Like Research in Motion, Nokia is playing catch-up, software-wise, to the iPhone OS and Android, which is funny in a cruel way because both Nokia and RIM have a far larger market share than both of them. Nokia has put out a preview video of their upcoming N8 smartphone, which runs the latest Symbian version, Symbian^3. Nokia, like RIM, has got work to do.
Like the BlackBerry OS 6.0 video we talked about earlier this week, the Nokia video shows off both new hardware as well as new software. Symbian^3 is supposed to be the much-needed overhaul of the platform which brings it in line with the competition, but judging by this demonstration, Nokia, too, has a lot of work to do.
Contrary to the BlackBerry OS, I actually have a lot of experience with Symbian. I have a Nokia E71 smartphone running Symbian, and hardware-wise, it definitely ranks among the best phones I’ve ever had. It’s well-built, sturdy, and its QWERTY keyboard eats software-based touchscreen keyboards for breakfast. As much as I like my iPhone, typing on it is an exercise in frustration compared to typing on the E71.
Software-wise, things weren’t as positive. While the phone multitasked just fine, without it affecting battery life in any meaningful way, the interface was horrible. It was unintuitive, slow, unresponsive, and generally confusing. The included applications for email and browsing were pretty much unusable.
I don’t really get the feeling that what I’m seeing here in the N8/Symbian^3 video is going to change my mind. The interface still seems to have performance issues, and it still looks remarkably disorganised and inconsistent. Knowing Nokia, the N8 hardware is probably top-of-the-line, but software wise, it dun’ look so good.
Nokia will have to come up with something better than this to prove Symbian’s still got life in her. Of course, the usual disclaimer applies: I haven’t actually used Symbian^3, so takes these comments with salt. Lots of it.
It’s not supposed to be the iPhone kick butt version of Symbian, it’s supposed to be an interim upgrade before the new Qt 4.6 stuff is all put together for Symbian^4.
Same thing with Maemo 5, it was step 4 of 5 for their complete solution.
At least that’s what I’ve been reading lately due to becoming a Nokia customer with my N900.
Maemo 6 went by the wayside due to the whole Intel / Nokia merge of Moblin / Maemo into MeeGo.
But yes, as far as Symbian goes, 3 was supposed to be a minor upgrade before they move everything over to Symbian^4.
It’s kind of unfortunate that they’re doing this, since hardware wise, both the N900 and the N8 are fantastic.
So Symbian^3 has new Qt, just not a new interface, Symbian^4 will have a new interface, and with the new version of Qt, applications should be perfectly portable between Windows, Mac, Linux, Symbian, and Maemo / MeeGo.
Hope that clears up why the N8 isn’t as happy and shiny as the iPhone OS.
But as a side note, it’s had Multitasking for a LONG time, in fact the ‘multitasking’ that iPhone will have soon is almost 100% a copy of the Symbian version. At least as far as what others have said.
It’s always this way with Nokia. They are always one step away from taking over the world with Nokia or Maemo or whatever. The N900 was supposed to take over the world with its Clutter GUI, but then Nokia bought Qt. They changed direction and their current product is relegated to “interim” status.
Personally, I don’t think they will ever get there.
Actually Nokia is already there. They are #1 in the world. I don’t think the N900 was ever supposed to take over the world. their flagship smartphone is the N97 mini. There has been no advertising of the N900, nowhere. The N900 is filling a niche.
But I see your point. “interim” status is just poor communication. Other vendors sell interim products but they call it a revolution and when the real product is ready, they call it a new revolution.
Edited 2010-05-28 15:02 UTC
No, they aren’t. N97 sucked big time. Even Nokia has admitted as much.
http://www.slashgear.com/nokia-n97-experience-a-tremendous-disappoi…
They are rapidly losing market share, and years after iPhone’s launch they do not have a competitive product. I like Noika, they are very up front and honest about their products. But, you can’t blame their honesty for their crappy products right now.
And corrected with both the N97 mini and updates to the N97.
Since Nokia had such a headstart compared to other mobile platforms, their market share in percents can only slowly decrease till it stabilises.
