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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!"
For me all they have to do to stay relevant is release an up to date E90 running Maemo/MeeGo. Apparently that physical phone layout isn't going to ever come back.
I've heard that Nokia is big in Europe, but at least here in the USA its hard to get a Symbian phone or any Nokia phone save for dumb-phones. What Nokia really needs to do is create a really high-end phone, make it be multi-carrier and release it for all carriers subsidized in the US. Phones like the N900 are nice, but since you can't get them subsidized, it really harms adoption rates. In the US people expect their cell phones to appear to only cost nothing to $50 for a dumb-phone and $100-200 for a smartphone. Paying $650 for a phone is something that few people will do, if it was $200 subsidized, people would pick it up because at the time, the N900 was a really nice phone, but no one wants to pay $650 for it.
Nokia needs to get their act together by flooding the market with their phones. Heck, even abandon Symbian for a while and create Android phones, really, despite how much Nokia seems to love Symbian, it kinda fails when compared to Android, iOS and even WebOS.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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...
When the average person sees that they can get an iPhone for $200, a BlackBerry for $100, an Android device for $100, a palm device for $100, a Windows Mobile device for $50 or the N900 for $650
This is true only because the U.S. cell phone market doesn't itemize the phone subsidy on the monthly bill. T-Mobile is the first U.S. nationwide carrier to introduce SIM-only plans that cost less than plans that include a phone.
What Nokia must do to stay relevant in mobile?
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"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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.
http://www.fool.com/investing/international/2010/06/18/can-anything-save-nokia.aspx
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/nokia-warns-on-handset-profits-ftimes-edf08c1a77e7.html
We had a ill-informed article by Galen Gruman just yesterday. And here's another.
Symbian OS has ALWAYS had touch capabilities. It was originally released on a PDA called the Psion Series 5 under the name Epoc 32. That was a device with both a touch screen and a full qwerty keyboard. Touch was absolutely central to it. In all the smartphones Symbian OS has been released for, the OS itself still has touch central to the UI code. In the case of Sony-Ericsson, they released phones that used those touch capabilities. Nokia always chose not to. To release phones without touch screens. It was always Nokia's decision, never anything to do with the OS not being able to do it.
How can you take a tech author seriously when he makes false accusations based on a complete lack of knowledge of the facts?
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.
Disclaimer: I hold Nokia stock
What Nokia needs to do is replace it's top management. Unless some drastical measures are announced within the next 2 weeks (Q2 report coming up), the stockholders are going to be demanding that too (just look at Nokia stock trend over the past 8 years, it's really not particularly pretty). The problem is the arrogance and incompetence of the long-time top company officials like Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (the CEO). Nokia's current situation is very similar to Ericsson a decade ago. They had a very strong market position, but grew arrogant and slow, while the market churn kept on speeding up.
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
That's the equivalent of saying a fully-fledged mobile Linux computer (with a really nice front-end) is nothing but a nice browser,
That depends on what you mean my mobile. A great strength of Linux is the ton of free software around - but much of it targeting X-Windows.
How much can run on that mobile platform? Software that is not meant for mobile devices doesn't really work for users.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Yeah but that misses the point entirely.
N900 is a sweet phone but a niche phone as you have pointed out yourself. Its missing many features present in the top end droid/iphone software. Simple things like double tap to fully justify a column of text in a webpage, and with Froyo the one big standout - the browser - is left in the dust.
For example my friend has a n900, he is a linux dev so for him its awesome.
I run a fedora server @ home and have tinkered with linux for years, but no coding beyond basic scripting, and for me the 'openness' of the n900 doesn't mean much as I can't code for it and make it do all the crazy things you see people hack it into. Sure I can copy/paste other people's efforts but would that compensate for not having all the stuff I'm now used to in Android 2.2 (even 2.1)? not a chance.
As for the repos, its nowhere close to even the android app shop let alone the apple one. For most people, once the basic phone bit is acceptable (and it pretty much is, left handed fruit aside lol) its all about the apps. I don't know if you have much experience with the iphone or high end droid phones but my friend made the same point, 'there are apps in repos'. I let him play around with my N1 for a bit and he was flabbergasted with the amount of apps/functionality available, and that's just android, let alone the insanely big iphone apps market.
So the n900 is a great tech demo, great hackers tool for linux devs, but it ain't exactly worth a ---- in the fight for the smartphone market. Now they're going meego, you wanna bet how many issues there will be with version 1? Meanwhile droid will move up to version 3 and iphone keeps getting more polish, power (lockdown and anti apple backlash too lol). Every minute a polished software/hardware combo is not on the market they are losing.
