Nokia Paying $10M For Symbian Software Devs 210
colordev writes "Yesterday Nokia and AT&T announced a mobile software coding contest worth $10 million in prize money. The move is intended to help Symbian compete with Android and iOS. The day before this announcement, Sony Ericsson said it would not be making any new Symbian devices and is instead focusing on Android. That left Nokia pretty much alone with Symbian, and now it wants to find new coding 'friends' to keep the platform alive. Natural selection seems to be slowly eroding Symbian's future. Is this contest too late?"
I think I'll pass (Score:3, Interesting)
So, one of the "prizes" is 1.0M in marketing for you app, and premium placement in the app store. Don't forget YOU are responsible for ALL taxes. What would the tax be on the 1 million dollars of advertising?
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Probably not very much as it's not income or profit, it's used to purchase stuff for the business... ?
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If you have a "million dollar app", you can either spend $1M advertising it yourself or $1M * 35% (corporate tax rate) = $350K to have them do it for you.
If I have an app that is going to generate sales in excess of $350K (which it is otherwise it won't win the competition), then I'll take their prize and pay the $350K in taxes and think about it like a $650K advertising discount.
Of course, a good accountant should be able to lower your tax burden significantly.
Me too, but not for the same reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
Me too, but not for the same reasons
The problem is that they are coming very late to the "applications game", and they are trying to fit those applications on legacy devices with vastly differing capabilities from one another.
The reason Apple has been so successful here is that all of its devices have similar capabilities and screen resolution, so there is a common baseline for all of the applications to assume, and so from that you get applications capable of using the device capabilities better, rather than scaling back and having the "minimum" UI.
Even the one where the screen resolution is a bit off in "twice as big" mode, the iPad, is "close enough" that the applications for the other devices don't have a problem running with it. Going the other direction, Apple is going to start having a few problems, as people write specifically to the iPad capabilities. The aspect ratio isn't similar enough for "twice as small" to fit those applications on an iPhone/iPod screen. I expect that what will happen is that Apple will normalize the aspect ratio between the devices by changing the next iPhone/iPod to have the same aspect ratio to make the conversions "work".
Android faces similar issues to the legacy systems, which is lack of a standard minimum spanning set -- android doesn't dictate screen resolution, touch (or keyboard) capability, and so on. So Android isn't going to do any better in the applications market than Nokia, unless they address these issues so that the applications experience is actually good for the customer between devices.
Without requiring this sort of standardization of the application operating environment, the customer is stuck trying to figure out how to pick applications that will run on their devices and/or the developer is stuck porting (and testing) on a zillion devices to certify their application compatible, or (more likely), both happen. If so, you only get applications markets that are device-specific, and the developers (those which are willing to be developers in such an environment) will tend to target only the most popular devices to maximize their market size while minimizing their development outlay.
And this is exactly the same problem that a proliferation of APIs and kernel versions and so on have caused for the BSDs and Linux distributions which have largely kept the commercial software players away from trying to sell into those markets (hence things like "no iTunes for Linux", and Adobe specifically targetting one browser and one Linux distribution with their plugins).
-- Terry
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"""The problem is that they are coming very late to the "applications game", and they are trying to fit those applications on legacy devices with vastly differing capabilities from one another. The reason Apple has been so successful here is that all of its devices have similar capabilities and screen resolution, so there is a common baseline for all of the applications to assume, and so from that you get applications capable of using the device capabilities better, rather than scaling back and having the "
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Who is Nokia again? (Score:2)
Re:Who is Nokia again? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Symbian "only" has 44% of the worldwide market share of smartphones. http://www.asymco.com/2010/08/02/android-global-share-rises-to-16-of-smartphones-in-q1/ [asymco.com]
Re:Who is Nokia again? (Score:5, Informative)
They used to have a lot more. 44% is way, way down from a couple years ago.
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Mainly due to it running on cheap, boring phones for business. Small screened devices with full keypads
There are lots of these phones out there, to call them "smartphones" is to use a rather old fashioned description for smartphones.
