Is Nokia Heading For a Fall ?

by Farhan on June 2, 2010

June is here and all the top players in the mobile industry are talking about their greatest upcoming phones.

  • Apple is about to launch their much anticipated iPhone HD /  4.0 and after seeing the iPad and it’s success ( sold 2 million  in 2 months ) high hopes are placed on it.
  • Samsung just announced simultaneous launch in 110 countries of their Android based 4 inch screen flagship Galaxy S
  • HTC has the WildFire aka Desire Mini a Euro 300 Android based phone
  • Blackberry is showing off their  OS 6 on the upcoming 9850

Amongst all this excitement what Nokia is doing ?

Nothing ,

  • N8 is all they have in  in store  , which was prematurely announced thanks to bashing by Eldar Mutezin ( a big drama over the leak ) and as per what I have studied and seen offers nothing more than a pretty face , sure it has a capacitive screen 12 MP HD Camera , HDMI support and all but at the back it’s still a s60 v5 phone with minor changes made .
  • Symbian ^3 , as being reported the first device will be launched by an Asian handset manufacturer instead of Nokia so any mistakes they make will be automatically considered the flaws within N8
  • N900 -  It was launched among much ( according to Nokia standards ) funfare ( in Apple standards it was nothing )  but according to latest Gartner report Nokia has managed to sell only 100,000 of them in first five weeks  .  N900 is not a mistake like N97 was but Nokia failed to work on it and make it a success , with Nokia’s interest lost even developer community seems to be loosing interest in it ( also they have shutdown access to extra untested repository)  . On OVI Store although now paid applications for N900 are available but they are for now limited to pictures , videos and some games no apps are being sold there as no one has the incentive to target the 100,000 users and N900 will forever be remembered as the big phone that could .
  • MeeGo-  The child of Nokia and Intel’s union , where it will go no one knows , it was supposed to be launched for N900 but Nokia has pulled the plug on it , now it’s been said to launched for new intel based processor netbooks and also phones , which may or may not have ARM processors.

So guys Nokia is looking at a bleak future , their OVI Services are not picking up as expected ( evident from the lack of figures being given out )  OVI Music is proving to be a disaster ( check out the number of subscriptions )  OVI Store is working but why bother going there when much of the programs are already available directly through the vendor ( but I like the preferential pricing for low income countries offering more than 50 % discount )

My advice to Nokia is to gear up themselves see where they are heading and where they want to go .  They are sitting on so many boats from phones to services to OS that now even they don’t know which direction to take and the result is showing in loosing of market share , loose of repute amongst their die hard followers ( today worldofnokia.co.uk has called it quits )  and people moving to other phones and OS

All this had been from heart , as much as I like Nokia , love their phones , their future worries me and unless Nokia comes up with something of a breakthrough ( which they also materialize well in time ) Nokia is looking forward to lose their market share big time to the competitors.

Farhan

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  • win

    get your facts correct nokia sold over 100.000 n900′s in 5 weeks not 5 months as confirmed by engadget and nokia themselves.
    bad journalism just reporting anything you read as fact without checking yourself

  • http://armnews.wordpress.com ARM News

    Last sentence – lose, not loose

  • http://www.senseapplied.com Farhan

    Confirmed , made a mistake there , it’s now fixed

  • momers

    I had been thinking of the same thing…there is hardly any excitement around Nokia any more (if there ever was?)

    I have been a long timeSE fan, that company went down and is still down, and now you have Nokia, totally un-inspiring.

    I have been looking for a new phone, I dont like BB for ‘prejudice’ reasons, i cant find anything decent in the SE line up any more, Samsung and LG not my flavour, Apple been there done that. So either it is an Android based device or Nokia something. But Nokia fails to excite, succeeds in boring.

