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What Nokia Must Do To Stay Relevant In Mobile
snydeq writes "Mikael Ricknäs reports how Nokia can turn around its three-year slide in the mobile market — one that has transformed the company's iconic N95 into a distant memory given the pace of innovation at Apple and around Android. Completely underestimating the impact of the iPhone, Nokia took too long to realize that Symbian's lack of touch capabilities would hinder its ability to compete in the smartphone market. Moreover, the company's move to open source the OS has significantly slowed down Symbian's development, according to analysts, leaving Nokia with both a lack of support from other vendors and a platform on which competitors can keep a close eye. Meanwhile, developer interest in Nokia's Ovi app store is nearly nonexistent. 'Nokia's problems are still fixable but the window is closing. I am not optimistic that they will be fixed in 2010 because there isn't much time left; if they aren't fixed in 2011, Nokia will be in big trouble.'"
... the N900?
As far as I'm concerned the only thing Nokia is missing is a better marketing campaign for their product that compares very favorably with the Apple and Android offerings.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
If well is not fully open (the actual cellphone part is somewhat closed source) the N900 could had started a trend of open, very flexible phones, you can even find alternative kernels where you can over/underclock them for special uses. It is still an impressive phone, but is lacking mindshare. It could have got more developers attention, but they didnt put their weight supporting that phone.
Now they are going for Meego, still having closed components, and the question is for how much they will give to it attention or how soon they will forget about that platform too. They should be more open on them, letting developers fully take advantage of that hardware (i.e. there is an Android port for it, but the cellphone part don't work because being one of the closed components), and see how far it could get... if the phone gets wildly popular because its flexibility, maybe they won't sell so much associated services if what most run is not tied with them, but for sure they will sell a lot of hardware.
That's the equivalent of saying a fully-fledged mobile Linux computer (with a really nice front-end) is nothing but a nice browser, while the other platforms do so much more...
I'm not going to argue with you, because you're right.
I'd just like to point out that marketshare isn't awesomeness.
In the marketplace, fartapps and other apps are the thing nowadays, sure, but come on, the N900 is basically a debian computer in your pocket that can also (often) make phonecalls.
Sadly, awesomeness doesn't equal marketshare either, of course.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Nokia makes great hardware, but they obviously have problems putting together a good UI or development platform. They are unlikely to come up with something better than Android, Chrome, or iOS.
So what Nokia should do is ship Android and build whatever software and hardware innovations they want on top of that. I think Nokia Android phones would be spectacular. Symbian^4? Sorry, not interested.
To expand a bit.
Nokia is betting the house on Meego. Big time. By announcing that Symbian will no longer be the OS choice for their top-end smartphones in the future, Nokia has essentially cannibilized the sales of their upcoming flagship - the Nokia N8. The N8 is actually a very decent device and it's going to be competitively priced, but they have not only failed to gain any major mindshare for it so far via very lackluster pre-launch marketing, they have now essentially buried it by announcing that Symbian is now officially a low-to-mid phone system.
You wrote: "The only fix for Nokia now is to go Android, then the fact they make nice hardware means something again.". Nokia has been well known for making good quality phones, but this is not the reality any more. Hasn't been for past 2-3 years. Flagship product N97 had so many flaws you can not even list them here. Do a google search. N900's hardware has been a nightmare! Just browse talk.maemo.org and you will see why if you are not aware already. Nokia phones used to be good quality phones some 2-3 years ago, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case any more.
i have said it before and i'll say it again
the N900 is a sweet smartphone.. i LOVE mine.
Nokia were VERY up front when they released it saying that maemo was "stage 4 of 5" and that it wasn't a phone that was for everyone. it was very much a niche of a niche phone.
the ovi store to be quite frank ISN'T where you get yer apps.. you get them direct to your phone from repositories. these can be accessed simply by adding them to your phone settings
check here for the settings
also you will find that maemo on the N900 is soon to undergo a change in that it will be going MeeGo - in a sense.
it's still going to have the debian based maemo under the bonnet and then the Meego UI.
Full on MeeGo is Fedora under the bonnet
how many of the people currently slagging off the N900 have actually had hands on experience with it? not too many i would hazard a guess
The article mentions lack of developer interest in Nokia's Ovi store, which is failing because there aren't very many users on it. This is because using the Ovi store requires surfing the web, cumbersome authentication, no downloading of free apps without a login, bad search, and other user interface fuckups. It's slow, it's cumbersome, it's confusing and it's not even used by Nokia. Handset integration is nonexistent.
Until the Ovi store works as simply as the Android store (ie. gets integrated with their handsets), most users won't bother with it.
And since no users bother with it, no developers will, either.
There are big bucks to be made elsewhere, and they don't require deep knowledge of Symbian landmines to develop for.
The N900 doesn't even try to compete with Apple and Android offerings, it's essentially a desktop computer in a small case. It essentially runs a flavour of Debian. (yes, you do have apt-get on those devices)
Now the next step would be to encourage more mobile phone vendors to do the same.