However, one should not forget that not only are they still selling more smartphone than any other competitor, their increase in smartphone sales year over year have also been bigger than those of any competitor, including the Iphone and Android, who both started from noting quite recently and still can’t match the increase in smartphone sales Nokia sees.
For example, the paltry 40 millions Iphone units sold on an average year means Apple will never be able to catch up with the number of Symbian devices Nokia ships each year. And that’s not even including cheap phones.
If you want to be difficult and argue things that don’t matter much, go ahead, but I’m not going to argue back. The important point that was originally argued, is that Nokia phones suck. They promise they will be better in two years time, but they still suck. Absolutely no one would consider buying a n97 over an iphone or high quality droid. And its going to be a while before they have anything that would compete with either platform.
Over-generalization spotted.
First because s40 phones are still an excellent low-end phone experience. Sony are pretty much on par with it. LG lags years behind in terms of usability and features since they went touchscreen and completely messed up their UI while doing so.
They got only recently beaten, in my opinion, and it’s by samsung’s new touchscreen phones. Their OS is pretty, snappy, and looks just right from an usability and feature set point of view : it does the job, does it well, and makes it easy to do (couldn’t test the other aspects, but it really impressed me in terms of straightforward UI and ease of use. That’s what any low-end touchscreen phone should look like).
Then, you forget about the wideness of their audience : unlike brands like Apple who got a very specific target (rich people who want a nice toy to play with), or HTC which decided to focus on business, Nokia’s mid-end phones cover an incredible amount of use cases. Two areas where Nokia shines :
-> A small phone (without touchscreen) that takes good pictures, in order to replace an average camera by something which makes call and sends and receives texts and mails : the N82/N85/N86/N96 line of product. It only had a sony phone as a contender last time I checked, and reviewers were somewhat critical about its picture quality.
-> Blackberry-like messaging + pda phones : The Eseries work fairly well, and prove to be a strong contender to the Blackberry world, without the whole creepiness of Blackberry’s user jailing (Blackberry enterprise server, only apps coming from the App world, several functions that only work nicely between blackberries…)
You can then argue that Nokia doesn’t know how to make touchscreen-oriented software. That’s somewhat true : last time I checked, reviewers were pretty happy about the 5800 and its successor, but it doesn’t match the wide range of touchscreen phones that has appeared nowadays. Then there’s the whole feature+app thing : Nokia more or less invented the MID concept before Apple started to make heavy sales based on that concept, and with the N900 they still do pretty well in that area as far as I have heard.
But they don’t have a complete line of products that matches the competition in that hyped to death area, you’re right. Only parts of it. It’s still incomplete. Then, saying “Nokia phones suck” is pretty much saying that this tiny area in the phone market pretty much sums up the entire mobile world. Doesn’t this sound a little excessive ?
Edited 2010-05-29 07:21 UTC
Actually tens of million of people do. Nokia actually sells more smartphones than Android and iPhone combined. The n97 is a very popular phone. It has longer battery life than any Android or iPhone, had a good keyboard, a good camery, its battery can be changed and it has many other advantages over Android and iPhone. It sells very well, even though the iPhone and Android phones are available and competing. Your taste is not everybody’s taste.
Edited 2010-05-29 09:44 UTC
Then what was the point in you spreading misinformation? If you just want to spread your opinion, that’s perfectly acceptable, but make up false information to supposedly back it up and you’ll be called for it.
Your opinion, just don’t buy a Nokia.
There you lost it again. More people consider a Nokia and buy it than there are people considering an Iphone and buying it. Fact is, Iphone and Android don’t even start to compete with Nokia (and to a certain extend SE) on points that matter to a lot of people. It’s life, get over it.
I agree that Nokia phones suck (especially the 700i) as you put it. However, they are far, far better than the Sony/Erricsson crap one that I’m forced to use for work.
You know the one that you can’t turn off predictive texting…
As for the UI! Well, a four year old could probably make a better job of it.
For personal use I have an Android one. I do however find it worse (from a UI perspective) than the iPhone I had before.
I really miss a few of the Apps that were available on the iPhone but not for New one so I unlocked the iPhone last week and now use the SIM from the Android in it.
It all depends on what you mean by “being there”. They may be #1 in the world but that is mostly due to the fact that they sell a lot of cheap reasonably well built feature phones.
