Operators: Nokia Would Sell Better With Android 439
nk497 writes "Mobile operators are complaining that Nokia's Lumia line of handsets would sell better if it ran a different OS — or if Microsoft was more willing to put marketing money behind Windows Phone. 'No one comes into the store and asks for a Windows phone,' said an executive in charge of mobile devices at one European operator. He said Microsoft's software worked nicely with PCs and allowed you 'to do tons of cool things,' but few customers knew this. 'If the Lumia with the same hardware came with Android in it and not Windows, it would be much easier to sell,' he said."
Re:A true story (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Informative)
WP7 SP1 already happened (Score:4, Informative)
WP7 "SP1" is called Mango, and it is what is shipping on the Nokia Lumia.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Current Lumia couldn't run Android (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry you are wrong: I got today the Android 4.04 (ICS) update to my Nexus S, that have a single 1GHz A8 CPU and 512Mo of RAM, and it run perfectly well and smooth. In addition there is already a few hackers that run ICS on a N9, the port is not complete, but the performance is not the problem.
Re:Nokia would sell better with Android software? (Score:4, Informative)
I went through a lot of Lumia 900 reviews on Amazon. Most of them repeat the same stuff. And for most of the reviews, Lumia 900 is the only review, nothing else ever reviewed. Several reviewers had the same text posted on different colors of Lumia 900 and had no other reviews.
My guess is that MS/Nokia shills are everywhere, not just on Slashdot...
Re:Android? (Score:2, Informative)
And it still sold more than the Lumia
Re:I work for Orange UK (Score:2, Informative)
Why does everyone care about quad-core phones?
The same reason people want whatever camera "has the most megapixels." [xkcd.com]
One of the other phone discussions even had a few people posting about how phone reviews are caught up entirely on the number of cores, not even how fast they are or how many are active on the phone, just how many are on the board.
Invest in advertising? It's free until the 20th. (Score:5, Informative)
They're literally giving the phones away until April 20th. $100 rebate due to a memory management defect if you buy by the 20th... The phone is $100 w/ contract. Or, it's $50 w/ contract on Amazon, meaning they're willing to pay people to buy them.
I don't see how paying people to use your product isn't the most extreme form of advertising possible. Maybe the problem isn't the advertising? Maybe the problem is no one wants a Windows phone?
Re:They're *partially* right, see the *Meego* N9. (Score:4, Informative)
Here [blogs.com] you go. Nokia did their best to hide the embarressing numbers.
Re:A true story (Score:5, Informative)
Congrats. You saved $99 for your entire company. Get a cert if you allow data you care about to be exposed to the public Internet. Ever hear of man in the middle? Train your users to purposedly accept self signed certs from their personal devices, it's asking for it.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
MiTM is easier to perform if you use 'official' certs (from CAs already in browsers/etc) than self-signed ones. Or to rephrase it - you are less safe when using 'official' certs.
You can rollout your own CA, whether it is to use at home, or in Fortune 100 company.
Why are these simple concepts so hard to understand for most people - I will never understand.
It's clearly deeper than that (Score:3, Informative)
Nokia and Motorola owned the cell phone market in the 1990's and all they've done since is fail. The problems are with the companies in their entirety not the products they make.
Re:Invest in advertising? It's free until the 20th (Score:5, Informative)
Do you realize that AT&T actually pays Nokia a lot for the device and then subsidizes it?
The phone is $449 unlocked($349 if you count the $100 rebate).
They're not paying the customer when the customer has to sign up for an expensive contract plan for 24 months with the threat of an Early Termination Fee.
Re:They're *partially* right, see the *Meego* N9. (Score:5, Informative)
As of the beginning of 2012: "Despite a modest launch and a limited distribution in terms of markets, Nokia's N9 model [Meego] has reached sales estimated between 1.5 and 2 million devices. According to Nokia's own quarterly report and analyst company Canalys analyses, the combined deliveries of the comparable Lumia (WP7) devices summed to approximately 1.2-1.5 million in the last quarter."
http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/smart-phones-overtake-client-pcs-2011
http://www.pcworld.com/article/248778/nokia_reports_loss_but_sells_more_than_1m_lumia_phones.html
It's also curious to see that Nokia N9/Meego phones are close to the 2-million sales mark with virtually nonexistent marketing, and Nokia did not sell that phone in the North American market at all -- stateside N9's were all grey market. For historical comparison, internal Nokia sales reports say the predecessor N900 sold 100,000 in its first month and well over 1 million by 2010 (which means the N9 sales are better than the N900), and yet they refused to sell the N950 at all when it was completed in 2011 (despite nil market overlap with WP7 phones). Apparently there are a lot of nerds out there, but Nokia doesn't want their money.
Re:Invest in advertising? It's free until the 20th (Score:4, Informative)
No, they are not "literally" giving the phones away. They still require a contract that requires people to part with money. Perhaps you meant "virtually"?
Re:A true story (Score:5, Informative)
A certificate from Verisign makes a lot of sense on a public web site. It makes a lot of sense to use a third-party certificate in any transaction or communication where the two parties involved do not know each other in advance. That's the purpose of a certificate: to certify that the other party (whom you have never met before) is whom he claims he is.
It makes absolutely zero sense whatsoever under any conceviable circumstances to use a third-party cert to authenticate between two parties who have already authenticated each other prior to their first communication. For example, if you are connecting your own email client to your own email server, it is ridiculously, mind-bogglingly insecure to rely on a third-party certificate to authenticate this transaction. Using a third-party certificate in this situation just adds an additional single point of failure, one that wouldn't exist otherwise. Actually, it adds many thousands of independent single points of failure all of which are outside of your control, since any one security breakdown at any of the thousands of certificate compaies such as Comodo [wikipedia.org] or Diginotar [wikipedia.org] will compromise your email.
The right way to authenticate your own server to your own client is with first-party public keys, not with third-party certificates. Unfortunately, the SSL standard does not support plain public keys, but self-signed certificates are a close alternative. This method is correct, easy, cheap, and provides the most security.
There is no way to put this nicely. The authors of the SSL standard were wrong in insisting on certificates in any and all situations. It's disappointing and dangerous to see that the general public has, without thinking, bought into the insecure and nasty myth that certificates are always better. Honestly, they're not always better. Sometimes they're worse, much worse. Please think about real world security threats and security needs instead of just mindlessly parroting false advertising for Verisign.