Tag nokia

Nokia. A Company in Denial.

Arrogant. Disoriented. Unfocused. Accurate characterisations of Nokia? Perhaps. Still, who'd have thought in the early 2000s that the market leader of mobile phones, one of the most innovative companies in its field that owned the European market would be the dying king of the 2010s; high volume sales of silly feature phones, low profit margins, a chaotic software ecosystem, little to no mindshare in the most important, lucrative segments. Perpetually in denial about its ageing Symbian stack, its schizophrenic Maemo/Meego stack, its unstable, ever-changing APIs and the amateurish, mediocre, unpolished user-experience its products provide. So many unappealing devices. A nervous acquisition of Navteq in 2008 for $8.1bn upon that the company never capitalised, while Google and Tomtom keep offering less while gaining so much more from their users (e.g. Ovi Maps has had free navigation for a while and no one seems to care). Its repeated failed attempts to create a mobile service ecosystem/platform (n-gage, MOSH and now Ovi). Prediction: With the N8 not being out until later this year and already looking like a device that should've been out in 2009, Nokia's future certainly looks bleaker than it thinks. Unless it wakes up, ditches Symbian for good and makes Meego something more than the mickey-mouse platform it currently is soon, I can't see how it will ever manage to compete with the super-polished iOS or the lightspeed-evolving Android. (The verdict is still out on Windows Phone 7)

Not so Heavy and definitely not Crap.

Definitely still Taiwanese though. =) Of course, it'd be too early to tell whether the Hero, or, indeed, Android will become a success, but if anything, the new HTC Hero will be remembered as the device that started the custom Android experience era. From the company that, according to Microsoft's own statements and some simple arithmetic, makes 80% of Windows Mobile handsets comes a beautiful 'port' and of its popular TouchFlo interface but with a twist. It may be true that the Hero only sports skin-deep improvements to Android, but with the platform rapidly evolving and with 18 to 20 Android powered devices due by year's end, it is already looking like a fantastic alternative to the ageing, craptastic Windows Mobile platform that HTC has depended upon since its earliest days. If anything, contrary to Nokia, HTC seems to 'get' how important the User Experience is.

They'll never learn.

The Nokia N97 is out. And what a disappointment this is. Still great hardware features. Still the same mediocre system software, the poor usability that comes 'for free' with Symbian, and average industrial design [from the moment a phone is that bulky, it's bad --- it doesn't matter how many Mpixels its camera has or what the resolution of its display is]. I find the idea of a resistive touchscreen dated and wrong, although I understand why Nokia might have chosen it over the capacitive kind that everyone else is currently using, given the subpar feel that its software has as a touch interface and the possibility for the need of a stylus. I'm really surprised however: given the success of the iPhone, the huge challenge that Android is going to pose to low and mid-level phone manufacturers (especially given how customisable it is) in the near future and the dwindling profits, mind and marketshare, why on earth isn't Nokia caring more about the user experience?

Nokia is The Past. Welcome to the Future.

I have written about Nokia and the need for the company to reinvent itself several times in the past. When the iPhone was announced in early 2007, I was lukewarm and slightly frustrated that the Mac, Apple’s former, at times sole and by far most important strategic product was complemented by a formidable ‘opponent’. I […]

N97: a mediocre stop-gap solution or has Nokia lost it?

Nokia just announced the N97, its first flagship touch phone. The device is evolutionary, or if you prefer ‘marginally improved’ in some areas, compared to, its predecessors, the N95 and N96, while it includes a touch-screen and the new Symbian S60 5th Edition. The new phone seems largely irrelevant in the post-iPhone world and it […]

WidSets. What a disappointment.

A reader of this blog sent me an email a couple of weeks ago, asking me to consider porting my Hellenic Reverse Directory Lookup widget (HRDL) for Apple’s Dashboard in Mac OS X to the Widsets service provided by Nokia. Over the past year or so I’ve been emailed another two or three times by […]

Nokia Maps 2.0β

Nokia has been after the navigation market for quite a while now. The free inclusion of Nokia Maps in some of its high end models and the fact that the application and maps are given for free --- with the user optionally purchasing navigation for set amounts of time and having access to updated maps whenever those are available --- was in itself a radical departure from the buy-to-own products sold by companies like Tomtom, Navigon, Destinator, Michelin etc. Nokia's €5.7bn acquisition of Navteq, one of the two major mapping companies around, cemented what was previously speculation about Nokia's interest in this market. While accessible and relatively economical, Nokia Maps 1.0 was not without its problems: a relatively disingenious interface coupled with slow performance left it trailing far behind its leading rivals. Today Nokia released Nokia Maps 2.0 in beta form, for free on their Nokia Betalabs web site. The new application sports a much improved user interface, faster performance, new map modes (satellite and hybrid modes were added) and a clear shift towards catering equally for pedestrians as well as drivers --- a very welcome addition, sorely missing for the most part from other offerings.
Nokia Maps 2.0 on the N95 8GB
To my eyes, Nokia has already surpassed many of its competitors in the market in navigation and mapping. Its inclusion of free mapping and (paid) navigation functionality in mobile phones leverages its dominant position in the mobile phone industry and might render it a trojan horse, its more 'traditional' competitors might not be able to counter. We live, after all, in the era of convergence.

Nokia's Future.

I just read this article on The Register about Nokia’s view of the future of mobile phones, Web 2.0, mobile internet etc. I generally like Nokia, they’ve managed to overcome their long-established image as a relatively small, insignificant player from Finland and turned themselves into the goliath of mobile phones in less than a decade. […]

Open Sesam…err iPhone.

A few completely unfounded (arguably bordering on stupid) excuses by salesman Steve. GBs of criticism on the web. A botched attempt at Reality Distortion. Numerous hacks. Dozens of semi-illegal third-party applications. Many bricked iPhones. And, now? Apple's spectacular realisation that the iPhone won't glitter forever. It was about time Apple did things right. The industry is not kidding. This is only the beginning...