When it comes to smartphones most people would prefer iPhone or something with Android. It feels like that the N8 doesnt bring anything new to the table. To be fair the camera is quite good compared to other cell phone cameras, but that probably tells us more about other cell phones than about real photo quality.
If Nokia continues like this they will go the way of Ericsson before thy became Sony Ericsson.
They are number one in smartphones also, and if the trend continues they’ll keep increasing their lead – not in percent points, but in millions of units sold. Don’t be mistaken by the fact they are also number one in feature phones.
What I’m saying is that there are no longer any reason to believe that the trend will continue. Apple and Android phones are rapidly increasing their market share, and that market share is coming from somewhere.
Chances are that they will come from Nokia.
I remember the “We are so big, that nothing will hurt us, lets not change anything” attitude from Ericsson around year 2000, and we all know what happened to them. Now I see similar behavior from Nokia.
You may have seen that a few years ago, but not now.
Nokia has been changing pretty much everything in the mid/high end, and ditching legacy like there’s no tomorrow – Avkon has been dumped, ditto for Gtk+. Look at the MeeGo co-operation, etc. etc.
Try to see past N8 to get an idea about what Nokia is doing in the high end.
It’s just that all this is a bit late or perhaps even too late.
Sure, they switched to MeeGo but all the result of that, so far, was to alienate old Maemo and not so old N900 users. All the change they do now gives more impression of panic than some sort of direction towards the future.
Seeing past the N8, I see no indication that Nokia will leave Symbian and concentrate all forces on MeGoo, or some other OS that is more developer friendly. I see no Netbooks running MeeGo either event though that would have fitted their current Netbook product mauch better than Windows XP given its low memory specification. I don’t see any other Nokia products on the market running MeeGo either for that matter.
Well, you have to consider that Nokia was never a ‘Software’ company. Cell phones had no such software beasts inside them until a few years ago.
Now it takes some time until Nokia gets its own software platform running competetive.
Edited 2010-05-28 16:16 UTC
This is an incorrect interpretation of the events; Maemo 6 is the “Harmattan” platform, and it hasn’t been dumped.
What I meant by that was more from the developer’s point of view. I do realize it’s still in progress, but from what my understanding of it is, Harmattan is basically MeeGo with Debian as it’s base still. APIs should be compatible between the two.
N900 hardware isn’t THAT fantastic…seeing as it has a resistive touchscreen and terrible battery life. I still like mine, though.
The N900 has a terrible battery life when compared to other Symbian smartphones. Compared to a 3GS, it’s better, and quite on par or better than the HTC Desire.
The best way to test this phone is to do it yourself…I like Thom have an E71 and I don’t think the iPhone has anything over my Eseries, I was not able to play with the phone but had read all the reviews from real users and didn’t find anything negative. The N8 and the new phone that they are going to make with the help from the Nokia community are going to innovators, I would hope that they made a phone to run Android and that said phone would have a real keyboard…I would buy it in a second.
Actually, Symbian is the core OS. Each manufacturer will add his own interface on top of it. They provides a reference interface but the vendors will develop their own.
Symbian is still the most advanced OS for mobiles today. With the new QT layer, applications will be more easy to port than ever.
So can you link to any advanced phone that runs symbian and can at least compete with iPhone G1?
The iPhone has a lot of good ideas in its interface, although I think it does not make up for its shortcomings. But that is not the point I was making. Symbian^3 supports pinching, as you can see on the feature list but the N8 interface does not seem to support it as you can see on the video. The N8 is the first to use Symbian^3 and it has its own interface. It doesn’t mean other Symbian^3 phones will use it.
Anyway, I think the N8 will be a great phone. The interface is good enough to be productive and the hardware is just way ahead anything on the market or coming to the market this year, AFAIK.
You should look at the Nokia 888:
http://www.nokia888.com/
That’s where we are headed.
Edited 2010-05-28 15:17 UTC
Nice if you are making a movie like Minority report but otherwise really gimmicky.
heh, I would like to know if people think the same if it was an Apple’s product/concept whatever.
n888 is a concept… so not much there.
