Nokia exec: Young fashonistas 'fed up' with iPhone A Nokia exec has identified the target market to which his Espoonians will "deliver services and phones that are different" from the industry-leading iPhone and Android-based smartphones: jaded kids. "What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone," Nokia Entertainment Global sales …
Yes, it's nice to know that despite the corporate gutting, the Nokia echo chamber of delusion is still intact. "Ooh, we've released a Windows Phone model - isn't that impressive? Let's bask in our own glory for a few months!" Several months pass.
"What do you mean everyone else has released five new models since our last one? We're Nokia, we're special! Wasn't one model enough?"
That was back around 1998. Since then, they have released one pathetic phone after the next. I can safely say... choosing Symbian simply ruining any street cred they could ever hope to regain.
Nokia is "The Granny Phone Company" now. It's hilarious that they're trying to be cool now. What's worse is, that even granny is switching to iPhone and Android now.
Windows Phone is really awesome though... I love it... it's just that I have my whole life eco-system revolving around iPhone these days. I am dumping my iPad for a far more useful Windows 8 Tablet this evening (watching the UPS tracking site as I write) but I can't imagine giving up my iPhone for anything else.
Now, if Apple were to port iTunes to Windows Phone... or somehow made it possible to use purchases from the iTunes music store on their phones... I might be interested. But it's Nokia... I don't think I'd be seen in public toting a Nokia... it's just that I have pride and frankly, Nokia is... well "The Granny Phone Company".
They really should consider changing the company name or spinning off their mobile phone division. No one wants to get their smart phone from "Nok-granny-phone-ia". Well... there are probably some people who wear ties that might... but that's only because they don't get it.
I agree with you thought... it's too funny to hear the head of the granny phone company talking about fashion :)
"The market is saturated"
What was also missed out was:
"We are a company with a damaged reputation from many recent poor phones trying to release a new product into a saturated market. We'll be totally fine."
WP8 may be very good, and the new Nokia is pretty decent, but they've still got a mountain to climb to make a success of it.
"I can safely say... choosing Symbian simply ruining any street cred they could ever hope to regain."
The problem was not Symbian. As everyone else, you are confusing the core OS with the GUI. They were completely separate. The Symbian OS was the most efficient and most developed phone OS bar none. The battery life was phenomenal. My old E71 used to run for over a week with normal use.
My wife has it now and I was amazed when we came back from a two week holiday and she finally asked where the charger was. After 18 months with a HTC Desire HD, I had forgotten just how good the Symbian based phones were.
The GUI side, bolted on by Nokia, was a total bastardised mess. Then they did the usual Nokia thing of panicking, buying someone out to try to fix their woes (QT) and then dithering for 2 years without delivering anything.
Nokia constantly flail about trying to plug the gaps and are totally incapable of actually sitting down and developing a potent deliverable strategy and then sticking to it.
There's nothing wrong with his analysis: iPhone's prestige value is dropping away, and it is becoming something of a uniform among the white middle classes. Both factors will push the trend-setters towards something new.
Android is ignoring the bulk of the market. If you're reading a tech website, you may not notice this, but most people don't care about "openness" or how easy something is to root. they'd prefer something they DON'T have to dick with, and this is what only Apple offer right now in smartphones (Nokia do this quite well in voice phones, and that's how they conquered that market).
Whether the Lumia 800 is that "something new" is another matter, but as an object, it's certainly more attractive than any other competitor to the iPhone, and that's the first hurdle to get over: make the potential customer pick it up.
As an Android phone owner I can tell you that you most certainty do not have to "dick with" anything on an Andoid phone. Downstairs from me is a woman who wanted my advice on a tablet. I helped her pick out a Samsung Galaxy tab and then offered to show her how to use it. Turns out she never took me up on the offer because she mastered it on her own. She is not a techie and all she wanted was GPS and the ability to browse websites and check her email and she likes her Android device because it is easy.
I, on the other hand, have rooted my company assigned Galaxy tab and replaced the OS on my HTC but I love doing that sort of thing. My point is that just because you can doesn't mean that you have to.
Good luck with that.
Although to be fair, China is likely to sprout an Apple-sized globo-corp of its own - or even a few - in the next decade or two.
Kudos to Nokia for getting a nice looking WinSlab out the door more quickly than anyone expected.
But - so what?
Anyone who wants to take on the iPhone has to understand that making and selling handsets is nowhere near enough. Apple has an advantage because its unified brand includes laptops, desktops, music, media and app distribution, and Cool Advertising [tm.]
