Nokia is NOT a has-been of the mobile world

Moreso, they’ve dominated the entire cell phone market with over 35% marketshare for the past ~decade. The closest any competitor got was Motorola (I believe) with the RAZR at like, 17%.

Nokia may be old but are still market leaders who offer a variety of phones for various applications and people. Others such as apple only offer a phone where one size fits all. Not exactly tailored but you can try and get it to fit as long as apple approve. again I find windows mobile had lost their way at the moment and android whilst in its infancy has still yet to mature. At least with nokia I have a choice whereas with apple I am limited.

I think what some mean when they say Nokia is a “has-been” is that the interface needs to be refreshed. I had an E62 and was really looking forward to the 5800 and then the N97 but was let down by both interfaces. Seemed like they were trying to squeeze an interface designed for non-touch screens into a full touch screen.

That being said, I’d rate OS’s in this order: iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, S60 (in the interest of full disclosure I have a G1 [Android]). Blackberry doesn’t even make the list. I have a Curve for work and my wife got one for personal use against my recommendation on the E63. Now she see what I was saying.

Since I’m on a rant, I don’t see what the big hype is over Blackberry. They’re hard to use, hard to navigate and for those that don’t want all their messages in one place, it a pain. S60 and the E63/71 are excellent choices if a touchscreen isn’t your thing (and for my wife it isn’t).

So I agree, S60 isn’t a has-been. For non-touchscreens, I think it’s the best out there. If you factor in touchscreen, then I do think much work is required.

for a geek, android and s60 are the way to go.. S60 users have to install the right tools and software for it’s true powe to be realized.. If left up to it’s default email client or you miss out on gravity, podcasting (ota), navigation, etc.) the user would be missing out.

While I do not agree in general that Nokia is a Has-Been of the mobile market, there is no denying that Nokia is hardly the leader of mobile innovations anymore, as it used to be (think back to phones like the 7110 with the first WAP browser, the 7610 with Symbian and integrated camera).

The current S60 operation system is getting quite old (especially the GUI). While you can enhance some features with extra software, many of these things should have been integrated into the OS by now.

Taking just email for example, there is not yet a professional integrated email solution on S60 comparable to systems like Windows Mobile or others. While you can get extra software for that (like Profimail), these solutions are never and probably will never be fully integrated into the OS. Nokia Messaging is a step in the right direction, but given the problems many have with it, it is far from ideal. And if you factor-in the costs for all the extra software that some might need to customize their S60 phone, you might end up paying half the phones price in extra software.

Looking at the new touchscreen phones, however good they are in regards to features and specs, there is no denying that instead of coming up with a new OS fully optimized for touch screen use, Nokia (very much like RIM) choose to enhance the current OS just enough so that is could support touch screen use. The question is whether this will be enough in the long run. The same could be said about the current state of Windows Mobile aswell.

Over here in Germany we have good access to all Nokia phones, but looking at the business customer market, Nokia is lagging behind more and more due to missing features or poor integration.

If you are looking for bang-for-the-buck, then Nokia is right there at the top with phones like the 5800 and others. But the question is how long people will be satisfied with that alone, with others constantly catching up and maybe even surpassing Nokia.

Wake-up post for horse-with-blinders bloggers like you:

Ovi Store!?

Another classic fail on Nokia’s part!

Nokia has announced closure dates for Mosh and Widsets through e-mails and news releases along with the eventual replacement of these services by the new Ovi Store.

However, the smarts at Nokia have not included anything about when the Ovi Store is actually going to launch. Everywhere I read, it says the store is set to launch in May – but what’s the date mate!??

A quick search of the Nokia website only adds to the ineptitude: Ovi launch search on Nokia’s website

In my opinion, the only thing going for Nokia is the fact that S60 has multi-tasking and some of their phones support US 3G (AT&T).

Nokia, you are really trying hard to piss me off:

Customers are screaming what they want to see in the phones – but the honchos are too busy squandering their riches from the past (Programs which work in Silos like Nokia contacts, Friendview, etc).

Specific rants:

1. Ditch the cheap plastic cases – seriously! They are obvious and cheesy – N85 is a big fail because of it.

2. Use capacitive touch – I don’t care what the hell your engineers say. Spend one hour with the iPhone and you will see how effortless capacitive is versus resistive.

3. Promote a standardized look and feel for apps through your SDK. Maintain customer expectation/experience and quality across all apps – created by Nokia or by a third-party developer. Does it even occur to you that’s one primary reason the iphone is so popular?

4. E71 – the camera is a joke compared to N73, which is three years older. This is not the precedent you want to set. News to you – technology should move forward – not backwards. The iPhone with a 2MP camera without flash takes phenomenally better pictures in daylight – that even after 3 E71 firmware updates. Get it? Fire the e71 camera division. It’s even worse when Nokia does not even accept they screwed up. And you wonder why Nokia has no market share in the US (hint the 5800 launch fiasco).

5. Firmware updates across the board!? E61 – just 3 years old – is a business phone. The browser sucks. It crashes all the time or runs out of memory. It’s an older version. UPDATE it! I paid $450 for that. You can’t leave it in the dirt after two years of half-hearted support. Why are your firmware updates 6 months apart? It’s unacceptable. The market and internet is evolving too fast for you to sit on your butt; either reduce the number of devices per service line (that’s another story) if you can’t handle them or hire more/smarter people.

6. EMEA, NAM, etc f/w update versions. Based on the updates you shoot out every 3-6 months, your QA guys are probably smoking crack. Even obvious fails slip through them. I can understand that hardware may differ over region-specific phones but it doesn’t warrant 3 month gaps between the region specific updates. Learn from your competitors – because these things will eat you if you don’t acknowledge (Hint: Zune jokes). The end of your domination is already here – accept it to maintain ground. The 5800 alone will not save you and based on your price-range to specs for N97, I won’t count on that device either (LED instead of Xenon for a $700 phone? Maybe your giving the wrong kind of porn to your product gurus – it’s turning them into sludge).

7. Widgets. Do you remember; 2 years ago, at an announcement – you mentioned that there will be widgets, which will let users input their flight details and in turn the widget will alert them about flight arrival or departure delays, airport conditions, etc? The services to offer this information are already here – e.g. FlightStats.com. But I don’t see the widgets anywhere?! What happened? Good idea/selling point but sounds like someone fell asleep. This should have been one primary focus of multitasking capability in a phone.

8. E-series. Aah… the award-winning phone that no credible reviewer had the balls to take a pock shot at. Instead, xxxx-arsed reviewers sounded like they were done a favor with a review handset when they justified the poor camera performance, ‘oh, it’s a business phone; its primary function is not to take pictures.’ If that’s the case, then why the hell has it packed a sxxxy e-mail client for 4 years; even on its newest iteration? Oh, and why does the phone not recognize calendar invites!? Even gmail has worked that sxxx out. Inexcusable! Do you guys even test your own devices in a non-Nokia-centric environment at all? I didn’t think so. BTW, Nokia email is a paid for app eventually, it is not a replacement for the inbuilt messaging client. A client and service are two different entities and should be maintained so if you want people to use your devices anywhere. For e.g. your browser doesn’t just work with your servers now, does it?

9. RAM. Why do your phones even today have minuscule amounts of RAM – usually just enough to get by – even though the prices have dropped exponentially?

10. Call log – how did you manage to screw this up even more? Call log used to work fine on the E61. But with the FP1 / E71, every incoming call is shown as a ‘cell phone icon’ even if the number is associated with a land line. Also, why are you not using different icons for work, home, cell phones? Is that rocket science? BTW, what’s QA been up to – at this point you might want to call a narcotics raid on them. Don’t get me wrong, you had it working right a few years back. I know you’re new to the concept so repeat after me: technology should move forward – not backwards – with time.

11. Call log 2 – Where does all the information related to the call log get hidden? Because when I used synble, I noticed that it was able to extract a hell of a lot more information from the call log than the phone’s client. This is just sick. Winmo phones allow you to store THIRTY days worth of information. Not only that, I can go into a contact, and view my call history for that contact including durations for every call as long as it was all within the 30-day limit. Obviously synble has managed to pull a lot of it out from my E71. But shouldn’t this have been part of your phone? So tell me, do you use any phones from your competitor at all? It might be wise to make a few purchases; right about now. Plus, if you want to learn from your competitor, you have to use it as your primary phone for 30 days and then go back to a Nokia and see what you can improve. This is the EASIEST way to improve/add features without investing into any ’smart’ people for R&D and probably should have been your first step.

12. Call log 3 – You know how right after you’ve called a contact or received a call, you want to try to call that contact again but but maybe at another number from the contact profile? Well guess what – you have to go through the address book to look at the other numbers. Yes, you can’t open the contact profile or alternate calling numbers from the call log itself. WTF? Talk about basic UI workflow/routing design fail. At this point, I’m beginning to think you have someone on the design/QA team with a mild narcolepsy problem.

13. Contacts – Have you ever noticed how ‘easy’ it is to ‘delete’ a contact but hard to ‘undo’ edits/deletes? I would think by the 5th iteration of S60 you would have got that down to a pat. I can hit the ‘back’ key and get a prompt to hit delete a contact. Nice. But if it’s a mistake, then what? I’m outta luck until the next time I sync. Plus, if my phone is set to sync automatically, then I will lose the information from my PC as well, if it comes in range with my computer (I use Bluetooth and sutosync) or if I forget about restoring the information before I re-sync. Did it EVER xxxxing occur to you that if you want to make deletion easy you have to make recovery just as easy, huh? Didn’t think so. I am now beginning to think, Nokia folks secretly don’t use their own phones.

14. Contacts 2: While we’re at it. If you begin to edit a contact and mid-way you decide to ‘cancel’ or discard all changes made to the contact (you haven’t saved yet). There is no way to do that. Seriously. I am sure many of you have noticed that by now – on FP1 at least – which is not that old and has seen tens of updates. From Nokia’s perspective, they probably want to ‘save’ all information on-the-fly as a user is typing to prevent accidental loss; which is a good thing. But would it kill ya’ to also add a function to ‘discard’ all changes and revert back to previously saved version of the contact on the phone. It’s not rocket science again. UAT (User Acceptance Testing – probably a new term to you Nokia guys) – That should have caught this. You might want to schedule a deep talk with the some department heads.

15. Standard bookmarks in the browser that can’t be deleted. You asked for the hacking of your firmware. Because those bookmarks are useless and have never offered anything REMOTELY useful. They should have been removed from the browser by the second iteration 4 years ago. Or you should have built a team to develop content that’s not discontenting. Besides, what’s wrong with allowing people rearrange those bookmarks? Plus the morons had to go right ahead and build a SEPARATE bookmark item for each link instead of putting them all in one folder called ‘Nokia’s junk’? You should be ashamed of yourselves. Instead of glorifying what you’ve accomplished, how about spending some time over the failures? Because it looks like they are being carried over iteration after iteration.

I can go on forever, but I am gonna stop here – cause as usual – you are probably not listening. But for your sake I hope you do!

Times have changed; it’s not just about the hardware anymore – but more about the software. Also, if you can’t make your software to interact with non-nokia phones over the internet then you’re wasting your time (Nokia Friendview, etc). There are many platforms to compute – the internet has always been social and your time as a leader has already been squandered.

When consumers spend $400 every 16 months for the past 6 years and have little to show for it. This is what happens.

I am SICK of the whole Nokia band-of-reviewers ignoring the most basic failures for the nth iteration.

E.g. Everyone is ‘praising’ the Nokia Messaging/Email app (the xxxx at Nokia couldn’t even decide for 6 months whether to call it ‘email’ or ‘messaging’ drives the point when each already means something specific) but no one is chastising Nokia for the abysmal in-built e-mail client as unacceptable for $300+ phones – which will be the only ‘free’ alternative in a few months.

In fact, Europeans are screwed even harder since they pay 20% more for each phone but are happy with lower expectations! The Nokia 5800 unlocked (US 3G) is going for $299 (224 Euro). How can a $300 phone perform worse than a mid-range phone from 3 years ago!? (N73)

I have the right to call out a poorly managed product line especially when they have such haughty claims but little to show for. Nokia stopped innovating a long long time ago. I am only hoping that someone at Nokia pulls their head out of their arse and reads through this entire post.

This vent was written in 10 minutes – so please excuse typos.

PS What’s the ovi launch date?

I’ll keep the post here because you make many valid points, but this is a site my daughters visit and I do not like swearing so let’s keep the profanity off of it please.

Could not possibly agree more with dextroz. As an E71 user who made the mistake of upgrading his firmware, I don’t think I will ever buy a Nokia phone again – for many of the reasons listed by dextroz.

One incredibly stupid decision to add to that list is the inability to downgrade firmware – which only seems to get worse with time. I now have forced sounds on my camera shutter because of a firmware upgrade, which I hate with a passion. I assume all new phone cameras of theirs will be crippled this way, so I’m hoping for some salvation in the SE Idou. If camera phones are meant to ultimately replace standard p&s cameras, embarrassing the owner with poorly designed and obnoxiously loud sounds has to stop.

I think Nokia lost the control of their ship. That is mainly because they want to have too many products and too many OS versions: S40, Maemo, S60v3, S60v3-FP1, s60v3-FP2, s60v5 and also country specific and operator specific versions. There are thousand of combinations. It is clear Nokia cannot keep focus.

For instance, why doesn’t Nokia allow firmware upgrade from s60v3 to s60v3-FP1 to s60v3-FP2? This is like on Windows I wouldn’t be able to upgrade the OS to SP1 or SP2, which would be very unplesant. I paid $400 for N95-8G and it is s60v3-FP1. Why Nokia does not allow upgrade for FP2 and support only FP2? Why is making small changes in all the FPs instead of upgrading to the next FP for version? They should learn: 1) How to do firmware upgrade and allow installtion of new FPs for the same OS version. 2) How to do swap of memory to the disc on the OS to not run out of RAM, like any real OS. 3) How to listen to the people’s needs. What is the future of the Linux based OS Maemo? Why they don’t give an exact release date and they fool us around with quarters? What is the future of Symbian OS? Adding to it s60, UIQ, Qt, etc, etc. makes the system too fat to be maintained. Why not a single simple SDK? I think Symbian can survive being open, but only as a niche, because it is an infantil OS, too many UI issues and sometimes memory issues which need OS restart. A real OS does not need restart! Is this cooperative multi-tasking or preemptive multi-tasking in it?

I don’t understand why Nokia crippled the e71x to keep AT&T happy. AT&T branded Palm Treos and Centros are basically the same as the unbranded version except for the logos, some bloatware and a couple of undeleteble browser bookmarks.

Also why does an ancient dead OS like PalmOS still seem to have the best mobile email client (Chattermail). I have been looking at the options on WM and S60 and none of them seem so good (the iPhone’s email client sucks too).

BTW Speaking of WM, a review comparing the unlocked GSM Treo Pro to the unlocked e71 would be awesome, at least for those of us still on the sinking PalmOS ship.

I agree with you 100%, Outside of North America Nokia is indeed the leader hands down. And alot of these so called ‘bloggers’ or whatever don’t seem to get it. They seem to think that everything evolves around North America.

And as for Andrew, i think Palm is taking a step in the right direction with WebOS. Time shall tell.

Nokia’s damaged its brand in the US… “free” phones don’t help. I was doing some college interviews last week, and I joked with one candidate that he should have looked up my company on his phone while waiting. He replied that his phone was a Nokia, with a dismissive sneer. All he knows of Nokia is the cheap candybar models that are “free.”

The E71x is a good phone at a good price, but Nokia let AT&T cripple it, which will drive away customers in the long term (I got burnt with AT&T’s crippled E62, and won’t make that mistake again).

Based on some of the comments here, my N95-NAM is a better phone than the E71x. Yikes.