Slashdot Mirror
Nokia's iPhone, No Seriously
Several readers have written to tell us that Engadget has a look at Nokia's visions for the future. "It was presented during Nokia's GoPlay event this morning as a glimpse into the future of Nokia interface design. Oh, and it's due out next year. When pressed during the Q&A about the striking similarity to the little Cupertino device, Anssi Vanjoki — Nokia's Executive VP & General Manager of Multimedia — said, 'If there is something good in the world then we copy with pride.' Well, ok then."
I'm actually pretty excited to see iPhone features make their way into non Apple products. Sure it is blatant idea theft. Sure Nokia is leeching whatever "coolness" they can from Apples form factor. Who cares? We have PCs that aren't proprietary because of blatant idea theft. Hell, we really wouldn't have spinning cubes in Linux were it not for ideas presented in other operating systems. Noah Wylie, while playing Steve Jobs said that "good artists copy, great artists steal". I do not mind getting quality (if Apple like) features at a lower price than Apple is willing to offer.
load "$",8,1
And it will be better and cheaper than the iPhone. I don't see why people are being asses about it, Nokia is a company with a lot of great phones. Of course the Apple fanboys will whine, but they always do.
As an IT professional, I prefer the S60 series of devices over the iPhone hands down. Symbian has a whole slew of applications available for the platform, including Putty, Citrix, and RDP clients. My E61i has built in wifi, and Nokia has released a SCCP client (Cisco VoIP) that registers with my Cisco CallManager cluster as soon as I enter the building. Combine that with their full Intellisync package, and you've got the sexiest work phone ever. I'll grant you that the average cell phone user would have a better time with the iPhone, but for me it's Nokia all the way.
p hone">this review.
For a more humorous take on what I'm talking about, check out http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=i
Sometimes I think the discussions on Slashdot are pretty dumb, but that Engadget discussion is a whole order of magnitude more dumb. I guess it's because it involves Apple.
It's not the hardware that makes this an iPhone clone, it's the look and feel of the interface. Hell from that poor quality video they posted even the UI colours seem to be the same.
Also Apple have patents on the UI behaviour up the wazoo.
On the other hand Nokia won't lock their device to particular networks, make it unlockable, and sell it with 2G EDGE only. On the other hand, it isn't out yet. If this is as early as Apple's previews, then Nokia won't have anything on the market for at least 6 months.
What this does show is the market moving on from rather static 2D PDA-style interfaces. Apple are a bit player right now, but Nokia are pretty major. This puts pressure on Microsoft, who have just released their WM2006 product - a classic 2D PDA-like OS, when the competition is moving to slicker, smoother, easier-to-use and intuitive interfaces that are far more function centric than application centric.
Nokia: More mature interface with features and market experience vs. historical cruft to deal with, and Symbian.
Apple: No cruft to deal with, but lack market experience and features, which will be made up by system updates possibly. Very small marketshare currently, US-only. Too restrictive right now.
Microsoft: Let's hope that some of our OEMs develop fancy interfaces on top of our base OS. Very flexible. ActiveSync nightmare.
It's really not worth it for either company to spend the money on lawyers.
Wow, your perception of Nokia is the complete opposite of mine. In my opinion, and frankly it's a very predominant one in the industry, Nokia is synonymous with the highest quality hardware and most intuitive interfaces in the mobile phone market. This is relative to the other phone companies, of course, not Apple because no one has made a phone anything like the iPhone before and it's too early to see what kind of phone company Apple will prove to be.
;)
Anyway, Nokia phones are generally [i]very[/i] expensive relative to their competition as far as comparisons in terms of features go. It is in ease of use, build quality, aesthetics, and performance that Nokia's have traditionally been admired -- certainly not cost.
It'll be an interesting competition. In a sense, Nokia would be the Apple of traditional mobile phone manufacturers. Indeed, particularly since Nokia has traditional been the innovator in form factors, technologies -- certainly the one cloned rather than the cloner -- I'm actually pleasantly a bit surprised by their shrewdness and humility in simply recognizing the excellence of the Apple phone and quickly taking advantage of the position they have (unusually), of being second and thus, able to copy it
Oh no, not Symbian!
:)
I'm an intern at Nokia Research right now. We all hate Symbian here. Symbian C++ is incredibly bizarre to program for, and this is coming from someone who thinks Haskell is a great language. You can make the phone OS either lock up or reset way too easily. If linux ever makes it into the flagship phones, I think you'll see a lot more innovation out of Nokia, because the developers and researchers will no longer be hobbled.
For example, Dlls are limited to a 1MB heap... unless you declare a new heap, then swap it out with User::SwapHeap. Of course if you call new on one heap and delete on another all hell breaks loose. Why have a hard limit on Dll heap size if you can just code around it?