As for the demo, I doubt it will convince anyone to switch to it. Call it interim version or whatever, Nokia will loose ground if it does not improve its OS. The guy not once used the phone in portrait mode… not working ?
Yes, it has portrait mode, and it’s much better than Maemo 5’s.
I neither have tried the N8 nor will I say I love symbians interface. But I will however say that comparing it to iPhone is ridicilous. The iPhone is so far away from completion it’s ridicilous. Like for instance, instead of having a descent browser, every one makes an app for every site out there to compensate for how crippled it is.
Instead of just having normal files and an e-bookreader, every book is an app. Talk about illogical and disorganised now will you.
Now to the point. Symbian is great in many ways and stinks in others. Fact is that as far as I know, Symbian is by far the king in extending life of battery? It’s _very_ stable (at least from my experience compared to many other systems). Now the problem with it is obviously some usability issues and the lack of apps (Not website apps or links to websites with altered graphics, we’re talking real apps). I do believe this is being addressed through QT in a not so distant future.
In all honesty, I think Nokia actually has learned it’s lesson and they bought Trolltech to solve the huge problems with interoperability for apps. Now it’s just a lot (LOT) of work before we see the result of this.
For devs this must be brilliant. I mean either develop your app for iPhone minimarket or use QT and aim for the remaining 90% of the market…. Humm,.. let’s do that math again… QT which runs on a multitude of platforms from Meego to *nix to Symbian…. or develop for uuuhm iPhoneOS with a tine share of the market and where you can get kicked out from the store any day because of Applezofrenia.
Geee it sure looks promising.
P.s Let’s not forget that NOkias hardware blows a lot of competition out of the water… especially i”Drop the phone on the floor and shatter the glassphone” D.s
Apple’s hardware is very good. In fact, I would daresay that Apple makes the best hardware out there. They make it feel solid. Nokias feel flaky. They have too many joint and movable parts. I like how the iPhone feels in my hands.
Of course, with a glass screen, it is going to be somewhat sensitive to be dropped from heights onto hard surfaces. I have dropped mine a few time though, and nothing bad has happened to it.
I love the scratch resistant oleophobic screen. I have had my phone for a year. It lives in my pockets without a screen protector and there is not one scratch on it (touch wood). I am yet to see a Nokia phone with such a solid construction. My girlfriend’s phone is a Nokia X6, barely 2 months old, and it is already coming apart.
Apple concentrates on the things that matter to consumers, and the attention to detail is amazing. I mean, 3 years later, Nokia hasn’t gotten its touch screen interfaces working as well as the first generation iPhone.
Nowadays I despair when I see phone makers touting endless feature lists. The more features there are, the more I can be sure that the features are poorly immplemented and that most people will not bother with them. They need to take a page from Apple’s cookbook. Concentrate on a few key features, and spend 90% of your resources on getting those close to perfect. The biggest feature of a phone is the interface nowadays. It is 99% of a person’s experience with a phone. Apple understood that when they brought out their 1st generation phone. Nokia seems to be getting the message a few years late.
They should spend 100% of their resources on each feature. Nokia can afford it. Their R&D team is twice the size of Apple. What you say is that because it does something well, it can suck at everything else. This is wrong in my opinion. If your phone has the prettiest interface in the world but the battery can’t be changed, or it can’t talk to the computer, it sucks. Only Apple can afford to do that because they have a brand and the marketing team that will sell it. If Nokia released the iPhone it would fail big time.
Edited 2010-05-28 22:30 UTC
I agree they need to work with the software, Symbian is fine OS for low to mid end devices but for a flagship device like the N8, MeeGo would be much better choice.
Service and hardware wise they keep a high standard, like Ovi Maps seems to be better then Google Maps. And the N8 hardware would be able to compete with the rest of the pack and their camera phones takes good pics.
What I noticed with Symbian is that it dose multitasking well, when I compared it to Android 2.1 where I still have to figure out what is running and how I close them.
the problem is that meego seems far from ready right now, so I doubt that they could release a n8 with meego before 2011, but maybe in the future there will be either a official or unofficial way to install it
I really don’t know what Nokia’s strategy is with its smartphones, is meego their future or Symbian^x? or are they going to try and support both at the same time. Maintaining multiple platforms just seems a loosing proposition to me. They need to pick one and devote their resources to making it better, and getting it out their. I mean if I’m in the market for a high end smartphone what should I get, the n900 or the n8. Or are they both dead ends going to be obsoleted by meego?
