Nokia nixes flagship phone in US Nokia is pulling the flagship 5800 Xpress Music phone from some US stores as the handset seemed to be having problems with American 3G networks. The withdrawal was spotted by The Nokia Blog, who popped into the New York store last week to take a look at the handset which was launched on Friday, only to be told that it had been …
I just got one since one week, and there is numerous traces of memory leaks problems : it reboots while listening fm radio, colors of the interface are changing without reasons (buttons change from gray to green...), interface locks then reboot, and so on....
I cannot believe that once again Nokia sells a potential best-seller without having properly debugged it !
I hope that this one will have OTA upgrades, instead of my previous Nokia 6131, AKA “real time failures”
Fast.
Nokia is now as irrelevant as Microsoft though both have failed to see it. I'm not an anti-Microsoft zealot or a Nokia-hater, I'm the founder and CTO of a global business that has been built on Windows technology and supported by Nokia but felt I had to share my opinion.
The future is all about Apple & Android. In the very early days we chose Microsoft over Apple as we, as developers, could get under the hood. That same argument is just as valid today - only now we've chosen Google's android as our platform of choice. Apple, despite losing out to Microsoft in the PC era, continues to thrive due to a focus that others don't have. Nokia fills the world with devices instead of focusing all its abilities on delivering one killer device with killer software - WHY?
As for Microsoft - shocking APIs, lock-down and expense. They just don't get it - the most recent hires (and fires) clearly demonstrate that. They're no loss - a point-in-time company we'll all look back on and wonder "how did they get so successful yet die so quickly". Reminds me of the small faces - A 60s band that just combusted.
Thanks for listening ....
Releasing dodgy CDMA handsets initially, then giving up on the technology completely didn't help them much either.
Now only if they would drop dead-horse symbian. Have they heard of this android thing?
Or sell them through Ikea, the only other exposure Americans have to scandinavian design.
"Americans have always viewed mobile phones as tiny little laptops, and expect them to work that way"
That's stupid. Most Americans have never used a laptop thus have no reason to compare a cell phone to one. Most Americans balk at the idea of paying extra money for a phone above the monthly fee, thus get the cheapest phone possible. There are still plenty of Americans without cell phones, who think cell phones are like their cordless phones at home, just with more range.
Sure, there's a segment of the population that does want phones that do everything. But to say that's what ALL Americans think or want is absurd.
I suppose the US carriers have always been a problem as they are "the King" and perhaps "The Sheep" when it comes to Apple.
Still I must admit that there was this renegade at Nokia who did not understand the flip phone and would not understand the difference between a Zippo and a Bic either. Too bad.
Still Motorala is not doing too well, a mostly American company I suppose, Nokia is American to 47%.
So well I suppose it comes down to what the carriers have decided the American like.
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Average Nokia phone has huge amounts of software in it. And Nokia releases about 40 phones each year. It's no wonder there are some bugs in them.
I've heard they use a modular software development. By doint them in modules they can reuse a lot of code but on the other hand there comes some bugs when modules don't quite work together.
Like in all software products you need to wait about a 6 months until the worst release bugs are ironed out. About a year for then to be "bugfree". ("" because practicly no software is bugfree.) At least a phone isn't a plane, or medical equipment. Bugs in those have killed people, in phones they just annoy you.
Apple has made a fine phone.
But, have a look at the OS page for usage. There, the iphone is 0.5% of hits. Even the famed 'Linux desktop' has more of the market.
This isn't to denigrate the iphone, just to point out that at the moment mobile browsers are a very, very small part of the overall market. Presumably this will change, just to give the figures some context.
Nokia is not solely responsible for the shit software that may find its way onto their phones. The chip suppliers also provide a large chunk of the software on a mobile phone (adaptation of OSes to their chips, multimedia architectures, communications stacks, etc). The problem is that many of the chip suppliers often don't see themselves as in the business of selling software. Consequently, software development is something they don't understand well and something they're incapable of doing professionally.
Very often their SW is designed and developed by poorly trained hardware oriented employees with neither the interest nor the aptitude for software development. Note that I avoid describing these employees as engineers as in many cases they're not.
In my opinion, this all boils down to greed and stupidity across the board. Nokia wants cheaper chips, the chip suppliers want lower SW costs and the result, after numerous cock-ups and missed targets, is ultimately more expensive SW that simply doesn't work as intended.
"There are still plenty of Americans without cell phones, who think cell phones are like their cordless phones at home, just with more range"
Which illustrates the way "cell" phones have been marketed in the US. They have been sold as almost exactly this, complete with a local geographical number and billing tied to your local operator and roaming charges to go out of state (not to mention charges for receiving calls). They are still treated as a luxury rather than an essential that has replaced the pay phone and even landline in Europe.
The concept of a truly mobile phone seems to go over their heads. The only advancement really has been stuff like the Blackberry which really is just text messaging in a fancy form for all they use them for (traditional text messaging also went over their heads).
I've an E71 -- great little phone, but have you tried to find applications for it. That's a googling exercise in extreme frustration. Spending 3 hours looking for apps at hundreds of websites, after sifting through hundreds of forum postings that don't lead to solutions, is discouraging. If Nokia spent a million on three or four web coders and crafted an 'iTunes' store for apps for their line of phones, us dumb 'Americans' might warm to Nokia. Or, hey, here's a thought: open more than 2 stores in the US. Or, hey, here's a thought: have franchise partners who can help service the phones. With an older 6230, I needed a firmware upgrade to have it see its own SD card for music storage. Couldn't download the software from the web, couldn't download an installer app. Couldn't take it to a local store for a firmware update. Was instructed that I would have to ship it to Nokia for 2-3 wks. My business cell phone, without it for 2-3 wks? Nokia -- grow up and support your products. Oh, and make a VNC client for the E71 that works. Maybe some of us dirty Americans will respond by that tired old method of viral marketing your products for you. We do like a lot of your output, but the support execution sucks -- unless that's just how you do it overseas.
I know what you mean about finding apps, but there is in fact the Ovi App Store coming up in a few months time (so you see they have been spending those millions investing in this stuff. In fact the upcoming N97 is dependent on Ovi). It should then be much easier to find apps.
The beauty of Symbian is that no matter which S60 phone you have you have a rich choice of 3rd party apps and they're not forced through an approval process to run on the phone.
I prefer the 3rd party market to be just that though rather than being strictly controlled by the manufacturer (*cough* Apple).
Downside of Nokia products though is there are so many of them and support does seem to dwindle once they are in the shops as attention moves to new models. However compared to some other manufacturers, at least they have some support (and don't charge you for their supporting software either).
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