Nokia prepares to fiddle with Symbian Nokia boss Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo livened up an otherwise by the numbers Mobile World Congress Keynote today with a declaration that we’d see a wide range of Symbian devices which are not phones. “We plan to broaden the definition of the smartphone, to expand them into categories and form factors that have not yet been explored …
I love the spat mentioned at the end. I've been using smartphones for a long time now, mainly symbian, and while it might be the most mature platform it's a bugger to work with if you're a programmer and Nokia's take on a "User Interfarce" will p!ss you off very quickly if you're not used to it already. Softkey press bonanza, anyone?
I especially love the comment about Nokia being a hardware company - hee hee! - and the comeback about the american mobe companies is dead on - motorola are renound for making appallingly designed UIs, etc, and the american mobe market stifled itself utterly with the magnificent "technology will win out" business model, instead of europe's more considered collaborative model to get standards out there.
Entertaining stuff.
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"... audience member John Strand, who asked why a bunch of Americans were lecturing Europeans on mobile phones and treating the iPhone, with its tiny installed base, as being significant."
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo's views I'm interested in; "audience member" John Strand's I'm not.
As for why the iPhone is significant, it's for what it does and how it does it (in combination with the iTunes software and the app store). Not that it's market share *is* insignificant in the space it competes in. And I'm sure Nokia is well aware of all that.
As for John Strand - what a pompous ass! I suppose he's an American or Canadian, but I'm sure the Finns can speak for themselves. They're most charming and eloquent people in my experience. However, Strand appropriates Nokia's "cause", as he sees it, and speaks of the continent of which Finland is a part - "Europeans". Thus while US citizens get to keep their nationality in Strand's mind - he doesn't refer to them as people from "the Americas" - he denies theirs to Finns. People like Strand make me want to throw up. If he can be an American, I can be an Englishman, and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo can be a Finn.
Americans think that iphone are the world hottest thing. Just being american and living in their own little shell can explain such a mentality... Mostly at blogs and podcasts the only thing I hear is nokia bashing in favor of apple. It is just disgusting!!
Its because motorola is biting the dust and my beloved fast food eaters cant handle that the number one (because the fast food eaters need to be number one in everything) is european?
Nokia might not make the best looking phones in the world but they are a cell phone company... Apple has one device, which sold very well indeed, but the margin is still far away from what Nokia has... Threat to Nokia is Google... and just in a few years and more devices.
Paris Hilton for our North American brothers.. Grab a mcfries and chill out dudes..
" .... a bunch of Americans were lecturing Europeans on mobile phones and treating the iPhone, with its tiny installed base, as being significant."
Why indeed? Well, perhaps it is because this tiny outrageous upstart of an iPhone has single-handedly shaken up the entire group of mobile manufacturers who are all trying to get a similar touchscreen handset out to market. It has been a disruptor and caused a fairly significant shift in a number of areas, not the least being in developing the notion of using the mobile handset for that Internet experience more than any other handset before it.
Yes, Nokia has supremacy in sheer numbers, but that is not the point at all.
Of course, the other American mobile manufacturers are, frankly, pathetic - with Motorola leading the pack.
Can Nokia, with Symbian, out iPhone the iPhone? I doubt it given Symbian's built-in constraints. Putting a pretty front end on it is unlikely to help that much. I agree with others that the Google Android OS is likely to be a much bigger threat than Apple's OS X iPhone, but only once the other manufacturers embrace Android and get product out to market. Right now that is HTC's playing field all to itself.
If this person is, who I believe it is, then he is a danish self proclaimed expert on telecommunication. He posses some rather polarized opinions on the telecommunication industry. He uses every possibility to denounce the iPhone, regardless of what effect it might have had on the market.
He also quite often bashes the different danish electrical power utility companies for having an interest in laying a brand new tele-infrastructure with fiber to the home, even thou it actually increases competetion here in Danmark, because the primary operator, TDC, was formally a state-run business that was later sold to the private market, and the whole infrastructure went along in the sale, so we basically got one operator that controls the baseprice of ADSL connections and so forth, because all the other operators have to lease the line to peoples homes.
Even if his comment on Americans telling Europeans about mobile communication is rather correct, he still comes off as rather pompous arse.
(I am danish, and I am quite fed up with all the danish TV-stations and newspapers using him as an expert)
It's interesting that anyone here is commenting about the demise of Motorola. While Nokia may be number 1 in the world, they've completely pissed away their market share in the U.S. Going from 78% to 6% (may be lower now) market share is not an easy thing. Their Henry Ford mentality, "You can have any color, as long as it's black", has translated into we will tell you what kind of a phone you want. This arrogance in telling the carriers and public here what will be the next trend has not worked. They completely missed the boat on flip phones, and were late with OLED, FM transmitters, and many other features. They are now only a low-end brand here because that's all they've sold in years. Now they think themselves a services company, but the only thing they've ever done well is hardware. Hardware still seems to be their selling point since a video from the World Congress show made the major selling point for an E-series phone of 28 days standby. I easily see them becoming the next Motorola-type failure within 5 years.
P.S. Their failure to back up Ovi for over 3 weeks was inexcusable for a commercial site and probably indicative of their future success in providing services.
After having worked at Nokia for almost ten years, and having used myriads of their products, I can honestly say that I never saw one that was as polished as the iPhone. Granted, numerous ones I used were under development, but even phones released to the market were never as easy to use, reliable and speedy as the iPhone. Nokia is now certainly no better than "the best of the rest" when it comes to smartphones. And the other manufacturers would have to stand on a stepstool to kiss Apple's @$$.
Doug Deeds is right about Nokia wasting the huge marketshare it had in the U.S. They ignored emerging market trends because they always thought they knew best what the customer wanted. They didn't bother listening to people who worked for them in the U.S. who were telling them what needed to be done, because we were just "Stupid Americans".
I for one am seriously fecked off with the amount of Iphone bumming going on everywhere it's a fuckin phone, just because it's all spangly and Apple. The next big Iphone app will be a blow smoke up Apples arsehole with added attachment to get jiggy with your Iphone. I mean it's an Ipod with a cellular radio in it, get over it.
</rant>
Nokia phones have been having issues over the last few years and going away from them has made me realise that they really do need to do something to make it back into the market leader it once was.
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