  • http://www.senseapplied.com Farhan

    Thanks for pointing it out

  • Kiriakos Bobotis

    Actually you wish…you don’t even have the right facts and you try to manipulate things…

    First mistake the first symbian^3 device is N8… Asian manufacturers will use Symbian^2 for MOAP…and also you should note that no MOAP device is actually a smartphone and has no similarity with S60…they just use the core of the OS (Symbian or Linux) and their own UI…so there is no similarity at all with what Nokia, SE, Samsung and all the other manufacturers do in their symbian device…
    Thats why Nokia went from Symbian^1 to Symbian^3 and thats what the others will do…AND take a look at that : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/11613_First_Symbian2_phones_ship_in_.php

    “Incidentally this news would suggest that Sharp and Fujistu can be ruled out of the list of Asian manufacturers who might be producing the first Symbian^3 phone. Symbian^2 is likely to be the version of choice In Japan until the next generation platform (which is likely to be based on Symbian^4 or Symbian^5) is ready in late 2011 early 2012.”

    N8 will be one of the best phones out there spec wise…12mp camera…great multitasking…usb on the go…. and you keep rantling about the User Interface…sorry but do you know what Qt is and the full support from N8…not to mention that Qt will replace Carbide in Symbian^4 but even that way it may not be so eye candy like the iPhone but still its so easy to use and better than Symbian^1

    N900 is the geek phone….and talking about it you should be enough informed about how linux communities work..so Im really sorry you can’t touch it…N900 was never meant to be an iPhone killer or a flagship phone…its a phone for the few.

    as for Meego you will see it on N900 as well as many other devices…from tablets, netbooks to smartphones…just be patient!!!

  • http://www.senseapplied.com Farhan

    Let’s see , for the First Symbian ^3 Device – ” Symbian’s Executive Director Lee Williams, the first device to launch with Symbian^3 will come from an Asian vendor… not the Finnish company, Nokia.” The Nokia Blog

    I’m not talking about N8′s features but will you buy a Symbian^3 device when you know that Symbian^4 is around the corner ? – in words of Jo Harlow – Vice President, Category Management Live Category at Nokia ” Symbian 4 is a very different UI from Symbian ^3 . S^3 has the same Symbian structure as earlier with lot of improvements for graphics , with S^4 we are moving away from familiar and moving into something very new and focus on personalization and customized
    content you want to interact with ”

    N900 is a Geek phone but the phone had potential , find me one phone from Nokia’s which stands at par with N900 , it’s open source , it’s powerful and it ‘had’ a future , it was never meant to be an iPhone killer but if Nokia had played it right with applications it would have been an Android killer .

    For MeeGo , the official Nokia statement is that it’s not for N900 it’s for tablet , netbooks , ebookreaders , car info systems and a whole range of devices but not for N900 atleast not officially

  • Kiriakos Bobotis

    We haven’t seen any Symbian^3 device or had on our hands other than the N8… check how many times one vendor was going to release a symbian phone and didn’t make it in time (Siemens SX1 on example which was late many months later and still so buggy). Even if an Asian vendor does that and its a real S60 device and not a Symbian MOAP then I doubt it will be as stable as N8 wich has a more open beta testing base now. Nokia has learned alot from the N97 fiasco! And on the other hand you have seen on Symbian^1 devices how stable were the Nokia from the non Nokia devices (samsung i8910 is an example, although great hardware really bad work on fixing the software from samsung. thank god there is always the community releasing more stable cooked firmwares and making the phone as it should be)

    As for Symbian^4 you try to compare things the wrong way. We have an open source operating system like linux. Just think of Ubuntu ver A lets say that uses Linux kernel version A but there is already out there linux kernel version C. Canonical is working on the next version of Ubuntu which will use kernel version B. Does that mean you will not get Ubuntu cause they don’t use the latest version. In technology unfortunately you should never wait. You should buy what you need at the specific time. Symbian OS works that way similar with Linux. They release a specific version which meet some standards and then the vendors take the source code and make all the changes they want to put it on their hardware. Symbian work on the next version without that meaning they abandoned the previous version trying to fix bugs for it with the help of vendors…vendors on the other side may play with the source code and built some features of the next version of symbian if they have at least part of the unfinished code (thats what nokia did with Symbian^1 adding features like kinetic scrolling and homescreen from Symbian^2). So you cant wait for a Symbian^4 device because by the time it will be out you will be hearing about Symbian^5 & ^6 and how more superior would be. Thats how things work on Open source and should be working if we want stability…if not you go the “do it yourself way” but Nokia won’t let you do it…at least for Symbian devices, at least for now!

    So if you like the new UI of Symbian^3 you get it, maybe its not the big change but it is much much better than Symbian^1. Personally I wouldn’t buy N8 cause of the lack of a physical keyboard…maybe N98 with Symbian^3 would be for me. Some people that also like the S60 UI may be alienated by the UI of Symbian^4 so being new doesn’t mean being better.

    And lets go to N900. Nokia would never support anything else than the version of the OS installed on the device. You have to pay to get a new version and when I say pay I mean buy a new phone with the latest. Unfortunately on a device running linux things are not going the way vendors want and thats mainly because of the GPL. So unofficially N900 can get an update to MeeGo. The very first versions are out there for N900 but Nokia won’t support them just like any router manufacturer won’t support the use of OpenWRT firmware!

    I agree though that Maemo has potential…either as MeeGo or Maemo, Nokia has plans to release 10 devices based on it till 2012. N900 was just the begining and I really wait to see a smaller and lighter device on Maemo/MeeGo. But that kind of device still is not for the majority of people and sure not for people who are used on iPhones. Such phones are for people who are into technology, not for people who just want to do simple things (and thats the main reason iPhone sells so good other than the marketing and the apple brand).

    Most people wont care about multitasking and the OS behind the device as long as they don’t want to do many things with their phones. And don’t forget that Nokia follows the same policy all these years…different needs different phones. There is not a real flagship phone but they have different sollutions for everyone. See how they still sell S60 ver. 3 devices like the e72 and how good they are. Once upon a time they had their flagship phone (n95) but now its not like that they turned back to what they were doing and believe me N8 for me is not their new flagship phone…its just what 5800 was when it was first released. The first of its kind and they want it to be good this time and not a fiasco!!! We will see much more devices on Symbian^3 some cheap some more expensive to go side by side with the new iPhone. Let’s not judge Nokia by just N8…

  • http://www.senseapplied.com Farhan

    As far as Symbian ^3 is concerned , we have to see which vendor comes out with it first in the next few weeks , times have changed now Samsung is not the old Samsung it used to be ( although I don’t think they will go for Symbian as they already have Android and Bada to work on ) LG and Japanese manufacturers are a possibility and as you said they could mess it up which will give the Symbian ^3 and somewhat to N8 a bad perception due to someone else’s mistake .

    Talking about Symbian ^4 as far as my information goes it’s a totally new Symbian built from ground up ( or something like that ) and first devices are expect in Q1 or Q2 2011 some 6 – 12 months after launch of N8 and many people are asking if N8 will get a Symbian^4 upgrade or it will be another N900 , hyped and abandoned.

    I agree Symbian ^3 is much more improved than existing Symbian flavors and N8 has some nifty features to it but I’m not going to invest into it when I know that the next best thing is some 6 mths away ( I’m no fan of MegaPixels and still take pix at 5 MP on my 12 MP Cam )

    For N900 – I’m no Linux guy , have no programming background but I got the N900 and never want to let go. Call it a love / hate relationship it may not have all the bells and whistles of an iPhone ( I have that too ) but N900′s user experience is such that it’s simply marvelous , I again say that if Nokia would have paid more attention to it , it may have given Android a hard time from the start.

    I never said that N8 is the flagship device but Nokia’s future in high end phones depend on it . Nokia does has a diverse portfolio launch planned for future including the Nokia C3 which surely is going to be a big hit given it’s price point , feature set and mass market appeal along with other new QWERTY devices .

    Through my post , I don’t mean that Nokia is going for a disaster which Sony Ericsson has become but it’s going to loose it’s market share in terms of monetary value as average revenue per phone which Nokia is getting is falling so to make the same amount as before , Nokia now has to resort to sell more units in it’s mid and low tier category while it’s competitors are targeting the high end market where although volumes are small but profits are much high .

    The beauty of Nokia is that it has a strong presence in low and mid tier category but it should also concentrate on high end too to increase it’s net worth

  • http://www.twitter.com Umar Nagi

    @farhan but hey look farhan the point is that n8 is not the flagship device of the nokia n series…the flagship will come around early next year, with nokia launching a symbian flagship as well as the meego flagship personally i think meego is the way forward for nokia….comin to n8 if your getting these features at a price tag of 370 euros its really not bad..unlike the new iphone which would be around 500 to 600 euros at launch and samsung galaxy also priced at 700 euros
    the price is a big issue and nokia seems to have resolved it…they made a mistake with the n97 and now they’re coming out with a revenge…trust me n8 would be a big big hit…..aleast i hope so with HD output, USB on the go, 12 mp, multitouches, Flashlite 4 support, 3D Games, Nokia Maps, UI which is 250 times faster then n97 and no double taps….i’m looking forward to july or aug whenever the n8 launches…
    Its a Nokia After all ……………………

  • http://www.senseapplied.com Farhan

    @Umar – For N8 I never deny it’s strength in feature set at the price it will be offered no phone can match it . The problem I have is with the OS it’s the same old tried one but as Kiriakos has mentioned in earlier comment that QT 4.7 could be the game changer . I’m also an iPhone user and despite it’s ‘simple’ interface the apps for it are marvelous and I’m not talking about those fart apps , near pro apps like Sketchpad Pro , Lexi Complete for doctors are things I want on my Nokia phone and N900 could have been an excellent platform for that . As Janole ( developer of Gravity) tweet yesterday ‘ it takes 10 times more time to develop an app for Symbian ‘ while talking about lack of apps for symbian as compared to iPhone and Android . I hope with QT developers give Symbian some importance and we may see some good pro apps working on N8.

    Coming back to N8 , I hope Nokia has given some out for testing and also incorporating the feedback they are getting . I had the N97 a month before it’s official launch ( I became the second person in the world to post it’s unboxing snaps ) at the time I informed Nokia Paksitan that it’s user available phone memory is going to be a problem at just 50 MB which has fallen to just 5 MB within one day of my regular usage with updates and Nokia Messaging . ( I never made it public as I’m no Eldar ) I was told that ‘ not every user is like you , you are a power user which general public is not ‘ 3 months after it’s launch they started hearing the same thing the world over .

    I’m not giving up on N8 , I may not buy one for myself ( I already have 3 screen widget based desktop on my N97 Mini with SPB Shell ) but I will buy it for my wife to replace her N86 8 MP .

  • Khan

    A great bump ahead for Android OS!!
    “A rootkit has been developed that can be activated via a phone call or SMS, giving attackers full access to phone data and eavesdropping”

  • Kiriakos Bobotis

    Guess I was wrong about N8 not being the flagship phone…but also take a look at here

    http://mynokiablog.com/2010/05/29/video-meego-qa-with-alberto-torres-nokia-evp-meego-computers-at-openmobile/

    All the coming flagship phones from Nokia will be using MeeGo…So symbian will just the the OS between S40 and MeeGo!!! We will see it in both powerfull devices and cheap not so good devices but the top devices from Nokia will use MeeGo…and S40 is far from dead too!!!

    so we have (according to the site above) th following Key points:

    * MeeGo phone being announced this year
    * MeeGo phone will push the boudaries of processing power
    * MeeGo phone will be a very high end product
    * MeeGo is an opportunity to create something well beyond what others are doing
    * MeeGo phone is step 5 of 5 and intended for mass market
    * MeeGo phone will be something everyone wants to own
    * MeeGo phone will try to satisfy all needs into one plate
    * MeeGo phone will be capacitive, more stylish and more beautiful with simpler UI that average users will find as equally compelling as tech leaders.
    * MeeGo has potential to be something deeper than typical smartphone
    * Maemo apps not directly backwards compatible with MeeGo
    * Nokia N8 will be Nokia’s flagship in a few months
    * All future flagships will be built on MeeGo
    * MeeGo phone will be on Nseries (not rumoured Sseries)
    * MeeGo will have higher experience level than Symbian
    * Symbian^3 and MeeGo will have certain minimum base level specification to ensure apps created on one device works in another.
    * N8 is first step in reclaiming momentum at high end.
    * MeeGo is the next step.

  • http://www.senseapplied.com Farhan

    @Kiriakos I agree with MeeGO being OS of the future ( I haven’t seen the video as yet ) and the same thing I’d been saying that if Nokia has played their cards right with Maemo , they would have easily hit the Android market . for N8 being a flagship , I don’t agree with it , with the price range it’s the upper mid tier phone where once N86 was but Nokia’s hopes are attached to it and as you said it’s their first step in reclaiming their place at high end . Hopefully the true flagship will feature Symbian ^4 .

    For the success of MeeGO it depends on how Nokia portrays and market it . For now the problems I forsee are that the first MeeGO device from Nokia will have ARM processor not Intel’s now will Intel allow that to happen? beside which ARM processor ? not the same old ARM Cortex they have in N900 which is going to be a disaster for Nokia as people could perceive it as N900 re branded .

    In my opinion Nokia also has to rework on their marketing strategies , a friend of my mine once said , Nokia people are great engineers just not great marketers , Olli Pekka or who ever his successor will be should make notes from Steve Jobs marketing strategy and techniques

  • Kiriakos Bobotis

    I’ve been skeptical on what flagship means in the minds of Nokia engineers. N8 would probably be the flagship phone of midrange phones like the 5800 was when it came out. Its not a n9x phone after all but surely the best phone it has now spec-wise and there is a lot of promise on what we can expect. It won’t touch the N900 users at all. Thef uture is MeeGo for Nokia and they just made the step to ditch symbian from their top phones although we will see expensive symbian phones in the future, the really high end segment belongs to MeeGo.

    Nokia strategy has 3 platforms evolving Series40, symbian and MeeGo and still there are alot series30 devices selling really good on the extremely low badget (below 50$) segment.

    The really bad move from Nokia that really killed today’s symbian touch devices was the bad hardware they used. So outdated that made the likes of 5800 and n97 being even worse than they look with the outdated (to many people) UI. Although I like that UI and there are a lot of people used on it we live on the iPhone era unfortunately where the simplicity of the UI as well as the bells and whistles will make a phone look better. That is actually the big difference bettween Maemo and MeeGo. They want to make it simpler, not for geeks. But unfortunately there will be no backward compatibility. (and im not so sure but I thing they moved from debian to redhat which is not a good move for the community)

    I agree with you that Nokia’s PR as well as marketing really sucks. They make some good moves now to promote N8 but I don’t know how good enough are to make the masses want to have that phone. As for Steve Jobs we all know how good he is in Marketing but also how much hated he is by many for Apple’s policy on…everything!!! Let’s say he is a God in the US but not so loved on the rest of the world!

    Other than that I guess Nokia also learned from their mistakes when picking hardware for their future device. There is an agreement with Qualcomm that gives us hints that Nokia is going to introduce on some of their future devices the really powerful snapdragon processor.

    http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/17/nokia-to-splice-symbian-and-snapdragon-says-qualcomm-ceo/

    A for Intel they are not really into the smartphone market but they will earn alot into having a non M$ OS for their future netbooks and tablets which will be easy to use and also be similar with that of a phone (doesn’t that reminds you the iPhone and iPad which they use the same platform). In other words they want to have an OS that will work really fast on their atom based devices as well as have a better and easier UI than any other Windows or Linux based device. But Atom is not yet ready for really low power consuming devices. Neither Intel has an alternative non ARM processor for that type of devices! But if they make the step to develop one I’m sure Nokia will be the first one to use it for their MeeGo devices!

    Unfortunately only time can tell what’s coming, so I can’t be the Oracle :p

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