We'll see. We'll see.
Not faulting the logic, Andrew. It's just... it'll be a while before I'll consider nokia again.
The comedown from upgrading my 6310 to a e52 was still smarts. I wanted a phone with lots of features and I wanted it to give me full access to them, both with easily installed utilities and programmatically. The latter is admittedly a niche, but I was seriously planning to write for it, just to see where I could take it, and if good enough release it. I had the time but little money to spend. Turns out, you're not supposed to want that. At all.
On top of that, most of the features are only usable in fairly narrowly-defined use-cases; wander outside those and you might as well untick the box to the feature.
And writing for it? The development environment was pants and completely unsuitable for free software or even just hobbyist writers. The source wasn't available in any usable way or form, despite promises. I mean, shit, a hundred fifty million handsets Out There that run on the freshly released source yet the only thing you are allowed to try it on is... a beagle board. I have better things to run on that, TYVM. RISCOS for one. Certainly not a symbian with spotty beta-quality hardware support, that should be running on a phone in the first place. Then the documentation just up and vanished, leaving shedloads of dead links. And so on, and so forth. They lost a lot of goodwill there. Especially the "not open source, just open for business" bit. That quite literally meant nevermore with the business either, farewell and don't come again.
Now they sold their phones' souls to redmond, and developing for that is, er, by invitation only? That's enough to not even look at anything else they might have on offer. If I want features, I'll get a feature phone. If I'm getting a smartphone, I want a platform that comes with a free pass that says ACCESS ALL AREAS.
I know what I want, and I'm not going to get it at nokia, so I won't bother to look.
Sour? Bitter? Me?
You bet.
I said as much right at the start.
Biased? Me? Absolutely. Yes, that too. A pox on both their houses, I say. But I digress. The point is, I'm but a picky minority, and hey, maybe all those kids who were supposed to flock to those ex-Danger phones, aka the "kin"-fiasco, just maybe they'll pick up on this. Who knows.
But, you know. I just don't see it happening. I don't see nokia suddenly getting it. I don't see them succeeding despite obvious disinterest from redmond to push this to the limit, for as you noted, they've spread themselves thin. The problem there, too, is that they've painted themselves in a multitude of corners. Their design got plastered on the desktop too, where it doesn't work that well. Why would Joe Enterprise Seatwarmer, hating the thing on his desktop, suddenly get more of same on his phone? Even if it works really well on a touchscreen, honest?
The design is a statement, certainly. Might even be nokia had a hand in metronotro. They certainly know to show how important font designs are to them. But will it work? More importantly, will people care enough to make it work for them?
Not me, but disregarding me, who? Julian the Geek? He has a basement full of linux. Franqie Hipster? Why, has apple suddenly become un-hip or something? Eddie Street kid? Doesn't he have like, five blackberries already? Mistah Suitman? With a nice yellow phone to match his suitcase, which is, er, black? Who are they going after, and why? Anyone?
I don't see it and I don't particularly want to know, but maybe the analysis is mildly entertaining. Now if someone could accidentally leak the marketing strategy documents, we could have a laugh or two. Or maybe we'll get to see it flounder and die. Ah, tragedy is an acquired taste, I hear.