Don't even get me started on the hacked together perl scripts that constitute the developer's kit (assuming you're a command line + emacs/vi person). Your SDK has to be in the root directory (or subst'd to be such), and your code has to live somewhere on the same drive - ie all projects live under the SDK.
The security model is a nightmare for researchers. You can't make the phone do anything genuinely new without flashing the phone firmware to a dev version, which means nothing you've written can ever be tried out by other people (nobody wants to flash their personal phone to the dev version), which means the idea will never make it out of the lab and dies from lack of exposure.
Bah. Posting anon for obvious reasons
If this isn't the truth, I don't know what is.
The funny thing is that Nokia offers several great devices which should compete with the iPhone at half the price, but the iPhone defenders immediately point to the UI as justifying the cost. Once the UI is similar (and perhaps improved) in the Nokia product, what will the defense be then?
Apple didn't invent the smart phone. They didn't invent the MP3 player, or camera. You could argue that the Newton was a huge innovator, except it flopped.
Apple is not above copying the technology of someone else and claiming they invented it. Look at Spaces. I saw an interview with Jobs where he flat out claimed to have invented this huge innovation in multiple desktops, never mind this technology has been around for near a decade. I wouldn't be shocked if Apple's implementation is different, but they certainly don't innovate nearly as much as the fanatics would have you believe.
The primary reason I switched from Windows to Linux as opposed to OS X was how much I am put off by the deception of Apple's marketing, and the ardent OS X fanatics who can't see any reason. Microsoft and Linux also have fanatics no doubt, but I suppose I find the Linux camp the most reasonable.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Sir Isaac Newton on Intellectual Property: "If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants".
Q.E.D.
I'm not sure what fanboy coolaid you are drinking, but nokia have been far from innovative in handset design. It took them years to understand that phones could actually be designed a tad more stylish than the standard house brick format. Sony Ericsson have it right, fast OS and far more intuitive interfaces, better music players, better sound. The only thing symbian has going for it is that it allows 3rd party software, though this is becoming far more convoluted and difficult with every new iteration of the OS.
How's the Visual Studio development toolkit going on? I was supposed to be project manager on that but they moved the whole project to Chezk if I remember correctly :)
I worked as Symbian coder for couple of years 2003-2004 and man it sucked. The whole development environment is absolutely horrible! But let's start from documentation. The whole documentation is directly generated from comments coming from .h and .c files. Often it lacked some necessary information which had to be googled or your software came crashing down. Sometimes it even gave wrong info and your software came crashing down. Documentation was almost useless.
And how about debuggin then? What's the idea with phone simulator (not emulator) that lacks of phone functionalities! There was some hack to get it to use Windows' TCPIP stack but no calls and no SMS. Simulator ran on X86 so you couldn't catch any of the ARM (or was it MIPS? Don't remember.) specific errors.
Building process was absolute mess! Perl scipts which had to be invoked from command line. Luckily I managed to create nice .bat file which compiled everything and packaged software to installation package. There was some weird thing with Perl also that you had to set some environment variables to get it working. Nothing of this was on the documentation of course. Just a notice, that you should not set this variable...
The whole architecture was pure shit. I've never seen a good C++ API and Symbian was/is no exception. Of course the lack of exception handling in the normal C++ way doesn't help either (yes, I know C++ didn't have exceptions when Symbian was first made but they was on experimental state and they could have added those later). I've heard a saying that if you need to inherit multiple classes (not interfaces or abstract classes but normal classes) there's something terrible wrong with your code. Well, I often ended up inheriting 3-5 classes and implementing 1-2 interfaces. Talking about good design...
And that's just the Symbian part. Add Nokia's Sxx or (Sony)Ericsson's UIQ above that with their braindead design and you get a very fucked up coder.
This reminds me when I was looking for a new job, I think it was -05, I got a phone call from London (I live in Finland) and they offered me a Symbian job. You know what I answered? "There's no company in the world that will pay me enough to get back to that horrible piece of ..." (I'm a gentleman, I don't curse when there's ladies around/in phone). Need I say that I didn't take the job? :)
Posting non-anon for karma whoring :P
You don't know what you don't know.
It can't do multi-touch, but the iPhone won't even let me select a song as my ringtone. Some multimedia phone.
The iPhone won't let me replace the battery, it isn't 3G, Flash doesn't work on the web, CSS doesn't display correctly, it has a low resolution, and the latest PC World (which normally loves Apple products) ranked it fifth out of the 5 smart phones they tested. They said video quality was shockingly low, and the only real praise they had for it was audio output.
As a typical cell phone, it lacks most of the features that free phones offer these days like song ringtones, multimedia messaging, etc.
For $600, some of the real basic missing features are just flat-out shocking. And when you compare it to smart-phones, I'd much rather have a phone where I can add apps, but maybe that is just me.
However, that multi-touch function sure makes it all worthwhile.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
We find this argument again and again from Apple advocates. It goes: choice is painful and people do not want it and cannot exercise it intelligently. Apple's product line, is better because it does not give this choice.
The argument has usually been applied to hardware. It is better to have less hardware choice - graphics card, keyboards, processors. In the present case it is being applied to features.
It ignores the way markets and products actually work. Nokia or whoever produces all these different models because they sell in competition with the offerings from all the other suppliers. If they stop selling, they stop making them. The same goes for Dell, Acer etc. If, from the product range on offer from all the different phone suppliers, you can't find what you want, it is not that they are idiots or manipulative, nor is it that your needs are not real and legitimate. It is just that you are in a very small minority.
It is a quite legitimate business strategy to focus on one particular set of needs in the market, as Apple does. Its called niche marketing. It is the reason why Porter is able to plot profitability versus market share, and show that it is U shaped. Profitability typically rises as share falls below a certain point - because you are in a profitable niche. If you like, you no longer have to try out all these different models in order to find out which will hit the mass buyer's hot spot, because that does not interest you. All that interests you is a small subset.
However, the basic mistake of the argument, both on the iPhone and on the Mac product range, is to assume that everyone in a mass market can practice a niche strategy. They cannot. Niches exist in large markets. It is only because of the large market that they exist. There may be a niche in computers and phones which consists among other things of people whose heads hurt when they have to choose among too many = more than three alternatives. But it is not the market as a whole. Most people actually like the choice, the competition otherwise would not produce it.
And no they are not stupid, and yes, they do pretty much know what they are buying. Whether its computers, refridgerators, washing machines, stereos...or even cars. As Detroit has been finding out over the last 10 or 20 years.
I have always been interested in the choice argument because it has echoes of political arguments. You find, for instance, in the UK, people arguing that choice in health care providers is bad. What I want is one good hospital, not a choice between 3 or 4. In the UK, this argument usually appears in the Guardian (coincidentally, an Apple computing environment...) where the assumption is that this hospital will naturally be State run. Choice in education is also deeply upsetting to people. What they really want is one good school, not a choice between half a dozen.
One suspects that the argument that lurks underneath is about politics. You really do not want all these confusing political parties. What you want is one nice, good one. It wouldn't be New Labour by any chance?
The analogy is correct in this respect: the argument in both cases ignores that the way, the only way, to get one or two or more good ones, cars, phones, computers, political parties, is by the mechanism of consumer choice. Back in the sixties, the argument might have been made, why does the UK need all these car imports? All we need is one or two good ones made by Rover (or British Leyland as it was then). Ah yes. And how exactly were you going to get Rover to produce even one halfway decent one?
though I stopped with the N80
s /testing/cap_granting.html
Ouch. Never used one, but according to forum chatter that one was a lemon. On paper a great device, but way too slow CPU and gimped battery.
It has gotten better, though. The latest batch of 3rd ed phones are quite good (E90, N81, N95*).
* Make sure you get the second edition of the N95 (the soon-to-be-released US or the just released 8GB one), the first ed is a bit short on RAM and battery. I got one of the 1st ed myself, and it is almost a small laptop in my pocket; the functionality is mainly gimped by Nokia skimping on the RAM.
As has now become tradition, nokia will require that every single piece of software be signed before installation
It isn't quite that bad. "Please notice that Symbian Signed is not mandatory, if your application uses only unrestricted APIs or user-grantable capabilities." http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/technical_service
Still, the process for signing is too cumbersome for most freeware / FOSS devs to be bothered with. It's unfortunately a sad state, because smartphones really need a good open platform for 3rd party devs and Nokia seems to be going in the wrong direction here. And it is likely that we'll have to wait a long time for Apple to release an iPhone SDK, too. Once you unjail the thing there doesn't seem to be any sort of security at all; at the very least, Apple needs to sort out a security model first. WinMobile? Oh, don't get me started...
The only other ray of hope is Linux, it will be interesting to see if efforts like OpenMoko are successful. I really hope so, because as I said we need a good open platform for small mobile devices. Even a moderate success might cause Nokia and others to open up their platforms a bit more (just like the iPhone is causing them to revisit their UIs).
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Why don't you conduct an informal survey? Gather together 1000 Mac users and 1000 Windows users, and ask each one the meaning of a few select pieces of tech jargon. I think you might be surprised that you find more savvy users in the Mac camp than the Windows camp.
Webkit passed Acid2 before KHTML... some of the changes are still in dev builds I think though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley