Is Nokia losing it?
Recently I have been wondering, whether Nokia is losing it or no?
I’ve always been a fan of Nokia devices and S60 and I still continue to be. But of late Nokia is acting a little too weird, making me wonder the above.
But why am I saying this? Well let me elaborate,
Xenon v/s LED:
After the N82 and the 6220 Classic, Nokia did not release a Xenon flash based phone, despite people (bloggers) stating that the Xenon flash was way better. Nokia instead came out with dual LED flash, stating that it was good and could be used for recording video. This at a time when Sony-Ericsson had both Xenon and LED on a single phone. Even now when it launched the N86 8MP, it gave it dual LED flash and one does not need to state how poorly the LED compares to Xenon flash. Now Sony-Ericsson comes with a 12MP monster and guess what, it has Xenon flash!
Ovi:
At first I thought that Ovi was a great step forward, it still is, but somewhere down the road, Nokia has stopped listening to its users. Ovi being rolled out in parts around the world is absolutely nonsensical. Develop a service, launch it through out the world, it’s better like that and will definitely translate into more users for your service. Look at Google, they follow that principle and see how well GMail, Google Reader, etc are doing.
N-Gage V2.0:
What a great idea it was, but what went wrong? no game portability to other devices, no touchscreen based titles, no accelerometer based games? high prices, that’s a lot of things stopping the mass acceptance of N-Gage. Sure the high prices has been tackled a bit. N-Gage has an expanding line up of games and that’s a good thing, but will that be the only thing that will ensure it’s success?
Competition:
Now this is where Nokia hasn’t really paid too much attention. Samsung has quietly crept up Nokia’s back, they have better phones and features currently. Sony-Ericsson is going to release the Idou soon and would only complicate matters further for Nokia. So how did Nokia counter this? Nokia launched a 8MP phone which was supposed to be path breaking. the N97 is also there, but with a high price in today’s times, you would have to be joking about people buying the phone. Nokia had the N93i which flopped, that N93i a jewel inside it, optical zoom. Why not do some R&D and come out with a 5MP camera sensor, with 3x optical zoom, face recognition, more modes and better photo processing capabilities?
S60 Ambassadors:
S60 recently has announced the withdrawal of the Ambassadors initiative. Why? The one thing that differentiated S60 from the other OSes was an active Ambassador program. Without the S60 Ambassador, who is going to generate buzz for S60? This is what set the S60 platform apart from the others, now with this edge gone, S60 will become just ‘another’ OS. Pity, S60 Ambassador program could have made S60 even stronger.
With all of these things, the one thing that comes to my mind is, whether Nokia is really listening to people or just doing something it thinks is the right thing. if things continue like this, I personally would shift to a Samsung. I just don’t see what Nokia has which can keep me loyal towards them.
Wake up Nokia, if this continues, you won’t have a lot of loyal customers left. I’m already contemplating on buying a N97? 6 months ago, I absolutely wanted to buy it. That’s how much things have changed!
Nice round up of the scheme of things adi
Im sure nokia isnt. Regarding devices, they are clever, they reserve the best for last. They will do stuff if they think they already NEED doing that kind of stuff. They will upgrade their line of devices if they think they are threatened. Their top priority for sure is targeting the larger percentage of buyers, and those buyers aint like us who are uber power users.
@aaron
point taken, but why have Nokia's flagship devices been such failures of late. It's like they closed their eyes during their making….
Why reviewers and interviewers need to play hard ball if they want better products from Nokia!!
To add to your points:
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, pussy-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 shitty 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 shit 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 fucking 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 sucking on NOKIA dick and ignoring the most basic failures for the nth iteration.
E.g. Everyone is 'praising' the Nokia Messaging/Email app (the fuckers 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, grows some balls and reads through this entire post.
This vent was written in 10 minutes – so please excuse typos.
PS What's the ovi launch date?
Totally agree.
I was a N95 power user, owning one of the first models released in the UK, and using almost every feature day in day out. Great phone, though a bit of a brick.
Anyway – fast forward 2 years and I'd brought an iPod Touch to play with. Very impressed with not only the the interface/quality but also the Apple Appstore. Thousands of great apps. The user experience kicks ass over the N95's internet / music capabilities.
Then a couple of weeks later… my N95 breaks. The N97 was my planned phone upgrade, though like you I had reservations re the LED flash. I mean c'mon Nokia! Needing a new phone immediately, I looked at other Nokias. The N96 is a joke of an upgrade.
In the end I sold my iPod touch on ebay and brought an iPhone. My initial concerns about the iPhone's capabilities have been resolved with the AppStore (I can use it as a modem for my laptop, use internet radio, etc). …. and it's superb for surfing the web / managing multiple email accounts. Jailbreaking the iPhone provides power users the control they need (to run multiple apps, non appstore apps etc). The main trait of the iPhone is it's camera. It's absolutely useless… but the N95 was never any good at night shots which is when I take most of my shots.
To be honest though I've never been an Apple person, I'm likely to purchase the next iPhone rumoured to have a great camera rather than the N97. I just couldn't justify losing some of my great iPhone apps and web/email capabilities.
My 2 cents
There are so many handset makers coming to india now
Nokia will soon be forced to innovate ..
But then the brand factor is always backing them ..
I don't think the demand for Nokia mobile would ever lessen, it is only going to go to one direction that is upward direction, so don't worry at all.
Debra
@Debra
I think the demand for Nokia has already lessened. I recall thinking of Nokia as a phone “god” for many years, and right when I get enough money to buy one of there mid-range/top of the line phones (e71) I couldn’t be more disappointed.
The s60 community is nowhere near as organized as it should be, and most decent software for this platform is expensive. There is a lot missing that should be built in by default.
I know the e series is for business, but I can’t imagine using this for business purposes, except for maybe its calendar function. Its messaging application is buggy, I’ve lost many messages to it, and the email functionality — unless you are using pop3 — is horrible.
The iPod touch has the upper hand on software and usability, while the e71 has the upper hand on hardware (except for the cpu and screen).
[...] it was raining phones from Nokia’s end. I had recently made a post of how I thought Nokia was losing it. I still stand by it, but yesterday seemed to have dampened that a bit. Finally we’re seeing [...]
I too have been a huge fan of Nokia and S60. I have used every ounce of features in the N95. Great phone the N95 was. It’s time for a new phone. I like the iPhone but don’t like on screen keyboards (large fingers). Perhaps an android phone? LG? I am not sure. I really liked the N95 so much I am tempted by the N86. Fab honest write up Aditya.
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