Nokia are doing well on the Jobsian idea of making tech that's shiny, brightly coloured and easy to use. But they still haven't managed to get the unified brand thing to work for them.
Nokia's music and media service wasn't, the app store didn't - etc.
If Elop tried to get Nokia into the designer laptop space and followed it up with some clever media licensing - i.e. not just a bloody radio - that might have some interestingosity.
But Nokia always fail when they try this stuff. (And Microsoft aren't any better at it.)
'I guess that's why it only has 53% of the smarphone market' ... for now.
The market Android is targetting is a market of volatile ppl whom change phones like they switch underwear. In the case of Android phones you mostly have to because after a few months most o/t models don't get official upgrades anyway. So these consumers don't have any brand or OS-loyalty. Don't expect Android to reign forever. As soon as THAT 'market' realise that every jack-shit has an Android phone they'll start abandoning them by the footload.
It happened with the Blackberrys whom became the not-cool-toy overnight.
All these corps target the wrong audience but since most of these corps are nowadays ran by jerks anyway I couldn't care less.
The youth of today couldn't give a f...ig about lack of security. The first thing they do is download several dodgy messengers or facebook/twitter apps to test them out and see if they can be the first to find a better whatever-it-is now and in this sense Android suits them perfectly.
Everyone forced to use same metro hub UI and official apps is not going to be hip and trendy wit' teh yout.
I usually have to get rid of an assortment of toolbars and spy/adware on my nice's computer on a twice-monthly basis, every time I give her the lecture about where to get software from, how to tell what's good and what's dodgy, and unclicking everything in the installer and every time it falls on deaf ears.
Meanwhile I'm peering at the Nokia Store and umming and ahhing over whether I should download the Bloomburg feed app and wondering why couldn't they have done it over the web.
My nephew (who's a 'yoof'), asked me the other day what all this "WinPho shit" was all about. He's been through iPhone/BB and has seen some ad's about that "Blue Nokia". Gave him a quick overview, mentioned about XBox live & FB/Twitter/People hub etc.. Say's he now wants want one.
Interesting that he latched on to 'Nokia Phone' first rather than Microsoft/Windows Phone. I guess even though Nokia has had it rough the last few years, you can't ignore the brand power the 'Nokia' name/image. Will be interesting to see what happens 6/9 months from now.
why you didn't talk him out of buying the Lumia 800 when it doesn't have a front facing camera and can't make video calls with the latest software upgrades (Tango?) that will bring video calling.
No doubt he'll be on a 24-month deal, so will be belly aching for a good 18 months, along with all the other mugs who were told the Lumia 800 was the "best Windows Phone ever" despite all the previous devices from other manufacturers having front facing cameras.
Really? No front-facing camera is a big deal?
I don't know anyone of any age who has ever made a video call other than to try it out as a novelty when first getting the phone.
All I can think is that you must work in marketing, because they are the only people who seem to give a sh*t about front-facing cameras.
with friends and family at home and abroad. Facetime on iOS is hugely popular, all it needs is an iPod. I personally use Skype for video calls on a whole range of other non-iOS devices. Maybe you don't make video calls, but for other people it's becoming a much more viable alternative now that smartphone manufacturers have simplified the solution and made it reliable, even enjoyable.
The omission of a front facing camera will come to bite those Nokia customers in the arse once Microsoft get around to supporting video calls in their next software update - they'll be wondering "what about me?" and regretting their decision to buy early hardware that lacks features.
What Apple did do was make video calling popular, reliable and usable - things that Nokia never achieved (or - most likely - even attempted).
You could say Apple "re-invented" video calls, which would be closer to the truth.
Video calls on Nokia devices, while possible for many years, was always blighted by low quality cameras (and thus video quality), it didn't always work (even between two Nokia devices) and when it did work you quickly realised it was actually a bit shit (thanks to the aforementioned quality issues, plus WiFi and all-inclusive data plans not being so widespread, not that video calls work terribly well over 3G even to this day).
Apple changed all of this (with the exception of dodgy 3G call quality).
Note I'm not an Apple fan, in fact I won't have one in my house - just acknowledging how Nokia monumentally failed and Apple succeeded where video calling is concerned.
"What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with oxygen. Everyone has the oxygen in the air, we are going to give them hydrogen cyanide instead, this will be really cool for several seconds until they realise why oxygen is so popular..."
