My (short) time at this particular Nokia branch wasn't glowing with roses either; they just laid off several hundreds of their employees and slowly but sure inserting contractors, moving some part of their departments to 3rd world countries.
Their development process was really slow: they'll get their Baseline (I never really sure what it consists of even after I talked to quite a few people but I'm guessing it's the Symbian OS with some standard API/Libraries/Framework toolkits) from Finland once every 2 weeks. Then they would have to merge their code to this Baseline and deal with whatever problems come up.
During the last 2 weeks I was there, some high-level management guy came from Europe. He would gathered everybody to a room to do some sort of All-Hands meeting. In this meeting, he would announce some organization structure "roadmap". I find it strange; instead of talking about the products, this roadmap discussed the company's plan to expand to China and India (DING DING DING!). Of course the guy would immediately told us all that "there won't be any lay-off". But you get the idea...
Here it is... the outcome of such environment: unhappy customers.
It's hard to beat Android that seems to operate in a more Agile way where the workers are far more enthusiastic and passionate.
After two years, they've finally shipped the first SDK which targets existing devices with the new framework. It's actually pretty nice: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt
However, these transitions simply take a long time. Apple purchased NeXT in late 1996, and the first usable Mac OS X release appeared almost five years later.
Nokia has split their "OS X moment" into two separate operating systems: Symbian^4 and MeeGo. But neither is ready yet. Meanwhile Nokia investors are getting very antsy: over the past decade, Nokia's stock has lost over 80% of its value, or something like $200 billion in market cap... If the Qt transition stumbles, heads will roll in Espoo.
I do think that they need to trim down quick. I know that might have hurt their stocks like a kick in the groin, but they've already lost a lot of their stock values. They should do some sort of reboot and becoming an underdog. Slim down that confusing offerings. Back then, they have tons of numbering systems that confuses people who happen to have interaction (reading news, chat, or whatever) with other people that live in different countries.
In Country A, the model might be called E1234, in different parts of the world, the model might be called E1235. The capabilities differ by tiny margin. It just doesn't make any sense. It might be because of regulation or whatnot, but very confusing.
If Microsoft offering is confusing, you should check Nokia's.
Currently, they have nothing other than cheap cellphone to be sold to Asian markets. I happen to be born in another part of the world. Back at my home country, Nokia is still strong because they sell cheap unlocked cellphone (coincidentally, the providers aren't operating like N.A. providers). Having said that, the mid-to-upper level economy population are full of BB users (weird isn't it, not Android, not iPhone, but BB).
BB at least has this "PIN" thing (I don't have a BB so I don't know much about it) where I noticed that most of my high-school friends are exchanging PIN, or exchanging stuff within BB. So I'm assuming there's some sort of ability for BB to have a "soft" vendor lock-in. Nokia has nothing other than cheap price.
I think they're almost done.
Also, Apple had Steve Jobs.
This does not look good for Nokia.
Because it will.
Maybe not the next day or the next week or even the next month. But it will happen, and it is because the suits have already started knocking the dominoes over in just the right way, behind the scenes, in the back offices and off-site conversations that you will never be privy to. I'd say this prediction method has worked successfully for me say 90% of the time. It's just something about corporate culture and the types of people who get into those positions, or at least, the pressures put on them to say certain things and not say other things, in order to manipulate employees and maximize their own personal benefit.
It's a bit Orwellian.
That's how I imagine the Windows department at Microsoft when Vista and Windows Mobile 6 was in development
I can only see 2 reasons here...
1.) Too much fragmentation. Fragmentation in android is nothing compared to slaughtering in symbian phones.
2.) No unified app store for developers. And that's probably due to #1
And #1 and #2 made it pretty easy for others to compete after apple showed the way.
All the above is not true for India though. Nokia seems to very popular even today. HTC is almost non-existent. And the BlackBerry only with the executives at corps. Palm is unheard of. iMate was once popular among the rich and classy and it's almost dead.
Nokia, Samsung and Sony can still happily sell their non-Android phones here and people would grab it happily.
Whatever, the nokia label would take a while to fade here in India until Android phones or iphones become goat-nut cheap. We've been having a slew of low cost manufacturers of phones with high-end features (touch screen, accelerometers etc) with products almost half the price of a nokia low-end smart phone. And still a lot prefer Nokia.
IMHO I would surely credit Nokia and Symbian for making some of the first easy to use devices. My mom who's been using a Sony phone for the past 6 months still can't figure it out quickly like she did the Nokia 1100 (!!) a few years ago. And I loved my N70 (S60 2nd edition FP3) when I first bought it. But again I have similar experience as Rick mentioned in the blog post - poor Memory and processor. And when I had 100 songs, the music player took ages to open. Like around 10 seconds.
