Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE Nokia N900. I got it about two weeks ago and have been really impressed with this device so far. I'm impressed both with the hardware and the software. It does have some rough edges and few missing features (nothing critical to me), but still it's the best I ever had.

But I thing that for Nokia, the N900 is a missed opportunity, and their current policy could really be their undoing. I'm sure there are lot of good and talented people at Nokia, doing their best to create great devices, but it seems like they have a serious problem in their upper management. What I see is lack of leadership, and as a result - lack of focus and lack of long term planning.

You know the story: one day, people at Nokia say that Maemo is going to be the platform for all the future high-end phones, and then few days later someone else says they are still committed to Symbian for high-end devices, and sometime later it turns out that Maemo is going to be replaced with Meego, and Meego is not going to be officially supported on the N900 etc.

I saw some previous threads discussing how Nokia's missteps affects the community, but this is not just a problem for this community. It is also a problem for Nokia itself.

People are not going to have faith in their devices without having a clear long-term commitment. As long as Nokia tries to dance in two weddings, they're going to fail in both. Personally, I think staying with Symbian for high end devices is a big mistake for Nokia. I haven't seen Symbian^3 devices yet, but based on my experience with S60 as a developer, I do not believe in the future of Symbian. Maemo/Meego, on the other hand, have the foundations needed to become a strong competitor to iPhone/Android/WebOS. In the meanwhile, Nokia is wasting time and loosing market share.
They still have the biggest market share in the lower price range, but as smartphone become cheaper, they will gradually replace the cheaper phones, and those who control the high-end market would end up controlling the low-end market as well.

What Nokia needs is a clear vision and a clear path. They need to decide what is their platform of choice, focus on that one platform, and clearly communicate their plans for the future of this platform. Otherwise, the future is not very bright for Nokia.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Nokia is trying so hard to fail its unreal.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Sorry, but you're better off posting these gripes over at the Nokia forums. talk.maemo.org is sponsored by Nokia, but crewed by the community. There are less than a handful of Nokia employees who are regulars here (and even less who read these kinds of threads).

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Good post, and I agree entirely with your sentiments

Personally I believe it is already too late for Nokia

What developers are going to commit to Nokia ??? or their ever changing platforms ?...

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Nokia just get rid of Symbian for high end touch devices. It is hard to understand what is so hard?

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Your information is woefully out of date.

• Symbian is not going to be in high-end Nokia devices.
  
• The most powerful Nokia devices will be MeeGo based.
  
• Qt is there to make development easier for Symbian and MeeGo (at the same time).
  
• Go ahead and research something about S^3, S^4 and Qt. Things are going to improve for developers. In fact, by developing in Qt, you are developing for both Symbian and MeeGo at the same time.
  
• Nokia grew marketshare last quarter, alongside with RIM and Android (Apple's remained flat).

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

The problem with Symbian is it's image more than anything else. As much as I think renaming Maemo 6 to MeeGo is a misnomer, I also think that Symbian^3 (and ^4) should have been called something completely different, to eliminate all the bad taste which actually originated from S60.

Forget S60 and AVKON. Seriously, just forget it, it's dead, let it rest in peace.

In the Symbian^3+ era, you will be coding serious stuff in Qt even for midrange devices, and that's a completely different affair than that that caused all the grey hair on seasoned S60 developers.

If you take a look at the breadth of the MeeGo platform, you will see that it is an utter overkill for anything but top-end devices. Symbian, OTOH, will do VERY WELL on the midrange devices of 2010H2, 2011+ and will be reinvigorated by cross-pollination via Qt. My biggest concern/hope is that Uiemo and MeeGo Touch get united/bridged at some point to minimize fragmentation.

(On a side note, a very-very long shot is that Intel Medfield next year turns everything upside down and Nokia's MeeGo division shifts to being X86 centric - in that case, the divison will look more like Symbian=ARM, MeeGo=X86, but I'm in 2012 by now, so I'll take it easy and return to the present to end my post :) )

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Maybe you're right, but the point is: I've never seen any official announcement from Nokia stating this - which is the whole point. And in the meanwhile, the next high-end device is N8, which is a Symbian^3 device. There is no release date for the next Meego device (the rumored N9), and the way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if it's not going to happen in 2010.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Nokia announced this. I'm too lazy to search for it on the forums but search for "Alberto Torres"

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

I present you (well, technically Nokia does :) ):

The Nokia Software Strategy White Paper

It hardly gets more official than that.

PS there is an announced tentative release date for the Harmattan device - 2010H2.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

So, you're saying the Nokia N8 is not a high-end device, right?
I kinda thought it was.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

The n8 will be the last symbian flagship

http://mynokiablog.com/2010/05/29/vi...at-openmobile/

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Oh, where have I seen such thread(s) before... Oh, wait.... I've seen a billion of em right here in TMO... YAY!

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

As far as I could tell from Nokia's Qt-based mobile UIs preview, they are going to create S60/Avkon all over again, this time in Qt. So, it is probably good to lower your expectations right away, unless you are saving them for a huge disappointment when Qt-based Nokia handsets are released.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

It's so sad that companies are run in such a way, as the OP says I bet there are loads of people at Nokia who wish the N900 recieved more attention from the top management, instead it seems Nokia has a nice staple set of "Old Skool" managers, the type who know nothing about the product, the technology nor the customers. The opposite can easily be seen in both apple and google, to a better degree apple. It's clear that Mr Jobs knows the technology, he knows his customers and he therefore knows what makes them happy.

It's a shame really as I hate apple, google I can appreciate and to be honest you think Nokia would have caught on, alas it seems that due to Nokia's past a good number of these managers have been able to kick back and enjoy the benfits of the nokia brand without any real work, in doing so it seems Nokia is headed straight the way of the NHS (far too many managers who cannot do the job required).