While a smartphone by definition is a phone which can be expanded and have extra software installed, a modern smartphone is so much more.
If you split the smartphone market by business and consumers the figures would be a lot more interesting.
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Uh, dropping like a stone?!
Maybe you should check your facts a bit.
http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/F/07/GLB_SMPHN0710.gif [thomsonreuters.com]
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As I understand it, Nokia has maintained their numerical share by selling low-end smartphones, especially in emerging markets, while completely ceding the high end 'proper' smartphone market to iOS and Android (ie. the part of the market that buys apps and actually uses the 'smart' bit of a smartphone).
Hence their massive drop [asymco.com] in profit share and the fact that (in my experience at least) commuter trains are now a sea of iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones with only a few Nokia low-end phones around.
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Gasp, how dare they serve an otherwise neglected market!
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The US basically does not have SIM-only contracts. To sell phones you need to do so through an operator. Operators insist of things like disabling frequencies of competing carriers, disabling tethering, installing crapware ("Verizon navigator" anyone), etc. Nokia always stayed away from this, and this has been fine as the US market has always been a bit backwards anyway. However, it has become a whole different market in the last few years, and worth getting into, as shown by this AT&T deal. We'll have
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Yes, Symbian "only" has 44% of the worldwide market share of smartphones. http://www.asymco.com/2010/08/02/android-global-share-rises-to-16-of-smartphones-in-q1/ [asymco.com]
What is a smartphone? Do these smartphones you talk about have similar characteristics as modern smartphones running iOS or Android? Do they have an app store?
Re:Who is Nokia again? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, yes and yes.
You've been able to get add-on software for symbian phones since... well I had one in about 2005/6. Now they have the Ovi store. And yes, a lot of Nokia's Symbian phones are very similar to the competition. Not that that's always a good thing.
Me, I wish they'd drop Symbian in favour of Meego, but it doesn't look like that's happening any time soon. They are adopting Qt for both, which should allow for some portability.
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It probably is time to start again. Microsoft could have carried on with the old Windows Mobile. They could have carried on with Win9x architecture, in the end they realised both were tired and not modern enough.
Symbian's origins are nearly 20 years old now.
Re:Who is Nokia again? (Score:4, Insightful)
``Symbian's origins are nearly 20 years old now.''
Linux is nearly 20 years old, too. Arguably, its origin is in Unix, which is about 40 years old. Out go the Linux-based Android, Maemo and Meego. Mac OS X and iPhone OS trace their origin back to NEXTSTEP from 1989. Over 20 years old, so out they go. Palm's webOS is, depending on your point of view, based either on Linux or on World Wide Web technology - both of which are about 20 years old, so that one is obsolete, too. That leaves Blackberry OS and Windows Mobile, both of which originate from 1996.
Or perhaps "old" doesn't mean "not good enough" after all.
Personally, I think that the fact that, after 40 years, we have systems implementing the Unix APIs on everything from embedded systems to supercomputers, and from specialty devices that virtually nobody has ever heard of to consumer devices like desktop computers, phones, and televisions, means that those APIs are good and one could do worse than continuing to use them.
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Why? There's a boatload of software for symbian already, dating back to 2004 or so, most of it compatible with current versions. You're probably asking for a new UI, which is a different thing.
As an actual underlying OS, symbian can give any of the competition a head start, and still beat it by a mile. It's a very robust kernel, specifically designed for mobile devices, which allows it to perform same functions (and often more) then IOS and Android, while consuming much less hardware resources.
The problem i
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Yes, Symbian "only" has 44% of the worldwide market share of smartphones.
Did you miss the part where your 44% figure came from last year? The 2nd Quarter figure for this year is only 38%. It's lost 22% of it's market share in less than 2 years. At this rate it's going to be irrelevant in no time.
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Come on, slashdot used to be smarter than this. Last year iOS was going to be biggest, this year Android is going to be biggest, etc. See also: http://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
It has lost market share, but gained users (market has grown). This is without Nokia releasing any proper high end phones during that time. And who cares whether S-E/Samsung uses Symbian, their share was non-existent to begin with.
The 4 announced S^3 devices, and the unnannounced AT&T phone, will sell, and they will sell a lot. Did you have a
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Come on, slashdot used to be smarter than this.
Huh? I was only quoting the AC's own article which he used as backing for his statements. I'm sorry if it says something you don't like, but I wasn't the one who drug it up.
Re:Who is Nokia again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Too sad that opinions about global corporation doings are shaped almost always but their achievements in the American market and media outlets.
Yes Nokia/Symbian is still huge and prosperous, except for the US market. Many statistics you see around showing Apple or RIM or Google at half the market are simply not taking into consideration other markets as well.
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Yes Nokia/Symbian is still huge and prosperous, except for the US market. Many statistics you see around showing Apple or RIM or Google at half the market are simply not taking into consideration other markets as well.
What does that have to do with whether what Nokia sells are considered smartphones or not? I never said Nokia didn't have a large marketshare. But if you look at the vast majority of those phones, they are pretty dumb.
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See Tolleman's excellent reply. Your definition about dumbness and smartness in phones is pretty hazy.
For me (and for Nokia), a smartphone is a phone with an advanced OS that its uses are mainly extended by complex apps. By this definition Series 40 phones are dumbphones and Symbian are smartphones.
MeeGo, although technically smartphones can be much much more, if Nokia gets that right in the future. We will see.
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Ok, so what can your android/iOS device do that a symbian phone cant?
Be user friendly?
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Chart says all. [cultofmac.com]
Having marketshare is -nothing-. GM had massive market share, but profits blew. If Nokia keeps this up they're going to quickly become nothing in the mobile market. It's not going to be worth it to Nokia shareholders to keep making Nokia handsets. The margins on nokia handsets are pretty razor thin as it is.
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This clear enough for you? [fastcompany.com]
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The brand has had a 15 year lead time to build robust, usable and competent mobile phones. Nokia should've beaten Apple to the Multitouch punch. They didn't. they should've beaten them to the browser punch. They didn't. They should've beaten them on so many different fronts. I don't think they've got any visionaries at the top who can actually build product.
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It is dropping like rock by the lack of competitive devices (N8) and updated UI and development environment (Symbian^3). Both issues have been addressed now.
Just give them time, the double OS strategy (MeeGo/Symbian) using a simple development kit and SDK is genius and in the long run it will bear fruit. Hardware-wise Nokia has always been extremely strong. Now their OSes and tools are finally catching app with the competition.
Don't underestimate Qt. If Nokia doesn't fail with the marketing effort, Qt can a
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Yeah, and the Chevy Aveo should've been competitive with similar entry level vehicles from Honda, Hyundai and Toyota, but, GM still went bankrupt.
I have zero faith that Symbian^3 and MeeGo can compete on any front with iOS or Android or even WinMo and BlackBerry 6. OPK going away is a huge bad omen for Nokia, and his replacement really doesn't inspire faith in me either. Nokia needs a guy who understands devices and people, not yet another over promoted middle manager.
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Seeing that the smartphone as a term originated from Nokia.
Irrelevant. Meanings change, and what Nokia mostly sells would not be considered a "smartphone" by contemporary definition.
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Define a smartphone.
Seems that the definition in Wikipedia is covered pretty damn well by Symbian. There is not one single thing that is possible in Android or iOS that isn't possible in Symbian. In fact it is the other way around. Symbian offers services that neither of the others have.
The prize is only $100,000. (Score:5, Informative)
The Grand Prize [callingallinnovators.com] is only $100,000. Most of the "winners" just get some upcoming Nokia device. "Winning" means that the app receives "$1 million" in marketing promotion: "a Nokia press release, premium placement on Ovi Store, placement in Nokia digital and social media efforts, and direct consumer messaging via email and/or SMS." In other words, winning means Nokia spams for your app.
Nokia takes a 30% cut on sales through their "Ovi Store", so they're promoting themselves.
Nokia's total outlay on this "contest" is probably under $1 million.
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Oh you're such a dick. Do you work for engadget? With your skills of linking to a source and misquoting it completely, you should.
Quote: "51 Category Winner Prizes - Each of the verified Eligible Entrants that published one of the seventeen (17) Apps selected as a First Prize Category Winner will receive a check for $150,000 USD / $156,229 CAD. Each of the verified Eligible Entrants that published one of the seventeen (17) Apps selected as a Second Prize Category Winner will receive a check for $50,000 USD
If Nokia really wants to remain relevant (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Ditch the goal of moving Symbian to anything beyond dumb phones with cameras
2. Change the name of Meego to ANYTHING ELSE
3. Release Meego completely OSS and don't hamper people wanting to go in and tinker
4. Start rolling out both (Official stock) Android and Meego on devices and allow for the devices to switch back and forth between the two
5. Release a marketing campaign to choose 'the next look of Nokia'
6. Analyze which OS is getting better market traction and phase out the loser
7.Profit More!
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2. ???
3. Profit
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Oh, wait, it's a tiny niche made up of geeks.
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Irrelevant. They can still provide a good user experience without locking down the device to an almost punitive level.
Of course, the exact same thing could be said for your regular computer. You don't need all that functionality, only a tiny niche of geeks do. Let us lock that down for you...
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You don't need all that functionality, only a tiny niche of geeks do. Let us lock that down for you...
Hell yes! To stop all the idiots out there from randomly executing applications would be a huge benefit, might just shut down spam and malware overnight.
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Well, don't go thinking you're somehow exempt from this. You get the ball and chain too...
Why? Is it not possible to have locked-down devices for the people who don't know what they are doing, and more powerful, open machines for those who do?
I don't see why this would have to be an all-or-nothing deal. Mom and Grandpa have their iPad, I have my desktop workstation.
Case in point: TV output on PCs (Score:2)
Is it not possible to have locked-down devices for the people who don't know what they are doing, and more powerful, open machines for those who do?
It was not possible in the video game market from roughly 1985, to 2006. After the NES took over from 8-bit home computers, video games were sharply divided between "console" platforms and "PC" platforms. PCs were open but couldn't output to an SDTV without an obscure adapter; consoles could output to a TV as a standard feature but weren't open. This began to change in 2006, with HDTVs gaining the ability to take VGA and DVI signals from PCs, though major PC game publishers appear not to have noticed the ho
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Because, the majority will drag the minority with them. You can have your open machine, but it'll cost you a thousand or so more than it does today
Why? Do you have an argument based on evidence, or are you just declaring this? The evidence shows that Moore's law is still in effect. It's not likely we'll have a sudden transistor shortage.
And on the mobile end, you won't have any open options at all.
Oh right, like the ever-declining mobile options we have today? Oh, that's right, we have more choices, and more power than ever before.
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, but Apple and MS certainly want it to be that way.
Again, where is your evidence of this? Back in the real world, both Apple and Microsoft have been offering more options in terms of OS and software than they ever have before.
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This has nothing to do with Moore's law and everything to do with economies of scale. If it's more profitable to crank out lots of low end chips for mobile devices, they'll do so.
But mobile devices will eventually be as powerful as current desktop machines, so you could just use those chips. Even if desktop PC sales decline, there will still be laptops. And even if both desktops and laptops decline, it's highly unlikely that economies of scale would cause the $1,000 difference you claim.
There's also this thing called competition, which helps keep prices in check.
And how many of them are anywhere near as open as your desktop PC?
As opposed to all the open mobile phone platforms that existed before iPhone and Android? Oh, that's right - they were loc
Trusted Network Connect (Score:2)
or is there some nefarious scheme in your worldview where Apple and Microsoft will somehow erase Linux from existence?
Imagine that the cable company and the phone company decide to protect their private networks by requiring home users to run approved antivirus software. But in order to make sure that the approved antivirus software is running, the customer will have to use a dialer that uses the Trusted Platform Module to make sure that an approved and unmodified operating system kernel is running. No approved kernel, no IP address. And good luck getting the phone company or the cable company to allow your preferred deskt
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What could have an impact would be marketing a clean, bloatware free phone as a clean, bloatware free phone.
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It doesn't matter to 99% of consumers if the platform is open source or not. Nearly zero consumers even know what that means
Who told you it's all about customers? I believe the OSS moniker is for the developers, professional and amateur.
OK to shut out amateur developers (Score:2)
I believe the OSS moniker is for the developers, professional and amateur.
But does it matter to 90+ percent of home users whether amateur developers are allowed onto the platform? The video game console market says no.
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These are mutually exclusive endeavors. Releasing Android puts you in the position of your users being dependent on Google (and Google dictating terms to you for access to the Android Market,) while fragmenting your userbase across both platforms.
They just need to release a MeeGo device with a simple bootloader unlock so I can have a better user experience with the same h
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android as a plataform allows the user (or the phone manufacturer) to install an alternative app store in place of android market, or even side-by-side with it.
if you download a trully stock android from the developer site, it barelly have a browser and phone app. google have _zero_ controll over android and over what apps goes with the handsets. that's the beauty of opensource.
There is no one market for all devices (Score:2)
android as a plataform allows the user (or the phone manufacturer) to install an alternative app store in place of android market, or even side-by-side with it.
But if it says "Android" on the box, an end user is going to expect to be able to download the same apps that his co-worker's Galaxy S family phone can access through Android Market. Right now, the end user can't officially install Android Market on an Android device other than a phone, and users on AT&T can't install an alternative market such as AppsLib due to the removal of "Unknown sources".
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Symbian has always been the OS for smartphones. I don't quite get how they could "move" something beyond something which it never was.
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Symbian has always been the OS for smartphones.
If that's the case, then why are the phones running Symbian not too smart?
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If that's the case, then why are the phones running Symbian not too smart?
It depends how you define smartness. If your definition is "how many fart apps you sport" then they're probably happy they are dummies. :)
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"Signed by Symbian" is a thing of the past with the new Qt procedures. It's a much more straightforward procedure now.
See? This kind of non-updated information is that hurts Symbian, not the platform's capabilities themselves.
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Re:If Nokia really wants to remain relevant (Score:5, Informative)
1. Ditch the goal of moving Symbian to anything beyond dumb phones with cameras
Many people outside of US still use it and want some compatibility with their old phones.
2. Change the name of Meego to ANYTHING ELSE
MeeGo is just the name of the SDK / developer platform. Most consumers will not see that name when they purchase the phone.
3. Release Meego completely OSS and don't hamper people wanting to go in and tinker
You can now [meego.com].
4. Start rolling out both (Official stock) Android and Meego on devices and allow for the devices to switch back and forth between the two
You can run MeeGo on N900. I think you can install Android on it too. MeeGo is not ready for any other device yet; not because Nokia doesn't want you to port it, simply because MeeGo doesn't have to features yet to handle any other kind of phone. Nokia doesn't think MeeGo is ready for primetime yet so you will not see it on any other phone for some time.
5. Release a marketing campaign to choose 'the next look of Nokia'
Wait until Q2 2011. I am not allowed to say anything else.
6. Analyze which OS is getting better market traction and phase out the loser
Nokia already said that they are moving to Linux/MeeGo. Qt is the "bridge" to move developers from one to another (just like how Carbon was used to move from MacOS classic to MacOS X). Talking to the people at Nokia, they already consider Symbian to be "legacy" and are already moving to MeeGo.
7.Profit More!
I hope Nokia will.
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Q2 2011? Seriously? By that time Apple will have released yet another OS update, and the market will be flooded by Android devices.
All my friends, even the hardcore long-time Nokia fanatics, this year have moved on -- tired of waiting for a decent OS after the terrible N97 experience.
Nokia should have released a super-device *this year* and instead they wasted months on the move to MeeGo. As someone who wanted to profit from the platform, I feel badly let down. The N900 with a polished OS would have rocked,
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Change the name of Meego to ANYTHING ELSE
They tried that, but the last two names they chose had trademark problems. Mobilix is too close to Obelix [wikipedia.org], a character in Asterix comics. Moblin is exactly the name of the Zelda universe's counterpart [wikia.com] to Duke Nukem's Pig Cops [wikia.com].
Market saturation and evolution (Score:4, Insightful)
Symbian (Nokia)
Blackberry (RIM)
Android (Google)
iOS (Apple)
palmOS (HP)
WinMobile (Microsoft)
Only two of these are available from multiple hardware vendors, and it's hard to imagine new entrants MeeGo (Intel) and Bada (Samsung) gaining any sort of traction. Unlike desktops, hardware/software integration seems to be key in this market, which may mean iOS may have an upper hand. Or perhaps its ease of development, which favors Android or WinMobile. So those will be my pick for top 3. Sorry Nokia, it was good while it lasted. Thanks for the cute ringtone!
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No one but Apple can have iOS. No one but RIM can have Blackberry. And frankly, Android is so Google dependent that it is considered a forward-looking risk (they note so on their statements!) that if vendors could get it away from Google, they would.
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AT&T did the same thing with some of their Android offerings. They locked the search down to Yahoo, and you couldn't change it even if you wanted to.
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Nokias largest problem is that they have a billion different phone models, none which have particularly fancy hardware specs and functionality.
You also have to see past the US, there's a world of phone users out there, and whereas you have a half mile queue to the macstore when they release their new iphone in the US y
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Considering blackberry, android and iOS are all recent and new entries i see no reason why nokia couldn't reform the symbian platform to a new look, while retaining backward compatibility.
Of course they could give it a new look. I don't see how that would help, though. A pig with lipstick on it is still a pig.
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Just like a pig you haven't seen before with multitouch support and accelerometers is also a pig.
My point being, if you can reform your pigs sufficiently they'll save your business.
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People per language (Score:2)
You also have to see past the US
It's expensive enough for a small shop developing applications for mobile devices to hire marketing and legal personnel for the United States and writers for English, let alone the countries and languages of Europe. The U.S. has more people per jurisdiction and more people per language.
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WebOS I think has a future if HP actively licenses it out to other manufacturers. The problem with WebOS is that the Pre and Pixi really weren't that great of phones, the OS is nice, the hardware is mediocre.
BlackBerry I think has the greatest to lose other than Symbian, a BlackBerry is great for corp
Re:Market saturation and evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
But Symbian, does anyone outside of tech circles even know what Symbian is? People know the iPhone, people have seen the commercial for the Droid, they know the BlackBerry, they recognize the Palm name but Symbian? Does the average person even know where to get a Symbian phone? Is there even a "flagship" phone? People can recognize the iPhone, a Droid, a BlackBerry some can even recognize a Pre, but what is the "must have" Symbian phone? No one knows that.
Outside US? We just call it "Nokia". It's that text on the phone that every other person in line has.
This is something that US-centric sites like slashdot and their users really don't seem to get. Nokia has near-zero market penetration in the States because it didn't bow to pressure from operators, who in US are gods of the market. They made their phones for the end users instead, often screwing the operator in the process by refusing to allow a permanent lock-in. US operators refused to stock such phones, and sales were crap from get go.
But result from having such phones in countries that have people actually buy their own phones in stores rather then operators? They have almost 50% of entire market outside US. People KNOW them. People were willing to buy essentially crappy, unfinished platform like n97 in droves, because it had "nokia" written on it. They're still buying them in fact. And that was a really shitty first attempt at making symbian touchscreen compatible. Nokia is a household name, something that everyone knows instantly, in line with brand names.