Oh course this is mostly of academic interest to me because I’m in the us and Nokia has zero presence or mind-share in the smartphone market here. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a Nokia smartphone. And this is even after apple and rim proved there was a market for them here, they still haven’t made any push. If they don’t care about the us market thats one thing, but they are sacrificing their control of the conversation by being such a no show. Nobody is asking Apple or Google what they are doing to keep up with Nokia, while Nokia is constantly getting the “so is this your answer to the iPhone” question from the tech media.
Yeah I know, Nokia still has the lead in worldwide market share, whenever a story about the iPhone or Android pops up someone is alway quick to remind of that, but they have lost their leadership role in the market, nobody is looking to Nokia for new ideas or innovations right now. And if Nokia wants to keep that nice market share lead they have to change that. Lots of big companies have fallen from market dominance to nothing once they lost their technological edge, it can happen to Nokia too. And I don’t really want that to happen, since more competition is always good and they seem to have chosen the most open source friendly strategy of any smartphone platform, including Android.
Official stance:
– Symbian = Smartphone
– MeeGo = Mobile Computer
You can generally expect Symbian devices to be the cheaper ones, with more battery life. Both can be targeted by developing in Qt.
Thats seems to be an increasing vanishing distinction, both iPhone and Android seem to be able to do both with one os. The cost difference is also ever decreasing, you can get a 3gs for under a hundred right now (on contract of course), its not the best phone right now of course but still very advanced. With prices like that where does a budget smartphone os fit in? Things may be different in Europe were subsidized phone contracts are less common I take it? I guess that would open up a niche for a budget smartphone os.
Of course since as you pointed out both are being built on Qt it will be much easier for Nokia to drop one eventually once they get tired of supporting two os’s without pissing off their dev community too much
I’m not that familiar with american pricing, but from what I’ve understood the price of acquisition is worth jack shit – the real price is paid over time. In the end I believe people will end up paying the full price for their phones, which is around, what, $500 these days?
The fact that phones have different price of acquisition is a gimmick to create false sense of differentiation.
Well no matter what phone you get you still end up paying an obscene amount for the data plan, so in the long run the initial cost is about marketing more than anything. And yeah unsubsidized most new phones seem to be clocking in at around $500, but in American you’d be hard pressed to find many who buy unsubsidized.
Though I don’t quite understand you calling the price of acquisition a gimmick to create false differentiation. Some phones do cost more than others thats a fact. The newest phones like the HTC Evo are going to cost more than a more budget Android like the devour. Though I would agree that with the markups on the data plans they could probably give you any phone for free and still come out ahead by the time your contracts up. If thats what you were meaning. I’m not trying to defend the American pricing structure, that would be impossible, but it does seem setup to make selling a true budget phone a hard sell since your going to end up getting screwed over with the data pan anyway, might as well get the best phone you can?
Yes, but they wouldn’t need to have different up-front prices. It’s just a way to lure people into buying more expensive phones, since they seem to gauge the different phones by the price of acquisition.
“Yeah, this costs $50 more but it’s somewhat more advanced, I think I’ll gonna buy it” is the psychology marketeers are playing for here. If you had the high end and low end phones both costing $0, the consumer would start looking at the total cost of ownership.
Exactly my point.
You are probably right.
Interestingly, a while ago, selling subsidized phones was illegal in Finland (as it was seen as misleading the consumers). This, of course, was bad for phone business; after subsidization was allowed, you could see people with very little money buying very expensive phones they didn’t need anyway.
Well that or they look at the prominently displayed spec sheet and say “Well their both free with the contract and this one is so much more shiny, I’ll take the newest phone you have please” People just aren’t very good at feeling the price for things over time. The best solution would probably be to make the carriers have display the total cost of ownership for a contract prominently on the advertising. This would seem fair to me.
Well… I, as a proud Eseries user, would prefer an improved Symbian over Maemo/Meego BY FAR !
Symbian is not perfect, but once you’ve finally set it up, it happens to be the best OS around if you want to get something done on your phone. From messaging to agenda, everything is properly handled in order to optimize the common use cases of the pda-phone that any smartphone is in essence. It’s the logical continuity of low-end phones OSs like s40 or this nifty new samsung OS for touchscreens.
Meego, on the other hand, looks like an OS in the iPhoneOS vein as far as I can tell (have to see some in-depth test of it) : it’s beautiful, it’s shiny, it’s got built-in facebook access, it runs pretty apps that make fart noises, but when you want to use your phone like… say… a phone ?, it looks highly unoptimized and clunky.
Texting, contacts, calendar, notifications… It looks as if those OSs have been made to be used like toys, not like tools. I hate this. Sure, it’s what sells right now, so Nokia has to develop something like that, but I just hope that they won’t trash Symbian, one of the sole serious mobile OSs in the world, in favor of something like that…
That’s the difference between a smartphone and a mobile computer, in my opinion. A mobile computer is a funny gadget, whereas a smartphone is a tool used in order to get some work done.
Edited 2010-05-28 21:29 UTC
What you have seen so far is the “meego netbook UX” (user experience). The handset UX, once revealed, will be different in appearance, functionality and code.
And what exactly can Symbian do that iPhone or Android can’t? Like I said earlier Symbian pretty much doesn’t exist in America so I don’t have any personal experience, but I do have some experience with Blackberries, the phone of choice for ‘serious work’ over here and there really isn’t that much difference. I know some business types who where switched from Blackberries to iPhone, these aren’t the type of guys who download fart apps and games. For the most part they transitioned fine, though some dearly miss a physical keyboard, but thats a hardware issue. If you want a serious phone, download serious apps.
Also I have to ask, if you consider texting, contacts, calenders and notifications functions of a ‘toy’ phone, what do you use your phone for? Well besides calling people but thats common to all phones smart and dumb. Those blackberries guy I talked about earlier probably put proper e-mail, calender, and contact manager apps way way ahead of any other function on the phone.
So while I will certainly admit that the iPhone is used by a lot of people for play instead of work, that doesn’t mean that it can’t or isn’t currently being used for work. It all depends on what apps you install. Now the issue with Apple’s walled garden is something else entirely, but thats an issue that isn’t shared with Android or in the future Meego.
Secure native applications and J2ME and now QT support.
And you can add better input methods, better handling of SMS/MMS, better multitasking, better memory management, less resource hungry, more open, more modular and the web browser is arguably also better. Symbian is versatile. It has a reference interface that is separated from the OS. Each manufacturer can apply its interface. S60 is the best known interface but there are others.
You can argue that Android and the iPhone have better GUI and I would agree but it’s not night and day in my opinion. The iPhone GUI is not the second coming of Jesus Christ and it has its shortcoming but it is very well marketed (by Apple and its fans)
Again, what Symbian need is a better GUI, but the OS is great. I have not tried ^3 and I can not base my opinion on a video so maybe ^3 will be a great UI. Going back to Android or the iPhone OS would be a step back. Apple and Google are still playing catchup, adding features after features.
Edited 2010-05-28 22:36 UTC
Well first it can make your phone last 4-5 days without having to plug it in, under moderate (heavy texting) use ^^
When you look at the home screen, you quickly get highlight on received messages, missed calls, but also pending mails and agenda entries going to happen later this day. You quickly learn what’s up.
Symbian can do that because its home screen is not a simple application runner like the one from iPhoneOS, and because their home screen widgets are highly space-efficient (unlike those from Android and to a lesser extent BBOS). You can run apps from that home screen, too, but only 6 one, which is a good compromise because you rarely use more frequently.
This quickly shows the thing up : http://www.cellphones.ca/news/upload/2009/02/nokia-e75-retailers-pi…
The phone is bundled with a nice set of apps, too, instead of making you download everything from an online store when you get your phone in a windows-like fashion. You get a little office-compatible suite, a fairly efficient translation+dictionnary app, a PDF reader, and a zip handler, which all prove to be handy when you get a mail. You’ve got access to the file hierarchy, which allows you to save email attachments in a known place instead or always having to look for it in your mail client. Copy and paste works even if you closed an app in meantime.
Then, what if you don’t have a data plan and want to roam between Wi-Fi networks depending if you’re at home or at work ? Symbian helps this too. On older releases, like the one on my E63, it was a bit clunky : you more or less had to set up per-app settings to “always ask me”, and always boringly specify the network when you connect on the internet. But on newer releases, like the one on my girlfriend’s N86, it’s exactly as it’s meant to be : in the option, for every internet usage (web, messaging, apps), you specify a list of networks which should handle it, from the most preferred one to the least preferred one.
The whole agenda thing is pretty nicely handled. You can fairly quickly set up complex things like an alert that runs every work day at a fixed time, while removing holidays, and then change the time of all entries at once if you change your mind. You can also put long-term goals in there, which will stay on your home screen so that you may remember them, and associate an alarm with them so that your phone wakes you up when you start to get used with the homescreen entry and forget about it.
Then, the built-in help is a nice touch, and the mail client works fairly well and can display much more messages at once that those new touchscreen-oriented OSs, allowing to get a quick overview of what’s in your mailbox. Speech synthesis works pretty well, which would greatly help the visually impared (along with the keyboard interface that Symbian is made to support : do you imagine how much of a nightmare it is for blind people to use touchscreen phones ?).
Globally, the Symbian+Keyboard experience is very solid, with a lot of nifty details that make it a pleasure to use everyday. I just need something to be happy : some work on performance, stability, and menu usability, even if it implies a feature freeze. I had to manually rearrange some items in the main menu (especially the config zone) in order to get a more logical setup. That’s not normal, and I hope that this is fixed in Symbian^3. Then, I fear that performance and stability are going to get worse when I look at all the shiny animations that they put in there, because stability and performance issues are essentially due to poor handling of apps that run out of memory. However, my girlfriend told me that she never experienced a single crash on her N86, so maybe it’s already fixed.
This convice me even more than before that I was right not to buy a blackberry ^^ I considered the option before deciding to go Nokia because I had a good experience with handsets from that brand.
But something puzzles me : why should one manually download everything in order to get a usable work-oriented phone ? Shouldn’t the device be suitable for that purpose out of the box (except for some basic setup like putting your preferred apps on the home screen, setting up your email account, and register your preferred network connections) ?
Sorry if I did not made myself sufficiently clear. My point was that the way those functions were handled on Android/iPhoneOS sounded more like a toy than like a tool.
Sure, but is it that much optimized for that use ? This…
…pretty much sums it up : you basically have to do a lot of work in place of the OS designers, whereas those are theoretically supposed to choose a coherent set of bundled applications that go well together and allow the user to easily handle the common tasks of a smartphone : messaging (including mail), handling and transferring files, making calls and managing contacts, working with an agenda.
Edited 2010-05-29 06:43 UTC
Three more quarters of these Nokia’s mediocre performance and won’t be the dominating phone company that it is today.
Edited 2010-05-28 21:09 UTC
As a mobile software developer, I am bewildered by the number of different Symbian platforms that Nokia offers. I look at the vast array and think to myself “why bother?”.
Nokia should leave Symbian where it does its best work, low-end feature phones that have limited hardware resources and low user expectations to match. For more powerful phones, there are already so many better and more established choices available.
Anyone else think an N97 built for Android would be the perfect smartphone?
I think Symbian is superior to Android. It just need a an interface that catches the eye of new users. Developing such an interface would be better use of resource than integrating Android in my opinion. Anyway, nobody has tried the N8 yet. The interface may be more productive and useful as you think.
The emulator and the videos suggest otherwise.
i think that Symbian is just fine.
Well, Nokia should improve it in term of user interface design, especially its graphics design. Other than that..its ok.
Symbian still among the ones with continues innovation. Icon grid (adopted in iphone os), app folder (coming soon in iphone OS 4, and Mr jobs will make it sounds something extraordinary, for sure), multitasking interface (coming soon in iphone OS 4), very good image and video quality in N8(coming soon in iphone OS 5,maybe), tiling widget screen since N97(adopted by Microsoft Windows Phone 7, and everyone seems to be amaze), good connectivity (worlds first usb on the go, maybe available in iphone 5G)..and flash support
Anyway,i think their true contender is Android. i saw the Google IO showing Froyo..man, that would be hard for Nokia
And, one more thing..(like Mr Jobs always said)
I think media is not on Nokia side right now. Everyone, including you OSAlert, always write negative reports. Just yesterday, Reuters report bad sales of Nokia N900, although its not clear for what region the data were taken.
