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Nokia Killing Symbian and S40 In North America
In an interview with AllthingsD, the head of Nokia's US operations declared that Nokia will be focusing exclusively on Windows Phone devices in North America. Reasons cited include the low profit margins of the ubiquitous low-end Series 40 devices and lackluster sales of Symbian based devices. This also means that the N9 won't be making it to North America either.
Dear Nokia, I love your engineers. But please ditch your marketing department, just soon as you fire your CEO Stephen Elop, the $hill from Micro$oft. I miss you lots.
It's a shame, really. My wife's 4 year old Nokia E65 is still doing its thing, with an OK web browser, wifi etc., and the battery life is roughly 5x what my LG Optimus gets. Nokia used to make some great kit if you weren't the type that had to have "Apps" that were just repackaging of websites or farting noises.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Apparently so. But their new CEO appears to be doing everything he can to change this.
Quite what the major shareholders think about it, I'd love to know.
I just bought a Nokia C3-00 unlocked and for what I want to do with a phone (phone calls and texting) it works perfectly, plus I get a good week+ of battery life. It isn't glitzy, the UI isn't the flashiest, but the hardware is solid, the keyboard feels good and it just works.
Far, far too many of the android and Apple products are going for glitz and glamour and eschewing the basics of what a phone should be. That is to say, a phone. In addition, they get crap battery life.
They've failed from a marketing perspective in the North American market. Partnering with a large US corporation which seems to know a thing or two about marketing could work out for them. Though it would be more reassuring if they partnered with someone who didn't define 'partner' as 'someone you work with until you eat them'.
Loose lips lose spit.
Nokia have turned Symbian OS into a joke. Every application you install including any freeware must be signed or your phone must be hacked. You also need a developer certificate - specific to the phone's IMEI to hack your phone. Ever since this June when Nokia changed Symbian Signed so that getting a developer certificate software for free is no longer possible, Way to turn a smart phone into a dumb phone. I'm locked into a contract until November. After that I'll never buy anything Nokia or Microsoft again. I am not big on brand loyalty but I have been using Nokia phones exclusively since 1998, and now I can't wait to ditch them. Up until a couple of years ago I was able to get good battery life and install the odd app to customise my phone without too much drama. Sure PC suite was buggy and made teathering difficult when it crashed (requiring phone or PC or both to be rebooted) and instead of fixing it it seemed to get buggier with every generation but I could live with that. For the most part the phones were just the right balance of smart phone at a good price. Now they are overpriced pieces of junk - you'd almost be better off with one of those crappy throwaway GSM only phones for all the capability the latest gen of phone give you. Bye bye Nokia, don't let the door hit your arse on the way out and take Symbian Signed with you.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
> Just get an iPad, a keyboard case, and buy one of the MANY VNC / SSH applications for the iPad. You cannot put iPad in your pocket.
You don't need to pay extra for a proper keyboard on N900.
You have MANY VNC/RDP to choose from and ssh application for free on N900.
You can get N900 for $200 used.
Those two devices are worlds apart.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
The problem is that while they make the most number of mobile phones the larger numbers don't translate into higher profits. In the feature phone market, Nokia is competing against others for razor-thin to no profit. This was evident in their last quarterly.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I've owned Nokia phones in the past, and have always considered them when it came time to buy a new one. But they just ensured that will never happen again. I can see maybe dabbling with Windows Phone and offering a few sets for variety... but when the news keeps showing that Windows Phone is DoA, I don't get why Nokia would bet everything on a sinking ship. Are they truly that suicidal?
The article you quoted is rubbish. Here's a comment from there:
One should invest in a little research before writing.
1) The 38% drop stems almost entirely from users moving from Windows Mobile to another platform. Windows Mobile is to Windows Phone 7 what the Newton is to the iPhone. Yes, Microsoft is losing to Android but so is Apple. And it is misleading to imply, as you did, that customers are leaving Windows Phone 7. This just isn't the case.
2) Mango was released to manufactures last month. This was reported by this same outlet that allowed you to publish such drivel. On second thought, you were right to ignore it. I wouldn't trust eWeek as a source either.
As to why Nokia switched: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b4232056703101.htm
Key takeaway is that hiring open source evangelists to design a mobile OS(i.e Meego) failed and they wouldn't have had enough devices running it. After the board realized that, they jettisoned the CEO and brought in Elop to get alternatives. Blackberry, HP and Google told him to take a hike so the only credible option left was WP7. Interesting angles that you don't see when you read Slashdot comments.
This space for rent.
Talk about the walking dead... wow.
Nokia dumping Symbian in an age when lo-end CN knockoffs come with Android 2.x, and HP is putting WebOS on printers... actually makes a little sense.
Nokia dumping Harmattan/Maemo6, an in-house controlled solid full-scale OS with a UI that's 4 years too late.. seems lazy or poor judgement.
Nokia jumping on WinPhone7, with zero control of a third-party franchised OS that has a great UI but functionality 4 years behind the curve... seems genuinely self-destructive.
Bye, Nokia. Nice knowing you.
I think not...(*poof*)
Nokia has made some fundamental errors in their business strategy the last couple of years. Around 01/02 (correct me if I'm wrong) they were the largest manufacturer of mobile phones, they had the largest market share on the mobile phone market, AND they had the largest global market share on the GSM technology market. The GSM department is still thriving, but their focus on the mobile devices market is somewhat shaky.
They had a good run with Symbian, but they got "too comfortable" in the leading position. The iPhone came in 2007 along with Android in 2008 and the market showed that the following years. Their crisis they face now is economically comparable to the one the whole industry was facing in 1995/6 when there was a shortage of semiconductors.
The failing of their strategy is seen in a few places:
1) The high entry barrier for developing for Symbian: license fees, tools, lack of freely available frameworks
2) The rather rough UI compared to iPhone/Android: the menus are not intuitive, the applications are inconsistent in UI, the whole thing runs rather slow
3) Failure to adopt higher-end technology: They had only resistive screens until 2010 afaik even though their phones cost the same as competitors with capacitive.
4) Failure to address the lacking application support: They should have reacted WAAY faster and more aggressive. They should have brought more innovation to the platform, made the tools freely available including the certificates (or for a nominal fee), implemented an appstore AND made the developing environment attractive.
They lost the developers, therefore they lost the applications. With the applications the content soon followed, and without the ability to consume content your smartphone is not a smartphone; it's a paper-weight that happens to have the ability to call people.