Not that I am suggesting that Windows Mobile=Toxic of course.
It's not Windows Mobile but Windows Phone 7. WM a completely different OS.
Windows Mobile at least had multitasking, lots and lost of apps including UI-enhancements (remember HTC's TouchFlo3D?), was fully compatible with outlook (you know, part of that office-stuff M$ had us swallow for the past decade), could connect to all wifi networks including those with hidden SSID's, Some WM phones could even record phone-calls. Oh...and there were some cool navigation programs for it that could import your contacts-addresses as POI...
But hey. Today all that matters is Xbox-live, FB, twitter and playing music (preferably bought through some online store).
It's unfortunate that a small businessman like me still requires a good navigationtool, has a few hundreds address collected in outlook (the past few years), needs the benefit of a call-recording tool to collect proof against abusive customers or to collect name ad address when driving from one client to another. And no I can't allow my sensible client to swim around in some cloud (client confidentiallity). Oh... I mustn't forget that we also make PHONECALLS (aswell to clients as to contractors and suppliers)!
Perhaps they think about us when we're all extinct and everybody is standing at the unemployement agency tweeting about.
I've found it to be truly horrible at the business of phonecall making, yet pretty good at the email, and other 'smart' side of things.
Not tried WP7, and won't because of my experience of WM6.x and other Windows CE-based devices (some of them came with a thingy for pressing the rest button. How confident is that!)
My wife has a pretty cheap Android (Acer Liquid Express), and she seems quite happy using it - didn't ask me much, she mostly just tells me to stop playing with her phone and to give it back...
It's really rather good - only thing she's complained about is the battery life because her previous was a classic Nokia, bck when phones had over a week of battery...
MS have previously said that WM6.x is stll around for 'business customers', yet there are no new devices running it, and very few older devices still in production so that's clearly incorrect.
WP7 drops the ball anyway for all the reasons you gave, so my next business phone is almost certainly going to be an Android.
Jaded yoof? They don't have iFruity things, they have BlackFruity things. 'Sides, nokia's newfound bedmate bought something promising targeted right at that very demographic then kilt it stone dead through the exact same infighting that saw nokia forced to take a rather high jump off assorted burning platforms. They learned to swim in the meantime then?
BlackFruity things, damn cheap ones and with a free messaging service to boot.
That is not a market which can be taken over easily with a good margin.
As far as real "bored with iPhone fashionistas" (quotes intended) when they are done with iPhone they will start with iPhone accessories like the iPhone integrated BMW, Pioneer AppRadio and all the other similar stuff. None of that dances to tunes from the GooglePlex or Redmond. World has changed. The people who _HAVE_ spending power no longer want just a phone. They want to take that phone and it to plug into their car, music system, house, etc - anything up to and including washing the dishes. That is an area where MSFT has got about zero attention from manufacturers and developers... Unless you want a Fiat with Blue and Me which speaks _VOLUMES_ about your disposable income :) Nokia has even less leverage there than Microsoft.
This is just a continuation from February. Probably a good idea in some parallel universe. In this one not so much.
Could it be that teens are becoming the Blackberry's new core market? I've been seeing more and more teens carrying Blackberries, usually the lower end curve models with the occasional bold or torch. Perhaps they are tired of fumbling through their 2000+/month text messages with a touch screen and have realized a real keyboard is far better for such heavy use.
Err, I think the OP is referring to the fact he's making assumptions about people's thoughts on Android.
As Android devices are flying off the shelves it seems unlikely this is true, and as for people getting tired of the iPhone, maybe they should check the queues outside the shops on the day of release.
Nokia's gradual decline over the last decade are all attributable to assumptions like this (starting with "why would anyone want clamshell phones?"), you would have thought they would have stopped by now.
I thought the youngsters fed up with iPhone/Android already had rioter friendly Blackberrys?
Moving from phones with lots of little, cute icons and a touchscreen to one with less but bigger, uglier icons that don't quite fit on that same touchscreen... hardly appealing is it ;)
(Did enjoy Microsofts HTML5 WP7 demo on my phone - confirmed that it's just a fugly and limited in action as it looks in pictures of it)
Poor old Nokia, though they're right about Android being complex. I've watched with amazement as a friend struggled with his new ZTE compared with the relative simplicity of using Symbian on my ancient Nokia E71 that has most of the smartphone essentials.
As for the iPhone, it's a bit rich to suggest that it's passe simply because it's so successful.