Its makes me wonder what actually happen behind the screen..
no wonder people now thinking Nokia smartphone is cripple..
It’s easy for the new kids in the market to be innovative and do things differently; They have no existing user-base to risk alienating. With the longer lived market members you have the problem that people come to expect devices from them to work a certain way, so making radical changes and departures from that norm entails much more risk.
It also hits up against “We’ve been dominating the market for ten years, there’s nothing wrong with it as is” attitude – In-house developers often get set in their ways on things like that…
… and when it comes to developers, CHRISTMAS ON A CRACKER they love to just keep re-using the same code using old/outdated methods no matter how badly written or behind the times it is.
Basically this boils down to an example of how it may just help to throw EVERYTHING out and start over. It’s BECAUSE they have so much legacy that they feel stuck in a rut.
For all my badmouthing of Apple’s product quality and absurd price gouging (as evidenced by their absurd profits and underpaid workers) there’s one thing I’ll give them; The past decade or so they’ve proven their not afraid to shake things up a little. MacOS to OSX, the switch from PPC to Intel, etc, etc. They’ve made some radical hardcore changes and come out stronger for it.
When you want to make a splash, sometimes you’ve got to start anew or at the very least take on an entirely different approach – but fear of upsetting the existing customer base can often scare many large companies into inaction.
Developers have to reuse old code because of various reasons which is not due to laziness … e.g. I can’t risk breaking backwards compatibility with websites that are running older code … so if the code or markup was written badly in the first place, I gotta stick with that no matter what, I can’t risk breaking the older website if it gets upgraded. I just have to work around it.
Even Apple had to shift from Carbon To Cocoa over time instead of just killing it off straight.
Edited 2010-05-29 21:44 UTC
I’m a bit confused by Thom’s statement that there’s performance issues very evident in the video and that the system looks very unintuitive. I’ll admit the GUI does not look terribly exciting, but I could not spot any performance issues out of the ordinary. After I’ve read I was actually surprised how snappy everything looked in the article. Compared to what I seen from the iphone I don’t see much difference. And calling it a confusing interface? How can you judge that from that video?
Not to sound like I’m nitpicking, but you’d think Nokia would have enough money to invest in better marketing than this.
Here we have a presentation done more or less unscripted in one take, from a fixed, wide camera angle, from a guy sitting on a couch which in combination with the all-white background and camera angle makes it look like he is sitting on the floor. No cheery music, no practiced gestures that make the UI look better than it really is, no close-up shots of the guy proclaiming enthusiastically how excited he is about the product. It’s no wonder Apple is better able to convince people to buy their products.
When Apple sells a product, any rough edges are made for all intensive purposes invisible, so that even when the customer buys that product, they believe it is just as magical as the advertisement makes it seem. Nokia, on the other hand, presents you with a guy seemingly sitting on the floor of his living room showing you his pet project. It does not inspire confidence.
anything coming out of nokia cost more than other company’s product in the similar category without any redeeming quality to justify the additional cost.
anything made using symbian has to have hardware, software, usability designed to cater for it’s inherent bloat-ness, inefficiency and antiquated, one-for-all, unfocused design philosophy.
these two behemoths share a symbiotic destiny. i am hopeful that the world will rid of them very, very soon.
Impressive how much people here sound like they *never* used any other nokia product than the bling bling but useless highest-end phones. Is there so much people that don’t understand that a phone is primarily made to be used for sending text and making phone calles ?
Take some lower-end samsung phones and nokia phones with similar form factor. Throw them on a wall and then let them fall in water. Put back the pieces together after drying them up. It’s almost guaranteed that the samsung phone will not work in some way, as they break after ~1 year of normal use in my experience. On the other hand, the nokia one *does* work, in my experience, though I did not try many times so it’s not a statistically valid result ^^’
Edited 2010-05-31 07:50 UTC