Posts filed under 'nokia'
Nokia’s irrelevance in the smartphone market, their inability to deliver a usable UI for their new touch screen gadget, and their ongoing inability to create an application ecosystem around the single most popular OS in the cell phone market has made me wonder if they are headed into oblivion.
Or at the very least, whether their role in life is to be displaced by a Chinese or Taiwanese cell phone manufacturer who figures out how to make really cheap and really reliable devices for the masses who just want to make a phone call.
But perhaps they’re not dead yet:
Microsoft Corp said it will announce an alliance with Nokia on Wednesday, likely unveiling plans to make the software company’s Office suite of applications available on devices made by the world’s top cellphone manufacturer.
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE57A60P20090812?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews
In spite of the efforts of Google and in spite of the claims by the Mac phone boys, Office is the single most important set of applications for smart phones. The fact that Windows Mobile has the only workable implementation continues to make it a contender.
This can only help both MS and Nokia.
August 12th, 2009
Oh my God.
I have been suffering with the my ATT Tilt, henceforth known as the, Piece-of-shit Cell Phone.
I had no idea how bad the experience was. Well maybe. My wife would sneer at my bumbling attempts to do anything with one hand, the absurdly short battery life, the large but mostly useless keyboard, but I faithful to the Microsoft cause stayed the course.
No more.
I am in love.
The E71 battery life is ungodly. No, I don’t do it justice. It’s Phelpsian.
The one-handed use of the phone is Boltian. Try to use an iphone or windows mobile with one hand. Go ahead, try it. Even better, try using an iphone with one hand while holding groceries at the farmer’s market. I defy you to try it.
Failed, didn’t we?
Still trying to figure out where the “slider to turn it on” is? Still trying to figure out where the number 5 is on the keypad, aren’t we?
And the keyboard. Oh that keyboard. I have these huge fingers, these ridiculous, stubby fingers that my genes bequeathed to me. And yet this keyboard works. Reviewers who tell you that the keyboard is too small are weak-willed, sniveling, cover-your-ass types who can’t admit that the keyboard works for people with big-hands because they feel they’ll sounding like Nokia fan-boys. This keyboard works for me, and I have hands that are ~12 inches from thumb to pinky, and approximately ~10 inches from the base of my palm to the top of my index finger. And I am not known for my dexterity.
And it’s even stylish. Yes, the Finns have made a stylish phone. Unbelievable perhaps, but true.
And of course, since it’s a Nokia phone, the audio quality is surreal, the device will only break if you throw it under an on-rushing train and frankly it just makes you good holding such a well engineered device.
Okay it’s not a perfect phone. The darned software doesn’t match the glorious experience of the phone.
For the corporate world, you really need Goodlink to be happy and unless you are willing to endure some entertaining phone hacking you’ll have to wait for Goodlink version 5.0. You do need to buy a whole bunch of software including an IM client.
And the S60 need a fair bit of customization until the UI experience is usable.
And yes, the iphone user-experience with two hands is superior.
But oh-my-God, I am in love.
September 28th, 2008
I used to wonder what the point of a camera phone was. The picture quality was poor, there was no flash and the refresh time was very slow.
But then my wife brought home an Nokia N95. And that is when I realized that camera phones do not have to suck.
If you check out some of her photos in her photo blog you’ll see what I mean.
December 12th, 2007
The recent announcement by Google around the gPhone has been portrayed by the press as a game breaking move. That somehow a new free OS that is customized for cell-phones somehow, once again, changes everything. And that more, to the point, that was Google’s plan.
I disagree. In fact, I believe Google had grander ambitions, those ambitions proved too costly, and that the recent announcement was an admission that those plans were shelved. And that Google was signaling to the cell phone carriers that they were going to play by their rules.
Hence, the blog title: Google capitulation?
Here’s what I think:
Google’s management team correctly observed that the future of search was search on the cell phone. And that location based search on a cell phone was going to be a tremendous revenue opportunity.