Where I really think Nokia have lost it is on price -- Android phones can be bought for as little as £40 which is nearly what Nokia expect me to pay for a new battery. Won't be a difficult choice when my battery finally dies -- new battery for an old phone or a brand new phone with a new battery included ? And another Nokia customer is lost.
Either these PR drones truly are idiots, or they think people reading it are.
Android is as hard as you want it to be. Sure there are lots of settings and tweaks you can do to make it work how you want, but the bottom line is you don't ever need to touch these things.
My 65yr old mother also has a Wildfire, and se has no problems with it. She is unlikely to ever visit the marketplace, she certainly wouldn't change her home launcher, the widgets are what I put there for here. BUT she uses her smartphone every day and loves it, she never thought she could use a smartphone...
the same OS ( in my Arc S) is also a power-users dream, I can tweak and change anything I want.
it's today's 55 to 65 year olds who got computing into the mainstream of business and hobby life. Some ot them are female, even mothers, despite losing brain cells along with the placenta.
65! I get the impression you think that is the definition of senility. Most 65 year olds I know can run up hills, sail boats, walk long distances, do rock-climbing, ride motor bikes,out-think spotty would-bes and use a real computer (not some wysiwyg abortion of a desktip consumer device) in a way that you patronising adolescents can only dream of.
Actually, my 82 year old mother is happy with her macbook and a "smart phone" and she was not even in a technical profession, unless you count general nursing.
Pompous twits. Pray you never get old, e.g. 35.
...so it's only a matter of time when it becomes part of MS.
""Also," he added, "many are not happy with the complexity of Android and the lack of security.""
Right. Because, unlike Android's underlying linux core, MS Windows is well-known for its hardened security for decades now especially in its mobile offerings, thanks to their also long experience in mobile business including long line of Windows Phone devices.
'"What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone,"'
- So 'youth' is the major important market? I hope this fjin doesn't refer to teens whom ask a weekly allowance from their parents? I can't see them as the big spenders. Especially as this suit says a bit later
'The marketplace is extremely crowded'
- So you suits concentrate on an already 'crowded marketplace' of consumers whom have no money of their own? Very smart indeed.
'whose lack of individuality is "very confusing to the consumer." '
- WTF. This is a contradiction. iPhones are easy because they're all the same and very limited to personalise (read: hard to tamper with).
'Nokia will need breakthroughs in design, features, and app-developer interest'
- By going the Microsoft route Nokia don't need to do anything. It's Microsoft that needs breakthrough in features and app-developer interest because they decide to what specs the hardware must adhere and how the OS will evolve. Nokia has absolutely nothing to say in that matter. They can only write their own apps which sets their phones apart from e.g. HTC, LG or Samsung. Just as HTC wrote the Sense HUB to set their phones apart and LG wrote some DLNA-thingy to set their phones apart. Djeez, who writes these things?
And more importanly what stupid f&^%£%^&%$ runs these companies today? Do these morons ever come out of their ivory tower? No wonder our economy is in shambles. All those stupis ppl ru(i)nning the companies that were supposed to bring us welfare and jobs.
Get me a rope.
I've bought phones directly from Nokia in the past, so I'm on their sales mailing list. The point at which I decided I'm not going to be buying another of their phones was when they started sending me promo Emails full of patronizing juvenile crap about 'Seeking Irregular People' for their 'Amazing Collective' and how I'd be 'sillier than a fake moustache' not to join in with their new social media hipsterfest. At least I now know that alienating boring business-bods like me is part of their marketing strategy, so I don't feel so bad about it...
Has he looked at the Windows Phone website?
If he's even mentioning that then he can't have actually seen his product, or he still thinks Nokia are shipping Maemo/Meego
Even the various models of iPhone look more different to each other than the various Windows Phone 7 devices. Windows Phone is homogenous by design intent!
One can claim that to be a good thing, but claiming the Lumia is not part of a sea of sameness is just stupid.
[Posted from my Kindle. How different is that!]
The killer feature for me is the built in FM transmitter. It gives me mp3s / spotify / internet radio in my car without wires or fuss.
Apparently the (developer only) n950 is very nice, but rare as rocking horse shit. The n9 is also a fine machine but will cost you £600 if you can find one and meego is looking a bit shaky these days.
My personal experience is that once I got a tablet/slate/pad computer I wasn't as interested in using smart phone apps anymore. I still have a smart phone, but I use it to *gasp* make and receive phone calls now.
On the outside chance that other people react the same way, well...this is good for apple, since they have the most popular tablet. And in a way, it's good for nokia because it commoditizes smart phones by making people think of them primarily as phones again, something they are still viewed as excelling at.
Anyone else remember, way back in late 2006/early 2007, when the world was in black and white and Jobs did the Keynote to introduce the iPhone, that he said 1) the killer app for smart phones is phone calls, and 2) it's amazing how phone manufacturers don't get this.
Surprisingly, this is still true. "Know who you are" isn't a business mantra for no reason.
do people post things like this article as a joke or what? There's been decades of Microsoft paying for "research" and "studies" which always showed what was hot sucked and that Microsoft's shit didn't stink. MS-Nokia isn't any different and besides, when an executive makes statements, he or she is going to boost their point of view. When acting like a Microsoft, they'll always disparage the others if there is even a message their product is better.
Because you know, the customers are asking for it.
So, according to Nokia, people are fed up with the "sameness" of Apple and Android.
How in that case is Nokia going to differentiate themselves from the "sameness" of Windows Phone across different manufacturers' devices?
Now, had Nokia kept Maemo/Meego (especially looking at the superb N9) then they could genuinely claim that theirs was a truly unique offering.
I would have bought a Maemo or Meego phone from Nokia and been proud to do so. but as soon as I read (a long time ago, now) that they dropped out of the Meego project in favor of Microsoft, I have turned down free phones from Nokia, offered by my work to all our IT staff. WinPho, no different than Win8, has an interface made for morons. While my employers buy ever deeper into the Microsoft money-pit, the same company lobbying our governments to bring more expatriot workers into American IT -further erroding our economy, I'm busy migrating my infrastructure to one purely based on Linux. As far as I'm concerned, Nokia has aligned themselves with the IT equivalent of Al Qaida, Microsoft, the most hated company in IT... Aside from SCO, which Microsoft funded to pursue Red Hat & IBM in an attempt to keep from being racked up in another anti-trust case. They both suck and should be destroyed.
If MS wanted their OS to do well, they should have removed all references to MS and windows and just pretended it was all Nokia's idea.
No-one wants to be reminded of their work pc when they look at their phone after 5pm, it doesn't matter how good it is. This isn't anti-MS, this is just wanting not to think about work or failing IT all the time. Apple's phone is tied to itunes (for windows users) or "my mac" for mac users. You may not like it, but its better then being tied to "windows" which may have viruses or at least needs performance-killing AV software and reminds people of being at work.
Oh yes, they should have hired Apple's PR agency. Successful, not weird (Nokia) or a loser (Win7 tv ads) is the image of the users you want to project. Its a phone - not many people care about the OS. They assume using it will be easy and expect standard guestures to work and they want decent application integration. Apart from that, you're probably looking at screen and battery life if you want repeat business.
I've just done it - broke away from the iPhone experience and bought a WP7 device. Got a second hand HD7 to have a go with to see how restrictive it is. I'm actually very happy with it. There's a couple of niggly things but as long as I have a subnet calculator and a few other choice apps then I'm happy.
I was sick to the back teeth of everyone and their mum (and 10 year old son) having one. Back in the day (not that long ago) the lines were clear and defined:
IT bods = Unwiedly smartphone
Suits = Simple, classy with great battery life
Kids = Whatever they're parents disposed of after upgrade
Mums = Whatever they're children disposed of after upgrade
Grandparents= Comes with a cable to connect to the wall
'Fashionistas'= Something small with xpress-on covers
Now the universal answer seems to be iPhone. Gahh.
a little realism into the discourse, this guy's a PR drone. Expecting him not to sound like one is like expecting water not to be wet. I would note that a couple of people here at my office have got the Lumia 800 and they care as much about front-facing cameras and video calls as any other mobile phone user I've met, which is to say "less than oil companies care about polar bears". What they DO care about is the UI, which they love, and which is fluid and easy to use, the performance, which is likewise excellent, and the screen quality, which is also lovely; they seem to be able to make phone calls perfectly well also. Funny how no-one bitched about the hardware spec when it was called an N9 and people were staying away in droves... Seriously, I suspect that most of the bitching here is from people who have never tried one, but have decided that anything Microsoft MUST be bad. While using Activesync-based email on their Googlephones (oh, the irony! http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/IntellectualProperty/IPLicensing/Programs/ExchangeActiveSyncProtocol.aspx )...
Disclaimer: I use a cheapie Android phone myself, and I like it, but that doesn't stop me from recognizing when someone else has a good idea.
He goes on about a "sea of sameness" which the Nokia phone will presumably be better than.
Yet it is almost impossible to tell the difference between HTC, Nokia, LG etc Windows Phone 7 devices. From more than a couple of feet away they are indistinguishable.
This is by design - Microsoft deliberately chose to tie all WP7 devices to a very tight hardware spec and the prevent any carrier or manufacturer from customising it.
There are good reasons for that, and it's a perfectly reasonable idea that could easily work as it means the phone manufacturers and carriers can't screw it up with added tat, as they have previously done with Symbian, Android et al.
Go to www.windowsphone.com and compare the phones. Can you tell the difference? Would you recognise any of those phones if the big label next to it were covered up?
So why is the Nokia marketing drone banging on about 'sameness' being a bad thing?
I think this guy has tried to adopy the distortian reality field to ill-effect. Blind yourself to failure and pray everything's going to be alright.
No point creating a sub-market for yourself that doesn't exist. Make a good phone or move on. Oh no, you can't. Better keep sinking.
If The Youth of Today™ becomes jaded, it is Facebook, Web 2.0 and other fashonware that will sink, not Apple. When your product is no longer The Latest Thing™, it has to survive in the cold glare of merit. Facebook is no longer fashionable. Everybody is bored with knowing their chum just ate an egg sandwich.
Have any of you actually tried the Lumia 800?
Its a nice piece of kit, and the metro interface is a welcome break from the standard rows of icons. Add in the active slide functionality, and the Xbox live integration and you've got a decent handset.
I'm a BB and iPhone user,I also have an Android tablet, and I'm happy with all of them... But I strongly believe thats its going to be good having a new contender in the smartphone market!
If only WP7 was marketed properly. The adverts for it are almost all shocking piles of crap, "it all starts with a windows 7 pc" doesn't make anyone want to buy it. The worst thing is that it isn't even true, there's some bit of software for a Mac that you can use instead of Zune on Windows.
One of the comments above states that WP7 doesn't have multi-tasking or the ability to put contact addresses on a map. Other comments say they won't touch it because of WinMo6.5. It's all just because the marketting is useless, of course it has multi-tasking and the ability to stick a contact's address on a map. The WinMo6.5 was crap argument doesn't work because they chucked the whole thing in the bin and started again.
In my opinion we should all be having a go at Microsoft about the awful marketing. The actual product itself is pretty good.
@AC 14/12/11 11:32:
Why is this such a hard fact to swallow?
Not everyone who posts on threads like this feels the need to crucify products purely because its what everyone else does. I do happen to own all three, and as stated think each product has its own merits and pitfalls.
My BB (Bold 9780) is the perfect personal mobile phone for me, its a good size, has a replaceable battery and a full qwerty keyboard. I'm not really a BBM user, and only use the thing for a bit of facebooking every now and again, so the service outage didnt affect me at all. Hence, being happy with my BB. Only real criticism of the device is the web browser.
My iPhone (4 32gb) is a company issued device, and is also perfectly fit for purpose. The Exchange activesync works flawlessly without the need for expensive BES services, its also the device I use for the bulk of mobile browsing, add in a few useful apps and its also a perfectly good device. My biggest issues with the iPhone is the lack of a keyboard (I just cant get into touchscreen messaging on smartphones for some reason) and the inability to change the battery.
The Android device is a cheapo MID tablet, running Cyanogen firmware. Its a bit slow and has a resistive screen, but I only wanted it to have a play with Android so its perfectly fit for purpose.
Having had a play with the Nokia Lumia handset, I can say that in my opinion, it is a great bit of kit. WP7.5 is a vast improvement on every iteration so far, and it bring something new to the table with regards to the navigation interface...
Surely its better for the consumers in the smartphone market to have an additional alternative to iOS and Android (in all its different guises)?
I dont have any affiliation with any particular vendor, product, OS.... My primary home machine triple woots Win7 x64, OSX Lion and Ubuntu. Again, each OS has its own plusses and minuses, and when required, I use whichever one I find most suitable for the task in hand. Win7 is my gaming OS, OSX Lion is my enthusiast OS and was mainly installed as a proof of concept, and Ubuntu is my Linux play area.
Being able to be objective about new products, instead of bashing manufacturer x or product y, is a far more rewarding approach, and who knows you may find that whatever the newfangled product does may actually have something that you like if you were to actually be more open minded.
To conclude, I do not have any vested interest in any particular product, just like seeing credible innovation and more healthy competition in such a crucial marketplace in the current economy.
While it's obvious that Nokia have f^cked up big time over the last 5 or 6 years, and that they should've simply replaced their marketing department rather than ditching the superb Symbian/Qt platform, I think you fanbois and fandroids might be surprised in the not too distant future. Lots of people dislike Apple's pricing and practices, and frankly, Android is a shoddy, buggy, insecure mess that sells because it has naff and pointless animations on the home screen, is not Apple, and is *very cheap* (which unsurprising when you consider what it's cobbled together from.)
AC in case I ever want to apply for a job at Google :-)
People like me are the ones that over the last 10 or so years made Nokia the dominant force in the market, there was no question at Upgrade time... it was a new Nokia. But then we walked away from the more recent tired offerings with limited development and what looked like minimal design and styling. Removal of great ideas like the pop port which made my trusty 6230i easy to connect to my Nokia CARK unit and charge at the same time AND offered hands free answering of calls.... well once that went I started to wonder how long Nokia would be worth bothering with. Now Nokia has lost sight of its "adult" market - the writing really is on the wall.
I guess we should expect this bigging up from this sub juncture of the redmond collective, sad fact is that Nokia are a spent force and a failing brand.
The CARK kit survives to this day - upgraded to Bluetooth it now runs my Android fine, although I still miss the "place in holder and it will just work while charging" convenience of the pop port... and the hands free pick up.
Nokia.. you *were" great... and soon you will be gone, once Redmond Guts you of your useful people and IP.
... The bloke doesn't know why people buy iPhones.
Granted, the 'new shiny-shiny' concept is part of it, but by far the least important. The most important for creatives is the fact that they can take photos, show photos, show movie clips, animations... you know... the stuff creatives do.
And that it comes with FB, Twitter, etc etc makes it a very functional shiny-shiny. I know creatives with Android, but I have yet to hear of creatives with WinPho who don't swear at their devices at least once a day. I have yet to have that with the Apple or the Android shiny-shiny.
Face it Nokia... unless you do something truly revolutionary, you're dead in the water.
The same execs who selected that abortion of a ringtone as the winner, while manipulating the one ringtone which generated publicity out of the rankings. What a missed opportunity. What a typically Nokia way to handle it.
It is they with whom the market is fed up. We're sick of being told what we want by Nokia. Apple and Android devices do so well because they provide a very flexible framework for consumers to slot into to suit their needs.
Wake up Nokia. Or if you must continue to slaughter yourselves, for fucks sake do it quietly.
Winpho is ruddy awful. I hate facebook and tw@tter, I don't want a massive icon everytime I open the phone telling me it exists and you can't remove them as everyone has social networks right??? I like to alter the UI to my way of doing things, how I like it and Android lets you.
Now my XBOX has gone the same way with ruddy great squares everywhere making it even more complicated to simply do what I wanted to do. Instead of "Right right right, down, play. It is right, up right, down, oh wait no, left up up across, right, is it? Erm, think... is it in music, no games... Hang on. Left left left down left and play. Oh wrong one now I get some god awful shop. Wait for the flash animation to clear.... Keep waiting.... Go back... up up up up left left..." and so on.
"Lack of security." Says a man punting an OS whose heritage is one of two critical requirements, the reboot and the AV. Both are not very good on a phone.
A few points…
Everybody that uses Xbox will within a few months feel at home with the WP UI – do not under estimate the effect of this when someone sees a phone in a shop that “feel” right.
You can’t get an iPhone with a keyboard.
The Android market is a big mess with updates and every phone model / network running a different version with different UIs.
So it is very possible that Nokia can take a good 3rd place with the WP – third place is good enough in a growing market to make lots of money. The next generation of phone buyers and third-world users are not a hooked on the iPhone as current phone buyers, so in the long term apple may not win.
It is good to make statements but you need to back them up. Nokia exec didn't reference any research to back his statements. I suspect that it is not the fashion minded people but nokia who is fed up with the iphone and android. Nokia has seen huge decline in sales having made the questionable decision of adopting windows phone instead of the industry leader android. There is still time to catch up with the industry but I am affraid that this will involve reversing that desicion. Trying to create a nice shaped phone based on windows crap is not the solution!
Perhaps this is an attempt to destabilize the competition by distracting them with a non-existent carrot.
Target market: "jaded kids"
That Nokia has identified this market does not do anything to lend it an air of validity.
So youth are "pretty much fed up" with the offerings from Apple or with Android devices, what is the evidence of this? The stunningly huge sales volumes of Windows or Nokia phones? Perhaps it is the huge inroads RIM is making into the market? No?
According to Gartner, in 2011 "Android's share of the worldwide smartphone market was 52.3% for Q3, double what it was a year ago" certainly not an indication that "jaded kids" are a huge demographic, which is not to say that they should be ignored. For this segment freedom of expression just might be very important, and if the open Android platform has anything, it has freedom, some may think too much freedom.
I see they worked in the fear factor twice in one sentence!
"many are not happy with the complexity of Android and the lack of security."
Paint the competition as "complex" then make noises about security issues. Insulting your target market helps sell your product only when the marks don't realize that you think of them as stupid. The cats out of the bag now though isn't it.
The attempt at painting the competition as dull is hilarious, what would Nokia do to improve on a touch-screen? I know, they would eliminate it entirely and use buttons! Or perhaps both lots of buttons AND a touch screen... yeah, that would be SO much better.
As for security, me thinks the security firms are seeing their market vanish. Who moved their cheese? Google and Apple! With Android the onus is on the user to give permission for software to be installed. Installing an alarm clock that requires full Internet access, blue-tooth access, location tracking, and the ability to read the phone state and identity just might be a bad idea.
The iPhone appsphere is guarded by Big Brother Apple, who vets applications to 'keep you safe', but also controls what you can access, do and to some extent, see (flash) with your device. None of this means there can be no bad applications, all it means is that applications are sanctioned by Apple. The quality of these would depend on the corporation and their policies (i.e. subject to change).
So Android users pay for their freedom by requiring they exercise thought and good judgement, Apple users put their faith in, well, Apple. Enough said about that topic.
He goes on to claim that "the market place is extremely crowded", um,... yeah, there's three real contenders, the iPhone, Android, and to a lesser degree, RIM (blackberry). The last time I looked it took more than two or three to make a crowd. Perhaps he is talking about the number of manufacturers of Android Phones, then by that logic the PC operating system market is extremely crowded, what with all the different makers putting Windows on machines by default.
Nokia has become a MS bi... umm... "plaything" (to use a more family-friendly word), devoid of innovation (I really liked their N810, I have one sitting on my desk), they seem to be heading down the same trail that Palm (you remember them) took. That trail leads to the history pages, where they can join the other companies that Redmond 'helped' out.
"Getting bored with Android", what a load of self-serving crap. Android is forging ahead. Apple has stagnated but no-one wants a Windows phone with its cartoon-like, made for morons GUI. It's a hideous GUI. It looks like something a child developed.
Nokia used to be a great company but now they're a Windows has-been. If they continued to focus on MeeGo then they'd have a chance but with Windows they will surely die...
For a company running Google Apps for Business, Android is the only workable mobile comms tools.
Blackberry Enterprise Solution is by far the most excellent email tool, because of the outstanding encryption and compression that means a really low data tariff, even when roaming.
But BES has no means of delegating internet access control to the network or handset, so all internet traffic goes through BES and thus screws up websites. Corporate sites will be HTTPS, so guess what BES does? Yep: blocks it. HTTPS = dangerous, apparently. The admins need to approve their own websites in BES.... crazy.
iPhones are a menace. They are a real security threat, because you can activate an iPhone on your Business Gmail account without ever declaring that you have done so. So your company cannot see where its data is being stored. Therefore, the company cannot protect the data if you or your handset go AWOL. Yet the company remains responsible for the data. Regulators need to make money themselves nowadays, they won't hesitate to prosecute a company that chose to use a system that it could not configure to prevent employees doing what the system was designed to do... Strangely, Apple seems quite happy to sue anybody to "protect" its intellectual property, yet to hell with the people who pay its customers, or its own public profile... To me, that makes them untrustworthy in any business relationship.
Nokia is no-where to be seen in this market. The only space that's left is to comply with enterprise security policies (preferably ones that exist, we're not installing yet another enterprise solution for yet another poxy handheld device).
Windows Mobile? Forget it: we have enough problems on Windows Desktops, and mobile devices bring their own problems that keep people locked into non-jobs for days at a time. Windows Mobile just sounds like an excuse to convert a non-job into a non-career.
Meanwhile, the telcos have many smokes and mirrors to blame their own shoddy network failings on other parties' devices.
So much for the Information Age. We're going backwards!
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