One other thing. Nokia's speciality has never been revolutionising. It has been evolving and out-competing on a price point. Apple, which never got any real traction outside US with their iphone is actually losing market outside US already, mostly to android. And that is because nokia is once again evolving the existing concept of touchphone into something they can make well, and then press the price low enough to kill the competition using their (on corporate level) legendary logistics. It's how they utterly butchered competition several times over during their existence in both cheap and expensive phones.
It's something they're fairly likely to pull off yet again.
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it's hard to imagine new entrants MeeGo (Intel) and Bada (Samsung) gaining any sort of traction
Yeah, but imagine the Samsung OS coupled with the Microsoft search engine. Who wouldn't want a phone named BadaBing!
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Realistically, within the next 3 years, almost every (smart) phone will have a 1 Ghz or better CPU based on current trends.
Too Late (Score:2)
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Nokia has "been late" for new fad for almost every single time in its history. Be it clamshells, losing external antennas or designing the look of their phones, they have been late for all of them.
And then they sat on their being late, and came up with a product that was at least as good if not better then competition, while costing less. Much less. And they ended up destroying the competition.
This isn't some theory. This is something that happened in the past. Several times over. US folks just missed it be
Urine-based analogy? (Score:2)
So if using Android is "like peeing in your pants to stay warm" [businessinsider.com], what would be the appropriate urine-based analogy for this attempt to compete with Android?
Paying a million bums $10 each to pee on you, instead of in their own pants?
Here's an idea. (Score:2)
If you need better software, then why not actually hire great developers to work for you? You know, like think about the quality of your product and dedicate resources to it over the medium-long term, rather than staging flashy gimmicks? I guess that just makes too much sense.
Yum, the smell of fresh toast.. (Score:2)
Retrofitting Symbian to compete with Android or iOS is folly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the latter two are fundamentally Unix-based (iOS being a stripped down MacOS X, and Android running on a Linux kernel -- man it was weird to see a penguin and boot screen on a candy bar-sized object..). So they probably leave Symbian in the dust for robustness and reliability, by virtue of the size of each of the development communities alone. Then there's the issue of availability of development environments.
This i
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Symbian's got an incredibly robust and excellent kernel. Complain about the UI if you want but it has a lot to teach Linux about robustness, power management and being light on resources.
This just shows how clueless this entire "OS" pissing contest is. The issues that people have are all about about user interfaces and whether or not you have a 1Ghz processor FFS.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know. I've always found Symbian quite impressive. I also prefer having a choice in the languages I can use for development, which neither iPhone OS nor Android seem to want to give me. Maemo has been a breath of fresh air: no hoops to jump through, and I can use the *nix development knowledge I already have. But between Maemo and Symbian, I'm not sure which is actually the better system for phones. While modern phones aren't really limited in computing resources by my reckoning, there is still somet
Symbian (Score:2)
Ditch Symbian, grab a copy of android os, rip the silly jvm out of it and put on a good native high performance interface and count me in.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean like Maemo [maemo.org]?
I just got a Nokia N900, which has Maemo, and I'm very happy with it. Finally, a phone I can code for using my extensive experience with Unix programming.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, that would be Meego then?!
Nokia, why don't you learn it? (Score:2)
I'll write it in finnish, maybe you'll understand
Youkkou makken greatikken harrdwwiikken, bukkut youkkour sooffwakkken ikkis krakkap. Frokkom a ukkuseeer poikkoint okkof viiikkew, Sykkimbian is okkkkay, but dekkevelokkkpers hakketen it. Ikkit is a hekkel to wrikkete for. Mokkove to Akkandroid alreakkidy
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'll write it in finnish, maybe you'll understand
Youkkou makken greatikken harrdwwiikken, bukkut youkkour sooffwakkken ikkis krakkap. Frokkom a ukkuseeer poikkoint okkof viiikkew, Sykkimbian is okkkkay, but dekkevelokkkpers hakketen it. Ikkit is a hekkel to wrikkete for. Mokkove to Akkandroid alreakkidy
FYI: Future of Symbian is Qt. After that, developer mostly doesn't even need to care what the platform is, especially if only targetting touch phones. It's not hell, it's heaven, already now. What I mean is, today you can download and install the Nokia Qt SDK, take an existing Qt application, compile and test it first in the Simulator (phone form factor selectable from menu), then (Windows only for Symbian, I think) hook up your two year old 5800XM to your PC with USB, install Qt packages from Windows Progr
Short answer: Probably (Score:2)
Never too late... (Score:2)
Here is a $10M idea - make an iPhone simulator that runs on the Nokia. Future proof.
