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What Nokia Must Do To Stay Relevant In Mobile

Posted by Soulskill on from the introducing-the-3d-cloud-social-farm-phone dept.

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.'"

4 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Did the author completely overlook,,, by SquarePixel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nokia has a significant market share in mobile world. Not just the toys. Apple only has one product line while Nokia has many, many different phones suited for quite much everyone, and is generally looked up to in the business world (as is HTC too). Not everyone cares about buying some simple games from the app store, you know.

    I think the story would be better worded as "What Nokia Must Do To Compete With Apple", as they already sure as hell know what to do in the mobile world.

  2. Re:Did the author completely overlook,,, by cduffy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Undoubtedly, my suspicion is that the N900 was a skunk-works power play to light a fire under everyone else's asses, and I believe MeeGo and the Qt transition is the result.

    If I recall the story correctly, the precursor to the N900 was very much a skunkworks project, and built at a point when Nokia was contractually prohibited from selling a phone running Linux; the N900 was thus a relatively small step that was easy to take once that contractual prohibition was no longer in place.

  3. Ah, Galen Gruman by BasilBrush · · Score: 5, Informative

    We had a ill-informed article by Galen Gruman just yesterday. And here's another.

    Nokia took too long to realize that Symbian's lack of touch capabilities would hinder its ability to compete in the smartphone market.

    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?

  4. why bother? by yyxx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.