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

[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: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!

Actually it's the E70...

[valdean]

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

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.

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: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.

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.