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."

Comments

This is S60 4.0

[Eugenia Loli]

This will be based on Symbian's S60 4.0 new version btw, not Linux. It's just the evolution of their S60 smartphone platform.

Re:This is S60 4.0

[222]

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.

For a more humorous take on what I'm talking about, check out http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=ip hone">this review.

Re:This is S60 4.0

[2nd Post!]

The customer Apple is targetting thinks Putty is silly, Citrix is a vitamin C supplement, and RDP is a French police department. SCCP and VoIP is just as arcane to them as TCPIP, XSLT, and the DMCA.

It's great that Nokia has such a wonderful phone for you, but isn't it even better that, coming soon, Nokia will have an iPhone-like device that will do everything you just described, AND work like an iPhone too?

Re:This is S60 4.0

[catwh0re]

Judging from my experience with nokia phones. The user interface, performance and construction will still have significant gaps/compromise in order to keep the end price affordable and the handset profitable.(Apple earn their followers by producing thorough and seamless interfaces, this directly contradicts Nokia's business model.)

Plus in the hey-day of MP3 player competition: Apple rolled out new models twice a year. I doubt that the iPhone won't be following the same aggressive product development cycle.

I'm not dissing Nokia for duplicating the iPhone interface (and definitely extending it with their handset experience.) What I am saying however is that Nokia will produce every kind of phone out there in their usual jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none design ethos.

They know that profitability is not about having the best phone out there, but having something comparable and half the price. (I.e consumer choice.)

Additionally one can argue that the two companies work in different markets: Nokia rarely cut out seldom used/confusing features in the fear that they'll strike off a possible buyer. Apple on the other hand will only include the most desired features and reinvent them with their particular experience in usability.

Re:This is S60 4.0

[McFadden]

What pisses me off about the whole thing is this is the usual "everyone's copying Apple" bullshit that gets trotted out whenever someone releases a product which might be considered competition or fulfils a similar role to an Apple product.

Because Apple were categorically the first company ever to release a pocket device with a touchscreen. History starts with them. The whole world of PDAs with network capabilities, picture viewers, mp3 players, web browsing capabilities didn't really happen. Companies like Palm who made small touchscreen devices, looked into the future, predicted the iPhone and copied the concept years before Apple did it first.

And I say that as a Mac Pro owner. Love their computers. Love their gear. Hate their fanbase.

Re:This is S60 4.0

[Anonymous Coward]

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 :)

Re:This is S60 4.0

[Divebus]

One Word: Newton.

Yup, history certainly did start with Apple. If cell phones in 1992 didn't weigh 6-10 pounds, it probably would have had that inside as well.

Re:This is S60 4.0

[digitalchinky]

No, it will be more expensive, have an illogical and clunky user interface, and take 8 firmware revisions before it becomes remotely stable enough to use. (I used to be a nokia fan boy, though I stopped with the N80 which cost me around $750 US when first released) As has now become tradition, nokia will require that every single piece of software be signed before installation, though they will find a way to screw that process up even more than they have now. The operating system will spend more time chatting to the TPM chip than all previous symbian versions put together, DRM will be significantly enhanced and soak up any remaining CPU cycles such that it takes at least 3 seconds for any key press to register, followed by another 4 seconds to update the screen. (And that's on a good day)

Until nokia pull their heads out of their collective arses and ease up on the pointless file system restrictions, symbian 3rd edition was the last straw not only for me, but a good many others going by forum chatter. I will not be buying nokia at all.

The alternatives aren't much better, but at least most have already been broken by 3rd party solutions. BB5 is still hit and miss.

Re:This is S60 4.0

[digitalchinky]

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.

Re:This is S60 4.0

[pyrrhonist]

Because Apple were categorically the first company ever to release a pocket device with a touchscreen.

Actually, the Casio PB-1000 was the first to have this feature in 1987.

Apple also had competition in the PDA market when it first introduced the Newton in 1993. The Casio Z-7000 "Zoomer"/Tandy Z-PDA were introduced a couple months later. These devices also featured a touch screen with handwriting recognition.

Re:This is S60 4.0

[raju1kabir]

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.

I think you're making his point for him.

I don't give a shit about how stylish my phone is.

I want one that lets me do what I need to do as efficiently as possible.

To date, Nokia kicks everyone else's ass in that regard. On average, the interface requires the fewest button presses to do the most common things, and it's relatively internally consistent compared to most other handset brands.

Re:This is S60 4.0

[weicco]

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

Re:This is S60 4.0

[LarsG]

though I stopped with the N80

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_services /testing/cap_granting.html

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).

Turn it on its head

[fishthegeek]

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.