I'm forced to mention that HTC, which has released the most number of Android phones has a clear website. Clean, simple to navigate and use and no conflicting pages offering different info on the same topic like Nokia's site. Takes only a 2 clicks max to reach the support page of my phone on the HTC site. The same would take a minimum of half a dozen clicks on Nokia's site even after going thru google.
P.S: Offtopic - just check out http://www.imate.com/ for some fun. I have on idea why iMate has been busy making a phone that meets U.S Military Standards? :P (or am i wrong and every phone in the US has to meet U.S Military standard?)
EDIT: Wikipedia says i-mate is now defunct http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mate
And a minor nitpick, but Symbian was limited to Nokia's smart phone range, their low-to-mid-end phones run either Series 30 or Series 40 which are far more basic yet far more responsive software platforms that are not based on Symbian, unlike Series 60. To be honest, I've never been impressed with Nokia's smart phones, as I've found their implementation of Symbian to be slow and buggy with a clumsy UI. This is in sharp contrast to their S30 and S40 phones, which quite justifiably have a reputation for performance and no-nonsense ease of use.
Is it any wonder that Symbian has stagnated as a platform without any hope of recovery?
I know the IDE is now free and the simulator is about to be replaced with a new QEMU-based one, but it's a little too late.
I don't even use it as more than a phone anymore because it is not worth installing anything and using up the c: drive.
I intend to switch to Android.
I feel so sorry for you. A few years ago I really wanted one but the people that already had them told me not to do it to myself.
I'm looking forward to MeeGo, a true Linux mobile computer. Neither Android nor the iPhone cut it for me so far. The iphone is great fun, but too locked up and hyped, I hate hype and fashion. I don't like Android because I think that it's just one more piece in Google's plan for world data domination. Still, they are both compelling pieces of tech.
Ultimately, Apple, Nokia and Google are all corporations. Feeling attachment for them is a mistake.
I don't use google for search because everyone else does, I use it because it works for me. If I start to find that Bing works better, I'll switch to that. Who cares if everyone else is using google or not.
Saying you don't want to use an iPhone because it's too locked up makes sense, even though I don't agree with that position. Saying you don't want to use an iPhone because of hype and fashion, that's cutting off your nose to spite your face.
You could almost feel this guy's soul tear while writing this. For what, a phone? A corporation?
When the market slams Nokia in the face, they will feel it, not when a fanboy jumps ship. And Nokia is getting slammed pretty badly right now.
They need to control the Os less they become a comodity producer like Htc and Moto already are. Sony didn't go full-android, but they're a shadow of themselves. We'll see...
Nokia have their hopes set on Qt and MeeGo and that looks fine to me, even if I don't know whether they will ultimately succeed or fail.
I had a friend who refused to get an iPod. They were then stricken with using stuff by Creative, which were plagued with hardware issues. Getting them serviced was a chore that took months at a time without the player. They still refused to get an iPod. Even if the iPod was as problematic (in my experience it wouldn't be) she would have gotten replacements so easily by going into the Apple store.
- iPhone didn't have a flash until 4G and had a weak camera. I don't have a camera, I use my phone. - no multitasking until 4G. I've used multitasking for a lot of time and run multiple apps at once. - it was very expensive and not available in my country for my operator
With each iteration the iPhone has gotten better and better to the point where I would actually get one, if it weren't for two facts: I like to be able to run anything I want on my phone and I want to be able to program it.
I'm probably a very special case... I would not hesitate to recommend an iPhone to friends.
Of course if all the problems he was talking about came from apps that are part of the phone then I guess my point doesn't apply to this specific article (though I could see this happening if the Nokia apps were good but the downloadable ones weren't).
Because it's the least-awful alternative if you don't want to go to AT&T. People will live with bad things or bad situations quite well, if they believe they have no choice.
ETA: Of course, for them to have 'no choice' but to go Android, they have to perceive AT&T and/or an iPhone as unacceptable, as well as the other alternatives.
I could not agree more!
Apparently this guy is not a Cleveland fan.
checked android-guru.com
Yep, somebody's running there! Getting a 404 though.
Its funny that this got posted here. My friends and I were discussing just this morning. Everybody agreed that all nokia phones were sluggish and had ugly interface. My personal opinion is that fastest phones are released by Samsung(this might be biased as I use a Samsung Corby) and the best quality in accessories like camera and music is from sony ericsson.(Remember that we were talking about low budget phones so that rules out Nexus One and iPhone). I have used N97 myself and found it sluggish and ugly. Sure I was first excited by the hinged slider screen, but apart from that there is nothing special about it.
BTW the nokia phone I like the most would definitely be 1108. Sure its black and white but its fast, it has high quality of signal and it so reliable that even if I throw it on the wall and put the pieces back together it would bloody work.
