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Nokia Had an Android Phone In Development
puddingebola writes "Perhaps influencing Microsoft's $7.2 billion acquisition, the New York Times is reporting that Nokia had an Android phone in development. From the article, 'A team within Nokia had Android up and running on the company's Lumia handsets well before Microsoft and Nokia began negotiating Microsoft's $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia's mobile phone and services business, according to two people briefed on the effort who declined to be identified because the project was confidential. Microsoft executives were aware of the existence of the project, these people said.' Perhaps Nokia feared they had put too many eggs in one basket? Whatever the case, the project is most likely dead at this point."
(dead at this point)
Think of all the embracing, extending, and extinguishing they could've attempted! Probably not a good business decision, in retrospect. I bet MS's phone market share would've looked a lot better if they'd developed a super-fancy Exchange-oriented business email client for a line of custom Android phones rather than developing WP8.
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I was actually more fascinated that the once-pioneer and market leader in mobile phones (outside the US) was being sold off for more than $1Bn less than the sloppy-thirds of Skype which is widely duplicated by free services.
... who declined to be identified because the project was confidential. Microsoft executives were aware of the existence of the project
Only Microsoft would buy have to a company they already owned.
It's been known for years now that their CEO was a trojan horse planted by Balmer.
Too bad for Nokia, because they were actually a very good company that made good products.
Then Mr. Microsoft-Assfucker became their CEO and burned them to the ground.
Now they make shit products and will face the same fate of all other MS mobile offerings.
in the acquisition? Exactly fuck all. Really, do you think Microsoft would pay $7.5 just to avoid yet another Android also-ran competitor?
If one is going to be a volume business in the mobile phone business, one has to sell android. It is the only thing that competes with Apple. Nokia is volume. At it's height Nokia had about twice the sales of Apple phones sales. Ms has been at this for 15 years and has never broken 20% of the market, and has generally had duds. Now with MS money they can be a boutique shop selling phones that do nothing. Unless Google stops backing up Android with lots of free to the user stuff, or unless MS starts supply free stuff to the end user(big skydrive, free cloud exchange, free online office) people are not going to pay for the phone then monthly fees to use MS services. Even Apple keeps prices low.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I did this mockup after the rumor about Huawei buying Nokia, its relevant again. http://i.imgur.com/ZOTnXTd.png Nokia Nexus 4.8 could have been fun
Without Nokia Windows Phone's global market share drops to 0.6 from 3.0. So... about $3B per point of market share. Otherwise they disappear in the noise of "other". There wasn't anywhere else they could get those points so cheap. They will probably scoop up Blackberry's customers too. They really have no choice. Smartphones and tablets will be more that 80% of clients sold next quarter, trending up. Next quarter will be the last quarter that traditional PCs outsell tablets, and people get tablets that are like their smartphone and work well with it, not one that works well with and like their PC. If people keep getting invested in phone and tablet apps on platforms that are not theirs, they are done for. Frankly I think it is too late, but to them they have no choice but to try.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Samsung only sells half the Android devices. So what you are saying is that a consortium of non-Samsung mutually opposed companies are colluding to build 400 million devices this year, selling them for perhaps $120 billion, and losing money on every one. Because they love Google, I suppose, and want them to do well despite their duty to their own shareholders. C'mon Hairy. Did you bring enough of whatever that was you took to share with everybody?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Indeed, Android was not the ideal choice for Nokia. If only they had their own next-gen mobile operating system, ready to go, and consistently praised by reviewers... oh, wait.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Nokia had the best reception of any cell phone company (at least, that was their reputation). They made nice hardware. Apparently they have the best camera of any cell phone.