As in a number of threads that have come before, it's clear that people arent unhappy with the n900 more so Nokia and there complete lack of... well complate lack of anything.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Nokia has always been on mass producing phones, and a wide array of phones at that. They are releasing new models even now that are dual sim ruggedized simple things that will last for months on a single charge.

Believe it or not, there are a lot more simple phones sold than the latest greatest whizbang devices. Nokia has dabbled and dithered with maemo for five years and they are finally going to bring a consumer centric device(meeg-harmattan n9 whatever) to a wide market to compete with the latest whizbang phones from apple google.

Apple makes one phone, google makes one phone.

Nokia will probably sell twice as many of these in Africa as iphones sold in America

http://europe.nokia.com/find-product...es/nokia-c1-01

Point being, they are a large multifaceted company, but yes they are now bringing some new attention to super high end general consumer again with meego devices

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Thats my exact point, nothing new instead the same old phone, simple yes is churned out with the idea "don't worry it's a Nokia so someone will buy it" google and apple may only have one phone each but my point is that the way there phones are created, marketed anbd sold is completly different to that of Nokia. Google may have one phone but they have there fingers in ALOT of pies all of which make them money in ways never seen before, apple is similar in a way that they have pc, os's etc.

As technology moves on so will the idea of the "sinmple phone" everyone will want to check emails, facebook etc and unfortunately the like s of google and apple will have there feet firmly planted ready for the consumers, Nokia sat with nothing...

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

There will always be people that could care less about those services. There are a lot of people on non-data phone plans and the iPhone is not for that market.

I think the new direction Nokia is taking is the wisest. There will always be a market for business phones, one for "simple" people, one for power users and one for mainstream.

E series = Business
C series = "simple"
N series = mainstream
X series = limited edition fashion phones

The E series should have 2 or 3 phones
The N series should have 2
The C series should have 5 (or the most phones because people in that market want their phones to have individuality.)
The X series should have only 1 phone

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

.. and that is what I meant when I said I hope a sane soul will merge/bridge uiemo and meego touch before it’s too late :) The good news is, however, that regardless of what they do, the bulk of the functionality is in ’common’ standardized modules (and last, but not least, those same modules will be reusable in desktop apps).

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Everyone initially has a clear vision and a clear path, but competitors have this strange habit of making both the vision and the path very unclear, simply by competing. One single player cannot win every time all the time, that is how business work.

It is a shame the N900 and Maemo will be left in the dust, but soon we can install a series of beta MeeGo's on our N900s, purchase a N8 and use that as the phone while waiting for the next (first) Atom based NXXXX running MeeGo. There is some sense to it after all, but I think the competition simply made both the path and the vision a bit too cloudy even for Nokia to handle this time around.

I am starting to wonder if there even will be an ARM based MeeGo handset from Nokia, maybe they will skip it altogether and go directly to Intel based devices. Time will show.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Ack-- this conversation is duplicated and scattered across too many places for me to follow...

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Yeah, there should a threat named "Whine about Nokia here".

Anyway, I don't think a MeeGo phone based in x86 will happen on this generation of Moorestown processors. I bet they will wait for the next gen, which is said to have power-consuming values closer to ARM; and that they Intel will promote then a MeeGo tablet (which can have a larger battery).

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

I think that in less than 10 years, there will be no "simple phones". The lowliest goat herder will have a smartphone. It just won't make sense to go to all the effort of growing a human, if you aren't going to plug him into the Hive Mind.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

We whine because we care.
:)

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Argh! Don't you guys have better things to do than philosophising about companies and devices?
Mods: Create one "Castles in the sky" thread and put all the mental feculence in there, because these things keep repeating themselves endlessly, giving me hemorrhoids.

Whoever wants to complain about my tone again is very welcome, because i'm slowly losing patience and hope about this place.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

And then in 20 years, they'll finally have a decent network that will blanket them with /2G/... How exactly is a smartphone useful for a goat herder if he/she can't get data coverage? What's better for a goat herder: a simple, long lasting phone that will work in a harsh environment or a smartphone that will require constant charging and babying (updates, downloading apps, etc.)?

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Based on how Nokia has handled Nxxx releases since the N770 (four year's worth of experience), expect something around October...

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Not likely. They are using N900 as test platform for developing MeeGo for the future device and they actually stated in early Maemo 6 / Harmattan documents that the ARM platform will be same breed as in N900. Most likely just a bit more up to date and with higher clock speeds, but core technology is likely to be the same. This also enables the community version of MeeGo to be developed for N900, with help from Nokia personnel (binary compatible with official MeeGo, including Nokia's Ovi-software...). So, I'm actually quite relaxed about the future of N900.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

We should create a wiki page with the title and links to the all over spread discussions related to this Topics... :D

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

The Meego conference is mid-November. It would be slightly silly if they had a full-blown conference and not a single device :) So yes, oct-nov sounds realistic.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the Motorola i1 iDEN Android phone. It supports 2.5G data on a network that was shut down years ago, so 19.2K is its max data rate, everyone! Isn't that wonderful?

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Wow, they even shut down the wiki page! Now THAT is serious obsolesence!

:p

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

"gentlemen" alone is enough, there definitely aren't any women on here :rolleyes:

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

revdkathy?

By the way, has anyone tried the Earthcom(b)er application in the Ovi Store yet? Seems promising.

Re: Is Nokia shooting their own foot?
 

Yes, I think the timing of N900 official release in HK and India is pretty poor. It's easy to get the idea of "they're dumping (soon)-discontinued products to unsuspecting public" by looking at the related headlines lately.