before the "app trend".

Symbian^3 was not innovating on anything. Not software. Not hardware. They were following products that were put out years and months before. The problem is it was actually still worse than competition. Newflash: Cameras do not sell phones.

I think Nokia actually burned some bridges with N97 on operators and users so Nokia couldnt flood the market with S^3 like they might have liked.

App store was defined by Apple in July of 2008. There were no meaningful revenues on mobile apps made before that. Nokia put a me too product called Ovi Store out in May of 2009. It was a crushing failure on every level and Nokia couldnt compete for mindshare of app developers because everything so much behind times. Nobody was actually using Nokia Symbian phones to download apps because the experience was so awful. Even the long hyped QT was not there.

NFC? That's only recently being implemented in Androids, whereas the mid-range C7 launched 2 years ago already had i

NFC is about as irrelevant today as it was two years ago. NFC in C7? GREAT another useless hardware feature on Nokia phone. Nokia didnt actually do anything intresting on software to support it like usual.

This is simply a lie.
Try to actually read any of his blog entries and none of them will mention hardware features exclusively.
Even that accusation is downright ridiculous, as the man is a world-class pioneer in mobile services.

There is mobile services before and after the redefinition of smartphones. Tomi and Nokia were about as relevant as VHS after DVD

Nokia burning more than 1 billion dollars per quarter in efforts to prop up sales.

This isnt really true. There was just over 1 billion reserved for NokiaSiemens restructuring in Q1

 

[Mize]

LMAO.

Pentaband UMTS was on Nokia phones before the iPhone even existed...until HTC One X no Android phone had it.

Skype video with a rearward camera before the iPhone. Granted Skype eventually killed it once Apple sign up with them...

Push email that the iPhone still doesn't have going back years.

Wifi hotspots...which the iPhone still doesn't have.

Turn-by-turn voice navigation...iPhone?

Apples iPhone innovations were the App Store, multitouch for better on-screen keyboarding and graphical voicemail navigation...

What else?

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Got myself a cheap Lumia 710 just to try it out. So far I think it's pretty good. 710 has pretty poor battery life though and unlocking the screen is annoying, as you have to press the power button on top of the phone, that is awkward compared to pressing home+swipe. The OS feels very smooth.

 

[warmi]

LMAO.

Pentaband UMTS was on Nokia phones before the iPhone even existed...until HTC One X no Android phone had it.

Skype video with a rearward camera before the iPhone. Granted Skype eventually killed it once Apple sign up with them...

Push email that the iPhone still doesn't have going back years.

Wifi hotspots...which the iPhone still doesn't have.

Turn-by-turn voice navigation...iPhone?

Apples iPhone innovations were the App Store, multitouch for better on-screen keyboarding and graphical voicemail navigation...

What else?

Does it matter ?
Nokia market share is pretty much dead while iPhone and Android are the smartphone market.

If you really want to know .. what matters is not who is first but who manages to do it right.

 

[Mize]

Got myself a cheap Lumia 710 just to try it out. So far I think it's pretty good. 710 has pretty poor battery life though and unlocking the screen is annoying, as you have to press the power button on top of the phone, that is awkward compared to pressing home+swipe. The OS feels very smooth.

N9's double-tap then swipe is nice too.
What I don't get is why nobody has figured out how to copy webOS's swipe to delete in email. You can open email and in seconds swipe away the emails you don't want to read.

The whole mark-then-delete or hold-finger-popup-menu-select-delete is so absurdly cumbersome.
With Open webOS can't iPhone, WP7/9 and Android just copy the finer features of webOS finally?

 

[Mize]

Does it matter ?
Nokia market share is pretty much dead while iPhone and Android are the smartphone market.

If you really want to know .. what matters is not who is first but who manages to do it right.

What does "do it right" mean?
iOS is hugely cumbersome compared to better OSes like webOS. It's not who is better, it's who markets better. Killing off innovators like MeeGo and webOS is actually not a good thing IMHO. I use iOS and ICS regularly and, aside from running on the best hardware, they are still behind webOS on a Pre 3 when it comes to multitasking and syncing.

 

[warmi]

What does "do it right" mean?
iOS is hugely cumbersome compared to better OSes like webOS. It's not who is better, it's who markets better. Killing off innovators like MeeGo and webOS is actually not a good thing IMHO. I use iOS and ICS regularly and, aside from running on the best hardware, they are still behind webOS on a Pre 3 when it comes to multitasking and syncing.

So where is webOS and meeGoo ?

I mean, are you completely divorced from reality or what ?

 

[Mize]

So where is webOS and meeGoo ?

I mean, are you completely divorced from reality or what ?

Uh...I have both an iPhone 3G and 4S, an iPad 2 and an ICS tablet.
(as well as about 8-10 other various smartphones)

The point is better often gets left behind when marketing wins. NeXTStep was loads better than OSX will ever be. BeOS was ahead of its time.

