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Nokia Exec: Young People Fed Up With iPhone and Android
jfruhlinger writes "Nokia's Windows Phones haven't hit the U.S., but at least one company executive thinks they'll be a slam dunk, since young people have soured on the iPhone and find Android baffling. Of course, much of the Internet commentariat found his remarks even more baffling. Is he right, is he delusional, or is he just trying to build buzz for his company's products the best he can?"
As a "young person", I do not see how anyone can claim Android is "baffling"... to begin with it was more of an engineer/dev/nerd phone but it quickly changed and now IIRC is the most popular phone OS. My facebook news feed often contains complaints or questions about "why is my iphone xxx" but not once have I seen any of them asking for help with a droid.
Every other day I'm hearing about smartphone makers suing each other, that's what I'm fed up with.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
It would take some serious kool-aide to think that people were generally confused by any of iPhone, Android or Windows Phone 7, they are all easy to use. Each has it's pros and cons.
However, with the serious lack of good 3rd party apps, I suspect mostly due to MS figuratively castrating their developers with insane draconian file access and network access restrictions that prevent any direct cross-app communication on the phone, or network access via anything but http/https... You would have to have gone through a few kilos of LSD before ever thinking Windows Phone 7 could catch up to those two. Nice OS, but MS royally screwed the 3rd party developers over.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
And I liked my Palm Pilot so much, I bought a Treo. However, the Treo was a terrible phone, I had to spend extra and buy it on eBay because the 680 wasn't supported by t-Mobile and for years I lived with it. Then, finally I started phone shopping.
A friend lent me his Nokia 900 and I found it to be un-useable. It interpreted *everything* as me wanting to use the device, including putting it back into a belt-holster... So it would start playing videos in my pocket, and when I wanted to really use it to make a phone call, the battery was dead.
I didn't like the iPhone's on-screen keyboard, but, when the iPhone4 came out, it finally supported a bluetooth keyboard. So, I bought the iPhone & keyboard. When I'm away from the keyboard, I've learned to live with the onscreen keyboard.
For the last year and 2 months now, it's been OK. I haven't wanted to run my phone over with my car, something I've wanted to do to both the Treo and the Nokia. Sure, it doesn't do everything, but, I have to admit it's better than what I was getting previously. The keyboard has made taking notes and writing emails very easy, making the phone a 60% desktop replacement.
It's a fairly good PDA, and even with AT&T service, it's been a use-able phone. All it has to do is not suck entirely, which tends to be what the other products do.
Considered that kids want what the other kids have, my guess is that this quote from Nokia that kids want a Windows Phone is rubbish. Kids want an iPhone. Apple is already on track to be the biggest phone-maker in the world.
Nokia, RIM, Samsung, and Sony do not have a chance unless they undertake some serious R&D and make something equally revolutionary. And somehow "revolutionary" isn't a word *anyone* associates with Microsoft. Windows phone ain't it, any more than GEOS phone. WebOS could have been it, but Palm and the HP both screwed that pooch.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
There are people like that. Before the iPhone killed the iPod, people would buy Zunes just for the "its not popular" aspect.
Will it be enough market to keep WMP going? Probably not. However, WMP has one advantage -- Microsoft can easily have it the only phone that works with a new "secure" protocol of Activesync. If MS also licensed it to Apple, Android would be effectively locked out of the enterprise like it was back in the 1.5 and 1.6 days. This by itself would all but kill Android as a competing phone. Exchange support makes or breaks handsets. Even Apple came to Microsoft to get support in their devices.
My N9 arrived from Switzerland and I think it is just freaking beautiful, and Microsoft really did a number on Nokia to muzzle this thing. Like:
The main website for the N9 is http://swipe.nokia.com/ Okay, so you're saying 'swipe, yeah I've heard of that. so what?' Man, if only Microsoft wasn't paying Nokia so hard to put a muzzle on it. Check out the videos at the bottom of that page, particularly the 2nd thumbnail'd from the left, at the very bottom. Dig on the one-handed swipe GUI. So now maybe you're thinking, 'well okay, if the one-handed GUI carries over through out the rest of the OS maybe...'
Okay, to do that, you have to wait for the Over the Air update (or use another way) to install the PR1.1, i.e. the first service pack for the OS since the phone was released. Then 'swipe' is fully installed, and you can also access control-keys, up/down arrows, etc. And it is freaking awesome! And being a linux guy of course I installed the devel extras which gets me the busybox terminal, and oh man what a gorgeous phone/client.
Today I was playing with the calendar and daily alarms; gorgeous! The included browser is fast and I'm a web-dev and really appreciate the perspective it brings to understanding modern mobile html5/touch browsers (that pops-up .flv videos in the media player but now .swf files).
I am certain Microsoft paid Nokia to *bury* the one-handed swipe GUI so deep as to obfuscate it completely. But I also think the Good Work of the Nokia linux team refuses to be buried so. At any rate, I give the N9 the coolest, most-positive thumbs-up review. And it does linux. (Oh, and who needs a million apps if I can bash script & ssh all over the place?)
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.