Given all that, they could have competed. Not because Android is magic, but because WP8 counteracts any benefit their phones ever had. Buy an Android with an amazing camera? Sure! Buy WP8 with an amazing camera? Does it even have a fart app?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Personally I'm a little sceptical about the "last quarter" part. The tablet market isn't saturated like the PC market is, making it an unfair comparison. And since a PC is still more essential to most households (and laptops can be price-competitive with tablets), it's inevitably going to be the preferred thing to upgrade in the long term for those who can't afford both pieces of hardware. It seems much more likely that the demand for tablets will eventually decline once the market's more mature, and stay in the shadow of the PC until the content creation situation changes, especially with cannibalization by so-called "phablets."
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
No one has allegience to Samsung (all my family are Samsung users).We buy the best Android phone on the day our contract runs out. We have a boatload of Galaxy S3 batteries on charge at any one moment, and when we come in the door, we swap batteries. S4 or HTC? when the contracts run out, we will look at everything, ZTE, Xaomei, or WTF.
No exchangeable battery - no buy. Simples. WinPhone? Are you MAD?
Dislcaimer: We have 4 Nokia Symbian 60 phones, and they are also in regular current use.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
So everyone here is completely and utterly unaware of the company that was formed the same day Microsoft bought Nokia called Newkia that aims to produce mobile phones for the Android?
Nokia WAS fucked mainly cause its managed by morons, and Android certainly isn't magic, so I'm with you there. But it's a little more nuanced than you depict. A Lumia with Android would not have been a magic bullet, but it would have been, and still would be, one of the top 5 sexiest android phones. It would be looking super sexy on that shelf right alongside the S4s and HTC One's, but with WP, it's in a corner of the shop that only lost children end up in. A few tangential points: 1) There's nothing particularly unique about Nokia's PHB problem. Almost every large company suffers with these issues. Nokia may have been particularly bad, but they still manage to make beautiful phones at competitive prices. 2) At the time they chose WP, Samsung was nowhere near the market leader it is now. HTC was a pretty big deal at the time while the best that Samsung had out there was the S2. The "only samsung is making it and everyone else is drowning" is bs. The top dog can fall off his perch in a single year. The S2 situation was barely two years ago and you can kind of pinpoint Samsung's "mindshare dominance" starting at the S3: only slightly over a year ago! If you look at Xiaomi, the HTC One, Moto X, etc, you start to see that the gap between top dog and the runner-ups is miniscule. 3) There STILL is no "Apple of the android market". I mean there is no Android manufacturer who has taken the route of making superbly beautiful phones with no compromises. Top dog Samsung's phones are nowhere near as beautiful or high quality as the Lumias or iPhones. The few phones where it looks like any effort was made in design tend to be pretty much clones (like HTC One = BBX).
Shipped and sales are not the same thing. You are comparing apples and oranges. Nokia might have shipped that many but sales are much lower. Almost no one who has experiences Windows on the desktop wants that on their phone.
In global terms it dominated sales in every mobile phone type and the only worry was that the rate of growth was slowing. The decline didn't happen until Elop took the seat.
You're correct that Samsung is the only company that consistently makes a profit with Android. But... it doesn't make any business sense to exclusively focus your entire phone business on a single mobile platform (Windows Phone) that hasn't shown to be particularly popular or profitable to anyone, without having say Android phones as something to fall back on if the gamble doesn't pay off. That to me screams ulterior motives.
Nokia didn't even TRY (as in, never actually put to market an Android phone, not including anything in R&D). If they put in a high-end Android phone with Lumia quality hardware, I'd very, very seriously consider it instead of Samsung. But they didn't fucking try because their ex-Microsoft boss had other ideas. And that's what's so annoying about this business. People using politics instead of common sense.