The challenge was that the current cell phone carriers act as tax men. You can’t sell a service without putting the service on a cell phone that the carrier sells. And the cell phone carriers themselves had ambitions on how exactly those advertising services were going to be delivered.
But why would the carriers be any different than MS and Yahoo in their ability to compete with search?
Unlike Microsoft and Yahoo, the cell phone carriers thanks to their connectivity to customers through Yellowbook, and the fact that they sell phone numbers, have the sales force, and the business process to create a real alternative local search advertising market.
So if you’re Google, and you have more money than God, you think outside of the box. If the problem is that the cell phone carriers control access, you need to create a new network that does not have the cell phone carriers acting as the gatekeepers.
To do that Google needed three pieces:
- A network that could carry phone calls that was not owned by the cell phone carriers.
- A set of devices that would connect to that network
- A set of compelling services that would cause people to select that network.
So what was the plan?
Let’s look at them in reverse order. For (3) Google was building it’s own applications, and then buying startups that offered innovative cell phone services. For (2) Google was working on an OS and reference platform. And for (1) Google had a three pronged strategy. The first was to build Metro WiFi like they did in Mountain View and San Francisco. The second was to bid on the wireless spectrum and either build or lure someone to build the network. Third was to create a regulatory environment that would allow other virtual carriers to build their own networks.
I believe that the cost of (1) became prohibitive along two dimensions. The first was the sheer dollar cost to build. The second was that while Google was building out it’s competitive network, the existing cell phone carriers would treat Google and their software as enemy number one. In many ways, the Google move might force the carriers to embrace Microsoft and Yahoo. The potential loss of revenue while the network was being built out and the cost of the network just made the strategy impractical.
Confronted with this reality, Google scaled back it’s ambitions, and like a researcher who has failed to prove something significant, they looked for pieces of that strategy that were still valuable and tried to get some value from them.
And that’s what the gPhone announcement is about. Unlike every Google announcement in the past, Google was announcing vapor. Nothing real, no product, just a statement that the grand cell phone strategy was about releasing a free OS to cell phone carriers.
With that announcement Google was signaling to the cell phone carriers that their plan was to play by their rules. Like Microsoft, Blackberry, Nokia, Palm and Apple they were going to release an OS, that the handset providers could port to their devices, that the cell phone carriers could certify and that Google would continue to be a software provider into those walled gardens.
Google was no longer planning to build an open, unwalled garden.
Google capitulated to the existing market reality. Perhaps we are seeing the limits to even their ambitions?
November 7th, 2007
Just the other day I was futzing with the Nokia N95 web browser and discovered that it had several features that were similar to the iPhone. For example the N95 has a mini-map:
and the time-travel feature:
I was intrigued. I checked out the relative Apple and Nokia corporate web sites and discovered that the touted features were in fact identical. So I set out to discover the source of the similarity.
Now it turns out that both Nokia and Apple in 2005 had agreed to partner on building a web browser based on Safari:
Nokia has announced that it using open source software in developing a new mobile Web browser for its Series 60 SmartPhone — and that this has been developed in cooperation with Apple.
The Series 60 browser will use the same open source components, WebCore and JavaScriptCore, that Apple uses in Safari that is based on KHTML and KJS from KDE’s “Konqueror” open source project.
Nokia said that it intends to continue its collaboration with Apple — and will actively participate in the open source community to further develop and enhance these components, contributing Nokia’s “expertise in mobility,” the company said.
And in fact Nokia’s open source project page describes exactly how the Safari web browser is the basis for their browser.
Mystery at last revealed, the reason the browsers are so similar is because they are the same browser.
I will observe that this further confirms my near universal irritation with the quality of technology journalism. The fact that the Apple hype machine implied the iPhone was unique in it’s use of Safari did not mean a few moments of fact checking would not have revealed that Apple was using someone’s else technology.
July 8th, 2007
