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Operators: Nokia Would Sell Better With Android
nk497 writes "Mobile operators are complaining that Nokia's Lumia line of handsets would sell better if it ran a different OS — or if Microsoft was more willing to put marketing money behind Windows Phone. 'No one comes into the store and asks for a Windows phone,' said an executive in charge of mobile devices at one European operator. He said Microsoft's software worked nicely with PCs and allowed you 'to do tons of cool things,' but few customers knew this. 'If the Lumia with the same hardware came with Android in it and not Windows, it would be much easier to sell,' he said."
Well, that article is mostly a "duh". Of course people come in wanting one of two things- #1 Android or #2 iPhone. It is going to take a LOT of work on Microsoft's part to try and get visibility now.
Nokia ditched perfectly good Linux based mobile OS's for their high-end phones and now they will have another uphill battle.
I have an Nokia N9. The multitasking with swipe is brilliant. Did you close the app? (as simple as swipe down) No? Then it is still running. And by running I mean actually running, not the half-baked task-switching employed in Windows Phone or iOS. And it takes only a swipe to see which apps are running. Even on Android I am often guessing whether an app is still active or not, which can be quite annoying.
QML/QtQuick makes app development easy yet powerfull. The normal Linux kernel with X makes porting easier. The N9 truly is a great device for novices, power-users and hardcode hackers.
They didn't. Elop did.
Our company runs almost entirely on Microsoft products. We use Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook for our e-mail. We use self-signed SSL certs. This week an employee got a Nokia Lumia 900. He brought it in for us to help him get the e-mail set up. It won't accept self-signed certs. It's a pain in the ass to get set up. He took it back and got an iPhone. We have people running iPhones, Blackberries, and Android phones all connecting without problems. But you got a WP7 device? Sucks to be you.
Congrats. You saved $99 for your entire company. Get a cert if you allow data you care about to be exposed to the public Internet. Ever hear of man in the middle? Train your users to purposedly accept self signed certs from their personal devices, it's asking for it.
It seems natural to me that if you have windows at home, and on your laptop, you'd want it "on the go" as well.
People who use Windows at home and at work probably know they don't want it on their phone as well.
I was shocked a few years ago when I rented a car in Italy and it had a Windows logo on the steering wheel; no idea what it was running, but I was continually expecting a BSOD across the dashboard.
After decades of dealing with Microsoft crap, Windows is a negative branding, not a positive one.
While I agree with part of what you say (the WinMo back-compat being killed, the abandonment of some enterprise features even though they included some anyhow), you're just pretty much wrong about the app developers thing. BTW, I'm one of the first Recognized Developers on the WP7 section of XDA-Devs.
ChevronWP7 (Labs or otherwise) wasn't useful for Marketplace developers (who would have already had developer-unlock through their developer accounts), it was used by people who wanted to install non-Marketplace apps. Microsoft, for reasons completely unclear to me, appears to be very anti-homebrew in WP7, and the people who care about that but don't care about developing official apps are the people hurt by the ChevronWP7 Labs fiasco. Everybody else, both those who don't care about unsigned apps at all (the vast majority of users) and those who develop (or even think they might at some point develop) apps for the Marketplace, are unaffected.
That's not to say Microsoft isn't being stupid here, because they really are. ChevronWP7 Labs was late, was too limited, and is now being discontinued... all for cheaper access to a built-in-but-paywalled feature of the OS (although iOS seems to do just fine without any equivalent feature at all...). Homebrew development was one of the things that kept WinMo alive as long as it was. The interop-lock in Mango blocked access to a bunch of apps that implemented unofficial but badly needed features, ranging from the superficial but highly in-demand (custom themes) to the critical (the ability to migrate app data and message history between phones).
I will also say that the article you linked contains a fair bit of senseless foaming at the mouth. Things like questioning how you'll be reimbursed for the free year of AppHub (it's a credit on the credit card you used to sign up, just like every other time Microsoft reimburses a cost) and claiming that WinMo was "immensely popular" (in any timespan even vaguely relevant to WP7, that's just not true) suggest an author whose frustration is overriding rational thought.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You can't have android on the lumia because it doesn't exist that way. Is like saying, iPhone would be better with android on it.
It's more like saying that an iMac would be better if you could also run Linux on it -- which you can. There is no reason whatsoever for phones not to be the same way. And it seems unfathomable that Nokia could possibly be selling more phones by offering solely Microsoft products than they could by offering both, especially since the non-Microsoft alternative is what most of the customers are actually asking for.
They're literally giving the phones away until April 20th. (snipped for brevity) Maybe the problem is no one wants a Windows phone?
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner here