Nokia and Symbian still number one in China Android may have an insurmountable lead in the Chinese smartphone market, but when it comes to internet-connected mobiles Symbian and Nokia are still number one according to new stats from search giant Baidu. The company’s latest quarterly Mobile Internet Development Trends Report for Q1 2012 measured only internet-connected …
Nothing wrong with Symbian and Nokia, great budget devices for the budget minded classes. It's only the advertising of the competition that tells us how crap they are, buy android, get an iPhone, and yet Symbian works well, has been developed well and has been around for a long time.
The grass is not always greener on the other side.
Problem is, it's somehow ignoreing Huwei and ZTE who are killing everyone in the entry level smartphone market in China with entry level Android phones.
This seems very selective reporting that is aimed solely at giving Nokia investors something positive to cling to in the seas of Windows Phone disaster.
It can. YOU can't code it, though.
If you can check email while playing music, multitasking is happening. WP can do that because the music player has native access.
It can multitask. It just doesn't let any old idiot with a copy of Visual C# Express fool around with its nethers. If you feel that makes it less than "smart", that's your decision.
The fact it's an artificial restriction doesn't really make any difference.
If you can't do lots of things at once, it can't really be seriously used in the place of a computer.
If my IM client had to go offline while I browse the web for example (as was the case on old iPhones) then that is a total non starter for me. (One of the original reasons I never considered an iPhone)
Given that most of my chat is via Jabber, that probably wouldn't help much. And I normally use Opera on a mobile.
Again it sounds like a feature phone. You can only multitask with the built in features.
My last Nokia was. 9500. It really doesn't seem like a Lumia. (3 generations newer) would be a very satisfactory replacement for it. (Let alone for the in between generations)
The article implies that the chinese think the same.
"Smartphone" is an irrelevant category these days. In a few years there will be no such thing as a "feature phone", so the quicker we start talking only about the phone market rather than the smartphone market the better off we'll be.
The people buying feature phones today do so because its the cheapest phone, and they use their phone only as a phone, not as a small computer. In a few years there will be no "feature phones", the cheapest phones available will be extremely low end stripped down Android phones.
Obviously some will upgrade to a real smartphone (Galaxy S, iPhone, Lumia 900, or whatever) but many people will never use a phone as anything other than a phone.
You could perhaps do some research and find out how many apps, particularly Java games, have been downloaded for "feature phones". The numbers are staggering. Your claim "... do so because its the cheapest phone, and they use their phone only as a phone, not as a small computer. " is almost certainly wrong, and provably so.
Personally, the only difference between a Symbian "feature Phone" and a so called "smartphone" is probably the screen surface area.
How timely then, that Nokia should let slip news of the termination of Symbian Carla and Donna upgrades. That's going to make the Symbian-based PureView 808 even more appealing, in an N9/MeeGo way... /sighs.
Are Nokia doing everything they can to blow the other leg off?
When the marketoids took control of the asylum and renamed Symbian Belle to 'Nokia Belle' in their infinite wisdom they didn't realise that there would be nothing to indicate in the name that 'Nokia Carla' is the next version of 'Nokia Belle' and most things compatible with Belle would be compatible with Carla. So they scratched their heads and thought a lot and so Symbian Carla became 'Nokia Belle FP1'.
As for Symbian Donna which is the dual core version, the chances of that seeing the light of day are fairly slim given that Elop appears to be happy to stick with the burning platform du jour, Windows Phone, and the best developers that Nokia had decided that Accenture is not the place for them.
Belle and Belle FP1 are actually fairly pleasant experiences, unfortunately until Elop is fired (probably when Nokia is on its very last legs and therefore beyond help sometime next year) they won't get the exposure or the marketing they deserve.
Actually, they seem to have blown their head off, and are now running like a headless chicken around the farmyard. A sad state of affairs for what was once an outstanding company.
The "Manchurian Candidate's" plan is on course for the complete destruction and the subsequent assimilation into the Microsoft corporation. I truly don't expect to see much of anything good from Nokia ever again, beyond the S40 low end. They have ceded the market to everyone else and bet the farm on a pig.
Steve B. must be just jizzing around the office at the success of his protege at knocking about 90% off the purchase price of Nokia. Too bad WP is going nowhere fast - it's half a plan with half a product and I can't see it ending well for MSFT either (it has already ended for NOK).
Paris: I need a happy Paris ending
I just wonder how much the results are skewed by the fact that most Android phones are going to be pointing at Google's search engine, not Baidu's.
It's kind of like Microsoft coming out and trumping up the probable fact that Windows Phone users represent the largest % of Bing mobile hits.
Having to juice up your phone once a day is not popular in China. Symbian based smartphones like the E series will run for a week. S40 ones even longer. A big advantage over Android and iPhones. That's a major deal out there.
Plus they are not such a fashion oriented gimme gimme gimme the latest gadget type society.
Accenture are utterly useless at doing anything properly and charge stupid money.
(My experience of them is them doing evaluations of Openview / Netcool and a few others on behalf of an ISP). Then deciding on the most expensive (When the simple thing that we already had worked fine). Then spending 6 months setting it up and at the end it was just acting as a pretty GUI using the output of the existing simple system.
There is no way they are going to be able to do anything like add dual core support to Symbian.
Dunno why they chose Accenture (Probably more Elop stupidity). There are embedded companies that could have done it properly. and probably cheaper.
Android running on the Symbian kernel (With a Freebsd like Linuxulator for the native Linux games etc would rock.) - TBH I dunno why Blackberry's Android emulator stuff doesn't have a kernel based Linuxulator.
Both of Symbian and QNX work properly for embedded when you want decent battery life.
You've got some great ideas - but I'd just thought that I'd point out that Symbian has supported SMP for ages; although it seems that few OEMs have actually decided to implement it in their handsets. I remember seeing an early video demonstration of it on prototype hardware, eons ago - where it seemingly outperformed Linux's SMP implementation.
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