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?
Re:Market saturation and evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
Realistically, within the next 3 years, almost every (smart) phone will have a 1 Ghz or better CPU based on current trends.
Re:Market saturation and evolution (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yum, the smell of fresh toast.. (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:Yum, the smell of fresh toast.. (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 something to be said for a real-time, microkernel OS engineered for devices with limited resources.
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.
Re:Who is Nokia again? (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd be hard pressed to find another phone from around 2007 (maybe earlier, not sure when all those features made it into the Symbian/Nokia setup) that comes out of the box as loaded as they do.
Re:Who is Nokia again? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.