Re:Turn it on its head

[nine-times]

Noah Wylie, while playing Steve Jobs said that "good artists copy, great artists steal"

That quote is stolen from Picasso, I believe.

Re:Turn it on its head

[mrjatsun]

> Sure it is blatant idea theft

You forget, Apple is leveraging decades of ideas in cell phone technology for their product that they never thought of. Sure they have a lot of great new ideas, but I don't see other folks using their ideas as stealing. No more than I see Apple building a cell phone as stealing.

Re:I know I can't get a Nissan

[Captain Splendid]

Well, in any case, I'm holding out for the ZunePhone...

Well sonny Jim, you're in luck! Get squirting today!

Re:Hype

[PlusFiveInsightful]

Slashdot stories are like digits of pi*. Every so often you'll get two in a row that are the same...

(*digits of pi in base 4)

Actually it's the E70...

[valdean]

And it's the "pinnacle of human achievement".

Why is everyone so hard on iPhone

[or-switch]

No product, especially something as personal as your phone, is going to satisfy everyone, and they're not designed to, which is why there are so many to choose from. The iPhone does what it does, and it does it reasonably well (though yeah, the phone feature is the hardest to use). It's a consumer entertainment device so why are so many people hard on it for business. If something else is better for you (you need SSH, Microsoft exchange, etc.) get a phone that has those features. If you can't live without a keyboard, get a phone with a physical keyboard.

Frankly, for the last two years I've kept a Razr and a video iPod crammed in my pocket, and I'm happy to have one device, that also gives me internet when I need it, in a single device. I wish it had 3G and some other things, but it's also a first generation device. The first iPod kinda sucked too, but not so bad it didn't make a big impact.

Regarding price, AT&T, and other 'problems' people talk about, get over it. If T-mobile is better for you, go with 'em. Nobody is forcing you to use an iPhone if you don't want to.

By analogy: When I was shopping for a car recently I looked at cool 50K sports car that only seats 2. Well, I drive around with friends a lot and a 4 seater is much more my speed, and I got one with lots of power for about $30K. I could say, as some do with the iPhone, "It only seats two and costs $50K! I can get a 4 seater for half that." So get the freakin' 4 seater.

The iPhone is clearly a luxury device designed for a certain market, but not all markets. Is all the griping over this to protect a moron from going into and Apple store, dropping $600 and saying, "WAit, this isn't what I wanted at all." People aren't that dumb, and if they are and have that kind of money, let 'em. Frankly, no cell phone could be perfect, especially with this group. Someone did an analysis on Slashdot I think of the 'ideal' mobile device and then proved it couldn't be made by any one manufacturer because of patent and licensing issues. Go get the phone with the features you want. I showed my iPhone to my parents and they said, "Hmm, we just need a phone that makes phone calls." So I helped them find a simple phone with big buttons because that's what they needed.

Or is all the griping because you secretly want an iPhone and are frustrated because you can't justify the cost because it doesn't have a feature you truly need. Hmm. I think a lot of the bitching about the AT&T lockout is becuase people still have contracts they can't cancel and really want one. Life's not fair (and yeah, as an AT&T customer for some time now they kinda suck, but what tradeoffs are you willing to make?) IF you're not willing, nobody is forcing you to.

Re:Can't anyone see it's a joke/hoax?

[Nazlfrag]

No, this is legit, it's coming from the London GoPlay launch event. There's a pic of it from a live blog here.

The Newton Irony

[krbvroc1]

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.

Re:The Newton Irony

[bjorniac]

This sounds so great until you realize that he was actually saying it to make fun of Robert Hook's short stature. Newton could be a very petty man in many ways, and he unwillingness to acknowledge Hook (and Leibniz) is the stuff of legend.

Talk about "strong bias"...

[Anonymous Coward]

You've probably never used a Nokia Communicator, an N800 or even an N70, let alone a high-end Qtek PDA (ex., Qtek 9000), right? Thought so.

The iPhone might look very impressive in the USA, where cell phones seem to have been stuck in the early 90s (your theory that Motorola was ever "the cellphone of choice" confirms this), but it's a joke compared to any modern european or asian smartphone. Why do you think Apple is limiting it to the US? Because that's the only place where they'll be able to sell something so underpowered for such a high price. Sure, there are some Apple fanbois in Europe too, but there's also real competition (phones come unlocked, and there are lots of operators). The iPhone needs to go through at least three iterations until it is ready to be sold in Europe and Asia, and the competition (Nokia, Qtek, Sony-Ericsson, etc.) aren't exactly sitting still.

Multi-touch

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Multi-touch

[Lars T.]

It can't do multi-touch, but the iPhone won't even let me select a song as my ringtone. You say that like it's a bad thing.