It was just too late by 2011. They should've properly invested in Maemo(/Meego) when they initially released it in 2005. Had that been polished up and shoved into a sexy phone before Android (or even iPhone) took off, the landscape today would likely have been very very different.
doing some profit is better than doing no profit at all.
but, you could put it this way: I might have bought another Nokia if it ran android. with windows phones no fucking way.. I can take them for free and develop for them if someone pays but no fucking way I'm paying with my own cash for them. compared to windows phone ANDROID IS LITERALLY LIKE MAGIC when it comes to (potential) functionality. windows phone objectively feels as limited as a s40 phone from 5 years ago(and the api's are quite literally comparable in functionality too!).
sure, the company culture would have needed to be fixed first for them to have been able to even make an android phone... but it would have sold and made a buzz. Nokia when they had their act together was able to bury every other phone manufacturer in manufacturing efficiency - from siemens to panasonic to ericcson to motorola. They raced to the bottom before! their most successful years were race to the bottom years of feature phone selling where eventually they became the dominant seller - it was only with android that the other players were able to get back into the game at all. That is where they could compete! that is where bean counting counts! it was foolish for them to try high end wars and especially foolish to try that with windows phone. the last really successful smartphone from Nokia I think is the C6 - a cheap piece of **** - but successful because it filled a role for users - for a lot of users - for a cheap price, so it sold a lot. it was the last nokia smartphone that sold to masses who pay for their own phones.
talking purely as an user of smartphones. I even bought the 808. but no fucking way I'm buying the 1020. So I might go for the sony z1.
though then again with fixed corporate culture they could have made symbian comparable to android as well(due to their culture they wasted in practice FIVE FUCKING YEARS of development and even plenty of wasted time of their contractors.. to which they paid a lot of money so they didn't mind wasting time) so maybe it's useless to discuss the matter - but with windows phone even if they had fixed their corp they couldn't have made wp catch up since that was ms's ball to drop.. which they did.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I am so sick of this "magical thinking" when it comes to Android. There is something like a dozen making Android phones, how many of those have been consistently profitable with Android? ONE, and that is Samsung. HTC and LG have made profits, not consistently mind you, and with LG their profits on a lot of phones can be measured in pennies.
Like it or not folks, and this is coming from somebody that uses an Android phone that I'm quite happy with, with Android you have a race to the bottom where the VAST majority of Android sales in the under $185 price range and this market, the ultra low end? is a market that Nokia could NEVER compete in, okay?
You're stupid. Look up Asha. Nokia succesfully competed not in just sub-185$ market, but in sub-100$ market as well.
and selling Lumia's at a loss was not a race to the bottom? you got to be kidding.
the ultra low end? is a market that Nokia could NEVER compete in, okay?
They have done pretty well in there before.
I don't agree with Hairy on a lot. And yes, 2011 I believe Samsung and Apple combined made 101% of the profits in the industry the other players on average lost money. The situation is not pretty. This doesn't include the smaller players like LG but the situation is worse not better as you go down market:
http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/51f97ca0ecad04705b00000d-800-/chart-of-the-day-oem-profits.jpg
Nokia could have had excellent success with an Android phone. Unlike the many upcoming phone makers you see today, Nokia had a huge market share with lots of loyal costumers who always chose Nokia phones when they needed a replacement phone. Nokia was a premium brand among consumers.
By not making a Android phone, all their loyal costumers were forced to go elsewhere. For years, 9 out of 10 Nokia costumers have chosen another brand of smartphone when they needed a new phone.
If Nokia could have kept most of those costumers with a Android phone, they would be dominating the market this day, and they would have kept the up coming competitors down, in stead of just handing over the smartphone market to them without a fight.
By what standard was it too late? They weren't exactly late to the smart phone market, they were early, and out of step. Symbian was under featured but still selling well all over the world. Symbian sales were still growing. They were profitable in smartphones. The switchover to Maemo would have been a challenge, but nothing like the challenge that Windows phone presented.
