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Nokia Wants To Make Phones Again
An anonymous reader writes: Nokia has indicated that it's interested in returning to the phone-making business. In a post on the company's website, spokesman Robert Morlino explains that although they sold their devices business to Microsoft last year, they're still interested in the phone industry. They're not capable of building their own devices, and it looks unlikely that they'll be able to build a new hardware section in a reasonable time frame. Instead, they're looking for a partner to build the actual phones (and support them). Nokia would contribute design and branding. All that said, their deal with Microsoft prevents them from getting back into the phone business until Q4 2016, so we won't be seeing Nokia phones soon either way.
...it will be difficult for them to restart, since they're already finnish.
Yeah, the gutting of Nokia in terms of phones is pretty complete.
Microsoft has succeeded in knocking them out of the market, getting their IP, and sending them on their way.
I still can't decide if this was a brilliant strategy by Microsoft which worked, or a completely inept attempt to expand their competencies in cell phones.
Either way, Nokia and its shareholders seem to have gotten royally screwed in the process.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I still can't decide if this was a brilliant strategy by Microsoft which worked, or a completely inept attempt to expand their competencies in cell phones.
I think both things were in the plan; the fallback for the inept attempt was to at least crush Nokia.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Seriously, WTF happened? Well Microsoft happened we all know that. The way forward was clear when the iPhone and then Android came about - either improve Symbian or move to Android. They could at least have been where Samsung is now as the de facto Android manufacturer and done a far better job.
their deal with Microsoft prevents them from getting back into the phone business until Q4 2016, so we won't be seeing Nokia phones soon either way.
New phones typically take years to develop and bring to market. I don't think Q4 2016 is prohibitive at all.
That's about a year...even if Nokia started today designing a new phone it would be kind of amazing if they had it ready to go to market by Q4 2016.
They say "You have to go away to come back" and Nokia definitely went away so....
Thank you Dave Raggett
Would the Nokia "design and branding" actually still be viewed as a net contributor to product value?
No. Nobody thought Nokia designs were all that amazing even when they were the top dog in the market. They were solid but never anything earth shaking. And they completely missed the boat when it came to smart phones. Today pretty much nobody cares about Nokia any more and whatever value their brand once had is just a fraction of a shadow of its previous glory.
I've never had a Nokia phone myself, but I always had the perception that they haven't been any good for a while
I owned several. I used Nokia's exclusively from 1999-2010 or so. They were fine but never great. Generally pretty durable though their reputation for durability exceeds the reality of it. The hardware design was decent if unspectacular. The software however SUCKED big time. I actually got to meet their CEO about 10 years ago during a speech he gave. He admitted during the Q&A the criticality of software to their business. But from my own experience with Nokia software they never really quite figured it out. They thought their customer was the phone companies and tailored their software efforts accordingly. They were wrong and Apple showed them just how wrong they were.
Nokia phones would have what I call checkbox features - great on paper but not in actual use. I bought one of their smartphones around the same time as the first iPhone. Both on paper had roughly the same capabilities but the Nokia's were basically unusable in the real world. The Nokia could technically email or surf the web and it could but even a geek like me couldn't really use it productively because the software and the interface were just horrid. Syncing with a PC was an exercise in futility. Updates to the phones were uncommon if they happened at all and sometimes involved sending the phone to Nokia.
Recently I bought a Nokia N9. It's not as cool as my good old N900 (which is still my primary cellphone), but MeeGo really looked promising. Why did they ditch it in such a bad manner is something that still puzzles me.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
...this, after last week we heard that Jolle (itself an offshoot created by some ex-Nokia folk) wants to spin off it's hardware making business.
I predict Nokia will magically find it's hardware partner by this time next week.
The title of this submission talks about "phones", the Fine Article discusses Nokia's possible entry into the smartphone world after the noncompete agreement with MS lapses. This being /. I can comprehend that "smartphones" and "phones" are synonymous in most readers minds but Nokia is still building and selling dumb phones and feature phones (profitably, I presume) and has been all the time they were being funded by MS to make the Lumia range.
The Nokia board probably have a good idea about their ability to leverage the good name of Nokia in the Android smartphone biz by looking at the sales of their N1 Android tablet in the markets it's already been released in. No public numbers yet though.
The two big differentiators that Nokia could bring to a new smartphone design based on its long phone-making track record would be voice call quality and the radio hardware, not something any of the other smartphone makers (with the exception of the Lumia series spawned by Nokia) seem to bother with much.
Might be easier if they buy or license Sailfish OS, after all it was a joint Intel project they cancelled to make Windows Phones and former employees created a company to continue it.
