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Symbian Sells Millions, Despite Nokia Pushing Windows Phone
Nerval's Lobster writes "During the fourth quarter of 2012, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones—a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices. The Lumia line runs Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system, which largely replaced Symbian as Nokia's smartphone software of choice. Despite that shift and Nokia's emphasis on Windows Phone, however, the company still sold 2.2 million Symbian smartphones during the quarter. The question remains whether Nokia should have gone with Windows Phone in the first place, or embraced an alternate platform such as Android; an anti-Elop camp has emerged in recent months, arguing that Symbian was still a viable platform before Elop consigned it to the dustbin of tech history. For now at least, both sides seem to be right: Symbian still sells despite Nokia's attempts to take it increasingly offline, and Lumia phones are selling well. It'll take more time—perhaps a lot more time—before the ramifications of Elop's bet become clear."
Lumia phones are NOT SELLING WELL. Don't repeat astroturfing media BS.
Just check the graphs here - Nokia is but a walking corpse by now:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/01/second-picture-in-the-nokia-destruction-saga-greatest-individual-management-mistake-ever-made-nokia-.html
-><- no
More likely, they're consumers that just want a phone that can do calls and send and receive texts. Dumbphones are still pretty popular, and they've got to run on something.
I agree. There are many folks who can live without Instagram [1] or Angry Birds.
A good/decent camera with "social stuff" like Facebook and Twitter and solid battery life is all that many people require.
Here in India Symbian still sells, sells well and people still like it, Here are some reasons that I can think of
1. Symbian phones have better battery life than most other smartphones. In a country where people travel a lot and power outages are common, a long batter life is a important. And when you ask and Indian what "good battery life" is , you'll get the answer: "2-3 days".
2. It does the job. SMS, WhatsApp, Skype, Twitter , Facebook are all the apps that people use. Using iFart apps has not really caught on. The downside is people don't use Yelp or Foursquare or GroupOn all that much in India. People just call up friends and ask. Sometimes that's easier and better :)
3. Indians hate paying for apps. Period.
Of course mine is a country of a BILLION people so generalizations are impossible But having stayed in this country all my life and having owned muliple iOS/Android devices ( currently evaluating WP 8).
Footnotes:
[1] = More people can live without Instagram, especially thanks to its new TOS
Actually, in Brazil the Nokia brand carries a lot of weight. People will buy a phone because it says Nokia here. True or not, around here people believe they need to buy Nokia if they want a phone they don't need to charge every days (sometimes, twice a day).
I have no reason to doubt it is the same in at least some other countries. And regardless, Brazilian cellphone market is huge.
morcego
They say numbers about Windows 8 and Symbian, but what about Meego/N9? If a platform that they declared dead and buried basically at the moment of launching it, in just one phone, performed in a not so different way than Win8 phones, that would be a big message. There were some numbers around N9 sales for Q4 2011 and Q1 2012 that could point that it was selling better than Lumias, but not sure how it evolved. What is possible is that if Sailfish or Ubuntu gets ported to it (have a good shape for the swipe gestures used in those incoming mobile OSs) it could be even start selling back.
Anyway, speaking about dead and buried OSs, Microsoft killed and buried the Window OS bundled in most Lumia Phones when announced Windows Phone 8, saying that present and close enough in time Lumias won't be able to run it, and that apps for Windows 7.x won't be compatible with it neither. Is not so amazing that it sells badly, even for being a Windows phones. You had to wait till Lumia 920 to have a Windows 8.
Symbian was popular, but it was a disaster in terms of technology: hard to program with one of the worst mobile user interfaces ever conceived. Nokia needed to change to something else. Windows 8 is actually not that bad in principle, but it was too little too late, and Microsoft has failed to establish it as a viable and popular platform for app developers.
Nokia should have gone with a dual Android (cash cow) and Meego (risky bet, high payoff) strategy. Nokia could have made fantastic Android phones. By now, they have lost their sales channels and their brand name, and lots of other companies have figured out how to make good hardware, so they are basically toast.
It's not boss ego, it's downright fraud: he did it for Microsoft's benefit, not Nokia's.
Circumcision is child abuse.
People don't care about "the OS" per se, but they care about several things which are related to the OS:
- They care about the GUI. iOS devices have a certain GUI. Android devices all have GUIs with highly shared characteristics. Windows Phone devices have that tile-based GUI. If you don't like the tiles, you could describe that as "not liking Windows Phone".
- They care about the apps and hardware accessories. iOS is the king of both- hugely well populated App Store, colossal range of accessories. Android phones have a great range of apps, and a smaller but varied accessory range. Windows Phones currently have few apps, and almost no dedicated hardware accessories.
- They care about branding. iPhones are extremely fashionable. Android Phones have built up a great reputation as almost the "standard smartphone"; plus the Google and green android branding is well loved. Microsoft Windows still makes most people think of offices, spreadsheets and beige boxes. For better or worse, those annoying "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" Apple adverts did hit the nail on the head.
People don't care about NT kernels and Unix-like file systems and Java Machines, no. But the OS doesn't stop with those bits.
I've got the last Symbian phone; Nokia 808 - works perfectly. And of course the camera on it is truly excellent, truly decent optics, and image quality thats resulted in my DSLR being used quite a lot less.
Whilst I do really like both my N8 and the 808 (and kinda despise my iPhone), anyone who thinks that Nokia were in a great position prior to Q4 2010 are smoking something dubious. It has taken Nokia 2 years to get Symbian into something like a decent state (as seen on the latest 808 firmwares) - Android and Apple were improving and growing at a much greater pace. Of course Nokias problem is down to stupendous levels of incompetence at the top end, management who don't know their posterior from their elbow, that were happily allowing teams to compete with each other, politics that would have made MS management happy beyond their wildest dreams. On that count, Nokia and MS are a match made in heaven/hell (delete as appropriate)
Recently my samsung galaxy note had some accident, so until it was repaired i was forced back to use my old nokia e63. Funny story: for email and podcasts (which is what matters to me on a mobile) i found that actually more productive, even after 2 years of using android phones/tablets, especially taking into account the battery life. I then checked in a store for the current symbian phone models, and i can honestly say: There is nothing in the smartphone world which matches the price/performance ratio of these.
They are cheap, well designed, have an os where the bugs have been fixed. The UI is sensible, i can take one in my hand and still use it without thinking.
I would rather buy a new symbian phone as a second cheap reliabe outdoor phone for sports etc. than a nokia lumia (even if these are no bad either).
If nokia would not have bragged so much about changing the platforms, the best thing they could have done would have been to put a decent kernel below and keep the API stable.