The discussion had migrated to whether Nokia was innovative and I pointed out many of Nokia's innovations that were adopted by Apple (and even credited to them). You seem to believe that the winner takes credit for the innovations. I don't. I'm a gadget/gear head and will politely correct you when you claim iPhone was first with video conferencing, pentaband UMTS, etc. that's all.

I also still have a Voodoo 5 5500 because it was the first card with (somewhat) playable RGSSAA and a Radeon 9700 Pro because it was the first card that allowed both AF and AA to be used simultaneously. Just wish I'd kept my Voodoo 2. Ah well.

 

[Pressure]

N9's double-tap then swipe is nice too.
What I don't get is why nobody has figured out how to copy webOS's swipe to delete in email. You can open email and in seconds swipe away the emails you don't want to read.

The whole mark-then-delete or hold-finger-popup-menu-select-delete is so absurdly cumbersome.
With Open webOS can't iPhone, WP7/9 and Android just copy the finer features of webOS finally?

Sorry? This is how it has been in iOS since introduction.

Swipe right to left and you delete it.

 

[Mize]

Sorry? This is how it has been in iOS since introduction.

Swipe right to left and you delete it.

Uh...no. You left out the second step.
iPhone is swipe left to right.
Then a "delete" button appears.
Then you tap delete.

webOS is swipe either L-R or R-L and it's deleted. It may not seem like much eliminating 1 of 2 steps, but when you wake up to 35-40 emails and only 10 are worth reading it really is annoying to have a two-step process. On my computer I just hit backspace, not backspace then click okay or enter.

 

[hkultala]

Ahonen clearly does not understand software platforms and ecosystem importance. He claimed Nokia had much better ecosystem than Apple with Symbian QT in 2011 even when it was clear Apple was dominating and Nokia had no developer mindshare. All the innovation was happening on other platforms. Bizarro world.

All he takes in to account are hardware features.. software experience is non-factor. iPhone 2G had nothing on N95 right? No need to worry. Basically Tomi is a prime example of the old Nokia management that doomed the company. Except he actually was there...

Nokia had a helicopter in their burning platform. They could have used this helicopter to fly away from their platform, but they decided to dump it into ocean.

This helicopter was called Meego.

There were lots of developers doing qt development, and practically ALL linux/unix software could be easily ported/compiled to meego.

And, in addition to that, old qt code that was made for symbian was trivial to port to meego (but old "symbian native" code was not, but that was crap anyway)

Also, there were dalvik VM that could run on Meego, and J2ME VM that could run on Meego.
(I don't understand why the N9 did not ship with J2ME VM; I know there was a very good J2ME implementation that ran top of QT as I've compiled and used that myself on a ARM-based device that used QT)

Also API's such as OpenGL which is used for most mobile games on android and iphone work on Meego, but do not work on WP7.

So , with Meego they could have had the combined ecosystems of
J2ME
Android
Linux/unix
QT


.. but they switched to WP7 which had practically NO software ecosystem, with the hope that this ecosystem will magically appear because of microsoft.

 

[Pressure]

Uh...no. You left out the second step.
iPhone is swipe left to right.
Then a "delete" button appears.
Then you tap delete.

webOS is swipe either L-R or R-L and it's deleted. It may not seem like much eliminating 1 of 2 steps, but when you wake up to 35-40 emails and only 10 are worth reading it really is annoying to have a two-step process. On my computer I just hit backspace, not backspace then click okay or enter.

Yeah, doesn't work for the majority of the demographic.

People would delete mails by accident all the time then.

 

[wco81]

So was Elop planning to go Windows from the beginning?

The burning platform was just a pretext?

Never had an open mind about Meego when he took over at Nokia?

 

[dZeus]

So was Elop planning to go Windows from the beginning?

The burning platform was just a pretext?

Never had an open mind about Meego when he took over at Nokia?

with Mr. Elop being an ex high up MS employee, I think that's rather safe to conclude. And more specifically, I think the people who hired him probably had this in mind too.

Now was it just an attempt to get a foothold in the US market, with the 'burning memo' being a shock to the people who hired him, or were they desperate enough to think that they needed an outsider (Mr. Elop) to 'deliver the bad news' (i.e. drop Symbian/Maemo and focus on a winning platform) and bet on the US market to save them?

Either way, criminal incompetence / neglect has been involved to kill off a company that could have possibly turned around with Maemo and slowly phasing out Symbian in favour of WM or Android, rather than just killing all platforms off abruptly in favour of a platform without a proven track record nor over which Nokia could exert as much control as Maemo.

P.S. Who was in charge of letting Intel into the Maemo platform? that was one weird decision too...

 

[Mize]

Yeah, doesn't work for the majority of the demographic.

People would delete mails by accident all the time then.

That's why you have a "trash" or "deleted items" IMAP folder that clears only periodically...but then...most people don't know IMAP from IMAX