Quarter 3 2010 Symbian based Nokia smartphone sales: 26.5 M units and 3.6 B Euros revenues;
Nokia smartphone Average Sales Price 136 Euros, profits in smarpthone unit 335 M Euros
Quarter 4 2010 Symbian based Nokia smarpthone sales: 28.3 M units and 4.4 B Euros revenues;
Nokia smartphone Average Sales Price 155 Euros, profits in smarpthone unit 548 M Euros
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/06/the-final-reckoning-of-burning-platforms-memo-damaged-nokia-by-wiping-out-13b-in-revenues-and-destro.html
What you are descibing is essentially regular drivers. It's exactly the same thing that regular computer operating systems uses. The camera is not in any way built for Windows, it just happens that it require a driver and that driver is available for Windows Phone. With the appropriate driver the same camera should work in any operating system.
Very true. I used a Nokia N770 tablet starting in 2006. It was fantastic for the time. Maemo (later Meego) was still a little rough around the edges, but very good. I thought at the time that surely it was only a year or so of polishing from mass release, and Nokia ARM-based tablets and smartphones starting at resolutions of 800x480 would sweep the market. And time ticked by. Even 2 and a half years later, Apple was still playing around at well under half the resolution, but time kept moving.
I still have my patched N800 somewhere with a (ridiculous for 2007) 65GB of storage.
Nokia could have dominated that market, or, at worst, been highly competitive with Apple.
Microsoft was paying Nokia fees for an exclusive ($250m / quarter). When the renewals came up the 2 or 3 year cost was likely so high (probably at least double that) that Microsoft realized it would just be cheaper to buy the phone division outright....
Like it or not folks, and this is coming from somebody that uses an Android phone that I'm quite happy with, with Android you have a race to the bottom where the VAST majority of Android sales in the under $185 price range and this market, the ultra low end? is a market that Nokia could NEVER compete in, okay?
I find it very strange that you argue that Nokia couldn't sell cheap phones when that was what they're best at. Nokia wasn't exactly the Ferrari of the cell phone world, they built boring solid cheap phones that the first world found dull and emerging markets gobbled up. Take those hardware skills, massive economics of scale, brand and sales network, build a cheap Android phone and they'd be giving Samsung a run for their money instead of maybe soon clawing their way back to second tier.
If there's a race to the bottom, you can either get in or get out but if you stand around thinking your customers will be happy to pay a huge premium for your product then 95% of the time you're wrong. For example just look at all the expensive solutions that have been replaced by cheap x86 desktops and servers. If you can take a cheap SoC from China, slap a $0 version of Android on it, put it in a phone chassis and sell it then that's what it is worth today, what that was worth yesterday doesn't matter.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So when were they making a loss before Elop? 1871 appears to be the number, then a profit each year since.
I really do not understand what motivates such blatant liars as the above poster. If he wasn't so incompetent at it I'd think he was an astroturfer, but instead it appears that it's just a clueless fan cheering blindly for a team and making up his own cheers.
Interesting? For a Wiki link? Really mods? if you want a link friend how about one showing what was REALLY going on with MeeGo which had one internal team screwing it (Symbian team) and one of the largest hardware makers ON THE PLANET actively fucking it for fear that the ARM version would outsell the X86 (Intel, which considering the cripple compiler and bribery of OEMs, is anybody surprised?) so MeeGo was DOA before it ever walked out the door.
So before you put your faith in the Wiki how about looking up what was going on behind the scenes? Start with OSNews, many of their posters are from that part of the world and include many software engineers that actually worked there. They paint a picture of an OS with serious flaws, including requiring to be restarted twice a day or MeeGo would crash thanks to a nasty memory corruption bug they were having hell locking down, and if that weren't enough they had Symbian team cockblocking and headhunting, they had Intel demanding and getting changes which sent the OS back practically to square one several times, and you had PHBs changing the entire UI on a whim causing the entire UI to be tossed at 75% complete.
I'm sorry friend but MeeGo, just like Nokia itself, was fucked. It had NO CHANCE of competing with iPhone 2 and Android 2.x (which is still so popular its used by many of the lower tier OEMs like Huawei) and it sure as hell couldn't compete with Android 4 and iPhone 5. All you'd have had is another Touchpad, which with Nokia profits dropping like a stone would have outright slaughtered the company.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.