As for asia/europe, sure there are lots of nokias around and it is still one of the best options for non-smartphones, but for the high end, nobody wants a nokia, they ALL want an iphone or android. There is NO buzz around nokia at all.
What is this "exact same Android phone" you speak of? I spent the last few weeks investigating upgrades to our phones in this household, and the one thing I can safely say is that the Android phones were a pretty diverse lot, size, camera, keyboard or lack of it, processing power, screen quality, camera quality, camera capabilities, styles, and, oh, prices too. The MyTouch Slide we eventually went for even has significant changes to the look and feel of the operating system, not just in terms of (somewhat unnecessary) T-Mobile crap, but also in terms of a revamped voice control interface (which is crap, but that's another story.)
If Nokia wants to make an Android phone and wants to distinguish it from other Android phones, they'd certainly not have a problem in doing so. There's also no reason whatsoever for them to build an iOS phone: all they'd be doing is creating a closed, proprietary, system when they could produce something just as capable and user friendly with an open architecture. Why waste money licensing iOS because of minor UI differences, when it's perfectly within your abilities to make changes to, say, Android or Maemo, that'll change the UI to whatever you want it to be?
I don't necessarily propose Nokia do Android, not because it's a bad choice, but because choice is good, and it'd be nice to see a mobile operator that once-upon-a-time was renowned for its style, come up with an alternative to webOS and Android, but suggesting iOS? Really? We don't need more iPhones. Nokia's problem is that both of its operating systems, Symbian and Maemo, have the same issues as iOS, not that they're not like iOS enough.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yes. Nokia has some problem competing with the iphone. Is this bad? maybe. But what Nokia need to focus on is the markets where they are strong and where Apple cant compete. Look at Indonesia, China or other places where you can not sell iphones costing $500-$1000. What Nokia need to do is keep their dominance in these markets stable, and when processing power become cheap enough (you just have to wait) to push a major revision into new models sold in 100s of millions per year, then they can make the change. Anything up to then serve either a very specific market (people who used Nokia for the last 10 Years) or are plainly test devices for Nokia.
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.
"things like double tap to fully justify a column of text in a webpage"
That's a very specific thing to be complaining about. I'm not even sure what you are getting at. Double tapping on the n900s browser zooms out the page (to the equivalent of being a 1280 width screen i believe). Double tapping again zooms in on that region. It's very intuitive and quick.
It's not what you're describing but it seems to achieve the same goal; Web pages are easily viewable on the n900. You can also install n900 versions of Firefox, Chromium or Opera if you don't like the default browser on the n900. So i don't see what you are getting at here.
As for the app store it's really just a repository, don't use the OVI store browser as that's redundant, use the App manager to browse for apps. You click app manager on the phone and you get a list of programs available from the repositories (including the commercial OVI store repository). Mame, SNES and Megadrive emulators, OpenSSH, ftpd, all the tux games, programs to turn you phone into a wireless access point, VOIP apps, all the major linux apps etc. are all downloadable from these official repositories. The n900's a full Linux system and the huge number of apps for the n900 reflects this.
I don't understand how you think there aren't many apps available. All i can think is that the official developer and extras repositories weren't added to the app manager and you browsed nothing more than the OVI store. Nokia open their phones so that there isn't one source of apps for the device, make sure you add the other well known sources. Note that's also why you never here about how Nokia killed app X for their phone. They aren't Apple. They couldn't stop a competing source of apps for their phones even if they wanted to and the OVI store is a small part of the ecosystem.
Here's some extra sources for n900 apps. Click these on your phone to add them to the App manager. The first link, the extras, is especially important as it's official and has a huge list of great apps with seemingly all the major linux apps represented. The rest i've linked here are a bit more specific and some are for beta version applications. But even if you just add the extras repository you should be giving the Android a run for it's money in the amount and quality of the applications available.
http://repository.maemo.org/extras/
http://repository.maemo.org/extras-testing/
http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/
http://my-maemo.com/repository/
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile
http://www.amsn-project.net/maemo
http://b-man.xceleo.org/repo/maemo-nintendo-emulators/
http://qole.org/repository
No matter what they do, Nokia will not out-iPhone the iPhone. They aren't Apple and they shouldn't try to be. What they are is *European* and they should use that to their advantage. They should become the Swatch of cell phones and start selling phones based on a combination of simplicity, price, and wild looks. Fashion trends change rapidly, and nothing is stopping the large (for a phone) iPhone from being supplanted as a fashion accessory.