What, you mean my Polaroid DVD player wasn't made in the USA? /sarcasm
Sailfish and Symbian are both proven phone OS options. Nokia has strong ties to both. I wouldn't be surprised to see either one, although Sailfish has the advantage of already supporting most Android apps.
I thought the N95 was amazing, and the N90 was pretty awesome too....and the N9 was spectacular.
Nokia made some fine products over the years. I never claimed otherwise and I used their phones exclusively for over a decade. But I have never once used a Nokia phone where the software wasn't terrible. On their old non-smart phones the interface was usable but clumsy. On their smartphones (at least every one I tried) it was just rubbish. Not just on the phone either. Their PC software like their Nokia (Ovi) Suite was absolutely hopeless. I'm aware they came out with some arguably decent smartphones but they were too little, too late and some like the N9 were abandoned before they were even released. Nokia's approach to software was schizophrenic at best and largely incompetent in general.
Miss the boat when it came to smart phones...they were *years* ahead of the current crop.
So if Nokia was so far ahead of everyone like you claim then why are they gone? They were financially sound, their hardware was fine and Symbian was the most popular mobile OS until about 2010 but it's market share plummeted. It's fundamentally because of their software. Nobody wanted it once there were alternatives available. Worse Symbian was fragmented with tons of incompatible versions. Smartphones are almost entirely about the software. It's the only thing that really sets one apart from another. Ergo Nokia failed because they failed in their software for smartphones.
Love them or hate them Apple was the one who figured out the basic formula for what we now consider smartphones. They nailed the interface which is something Nokia struggled with and people liked it better than what Nokia offered. Other handset makers went with Android because Google was giving it away. I actually bought a Nokia smartphone after the first iPhone came out because on paper it was a better device. Had more features and better battery and I'm not a brand loyal person. But it was utterly unusable, never updated, and pretty much neglected by Nokia. Emailing was a pain, web surfing basically impossible, and syncing with my PC via their suite served no purpose. Nokia's software sucked and after that I've never been back because their software was so bad.
Actually, I find myself disagreeing with almost everything you say...not much point in continuing.
Disagree all you want but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. Nokia dug their own grave with their incompetence at software. They filled the grave in when they threw their lot in with Microsoft.
Nokia sold the design patents, ~8,400 of them, to Microsoft. The other patents were license to Microsoft for a limited time.
So no, Nokia did not retain all their patents.
Apparently you never heard of the Burning Platforms memo.
We'll never know if Elop was actually a mole inside Nokia,
Did you read the last sentence of my post? I'm well aware of what transpired with Elop & friends. But Nokia was on thin ice even prior to that. They were already hemorrhaging market share well before Elop got involved. Elop just added gasoline to the fire and burned the house down while they were still in it.
But just when maemo/meego was stable enough to depreciate Symbian after >10 years of development, they choose to throw everything away and go the W7->W8 way.
Bizarre isn't it? It made no sense at all. Not at the time and not in hindsight. They threw away years of work to go to a closed source system which they didn't control with close to zero market share. Worse they announced it a year before they had any products on the new system thus killing any demand for their existing products. They'll be teaching that as a case study in stupid management decisions in business schools for the next 50 years.
This decision was made when Nokia still dominated the smartphones market (yes, Symbians were smart phones), android was a bag full of crap, and the Iphone 1 was prettier but inferior than the N900.
Symbian phones were technically smart phones but generally rather poor ones. I owned several myself and they were disappointing to say the least. I bought a Symbian phone right when the first iPhone came out because it seemed to be a better deal. It had a little better specs and a physical keyboard too. But in hindsight it was a mistake. The email was almost unusable and the web browser was totally unusable. The calendar didn't integrate with anything, the to-do list didn't etc. It technically had all the features the iPhone had and more but you couldn't actually use any of them. The phone was clearly made so that they could say it had all those features but clearly no effort was put into actually making them useful.
Maybe before the end Nokia figured Symbian out but by then I and most other people were long gone. They had years to get it right before Apple and Google came to the party and they couldn't be bothered.
Meanwhile in a parallel world, Nokia's meego might have stood a chance (or might lay somewhere between Palm and BlackBerry )
Perhaps. I never got my hands on one to evaluate but by most accounts they were promising. But we'll never know. My guess is that it's technical merits were insufficient by the time it was released. Google was giving Android away to every other handset maker. Apple had a tight vertically integrated solution. Nokia on the other hand was unfocused. They had several different operating systems, no coherent design strategy, and a close source system. Basically take all the worst things about Android and the worst things about iOS and mash them together and you have Nokia's "strategy". It's hardly shocking it failed.