Ok I've had it with the UI bashing (Score:4, Insightful)
How many different ways is one to implement menus, checkboxes and radio buttons? Those are not going away any time soon. In 2006, Nokia introduced an optional new home screen that showed shortcuts to apps and alerts for new email/calendar appointments/nearby wifi networks. This is now far more customizable as in the upcoming Symbian^3, where you can have upto 3 homescreens with customizable widgets. Android also has something similar, but iOS as far as I've seen has no such native capability. That's not innovative?
Symbian has been designed from the ground up as an OS optimized for low CPU/memory usage, so it scales well from low to high end devices. It also has true preemptive multitasking since its 2002 debut- for example if there's too many apps open and there's an incoming call, the call takes priority over everything else and the OS will close a couple of background apps to free memory. Compare that with the hottest new Samsung Galaxy S which sometimes fails at receiving a basic phone call. [vodafone.co.uk]. You can't control when the phone syncs data, or using what type of connection- you need an APNDroid hack to stop it syncing permanently in the background!! People rave about Snapdragon and gigahertz class CPUs for the newer Android devices, but the OS doesn't scale to lower specs at all [allaboutsymbian.com]. It practically requires a high powered CPU to power all that eyecandy.
Let's not even get started on the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco. Symbian has matured over 8 years and got the basics right - power management, multitasking, making calls,managing data connections over GPRS/3G/wifi/Bluetooth etc. It has also supported themes since its inception -there's hundreds of custom themes with different icons and colors available since then on various sites, so it's not like you're stuck with the look and feel that it ships with out of the box either. But well, superficial looks are all that matter in the end, apparently.
What Android is missing (Score:2)
Android is missing good battery live. But it has the looks but it is not good for embedded devices like mobile phones at current stage.
disclaimer: The Android phone I own is running Android 1.5 with no options of update. I am currently not using it.
Symbian has good battery live, a rather clumsy user interface. But it is decent. It is stable (but it might be better).
Both of those have there good side and the bad. But I would still go with a Symbian phone if I can choose.
Re: (Score:2)
More importantly should be them enabling QT on both symbian and meego devices. The OS is of lesser importance if you can cross-compile things from left to right and up to down.
Also, abandoning symbian for meego may simply not be viable for all hardware, remember that nokia have an enormous global market of low-spec phones .
Re: (Score:2)
Nokia has an excellent OS in Maemo/Meego, but still they keep beating this dead horse. Unbelievable. 'Nuff said.
And some dudes still fail to understand the ace on the sleeve of Nokia... the Qt SDK!
Who cares what you will be running in 2011 once developers will be able to develop cross-platform apps that run both on MeeGo and Symbian. Customers won't even see the difference and they will probably keep adoring their trusty Symbian smartphones with the huge battery life.
Re: (Score:2)
Since 99% of the commentators on the internet are complete bozos it doesn't make any difference how many times you mention QT they all see Symbian == bad. But of course they only read that once three years ago and are completely incapable of making any change in opinion. So I guess then it is left to the rest of us to make a bundle writing apps for the 40% plus (and growing) share of the smartphone market.
Re: (Score:2)
Nokia really needs to rebrand their mobile OS line. Every time I hear "Symbian" I think of some odd mechanical sex device.
Heh, really? When I hear "Android" I think of a sex device too... in the shape of a puffy doll! :)