Posts tagged with nokia

Nokia looks to be in serious trouble. They've delayed Symbian^3, which was supposed to be the sort or basic catch-up version of their main smartphone OS. Symbian^4 is supposed to be the move ahead again version and who knows when they'll release it. Meanwhile, Maemo or whatever they're calling it these days is more like vaporware even though theoretically it's out on a couple of devices.

Hey, you know what? Maybe Nokia just can't write good software.

Think about it ... when was the last great release of software from Nokia. The first version of Symbian S60. Which, if you remember your history, was actually written by PSION. Symbian has not improved in any major way since then. The first Symbian smart phones were epic—the Nokia 7650 was way ahead of its time in 2002 and make Nokia the smartphone kings. But after that they didn't seem to be able to put out a really substantial upgrade.

Big companies have a long history of not being able to complete operating system upgrades. Back in the late 80s early 90s Apple managed to fail to create a new OS not once but twice—Pink and Copland—were both epic failures of massive proportion. Making software is hard.

The question is, can Nokia learn how to do it. One option - which I have advocated in the past - is to simply ditch Symbian and get on to the Maemo train full stop. But it's not clear if Nokia has the guts to do something so drastic.

Well, they'd better grow some, because they haven't put out a competitive smartphone since the N95 three years ago. Their current offerings are jokes. Android, Blackberry and iPhone are way ahead of them. And, the investors are starting to figure it out. Hopefully Nokia's shareholders will beat them up until they take the drastic measure before it's too late.

So according to what everybody is saying, Nokia is going to start using the Maemo operating system + SDK in their high-end smartphones. This is good news. Symbian is basically a smoking pile of junk. It's too old, and too crap, to be fixed. Toss it out the window and good riddance.

I realize this won't happen overnight, but the sooner we can get a more modern, well-documented, programmer-usable SDK available for Nokia phones the better. Maemo looks good at first blush. You develop on Linux instead of horrible, horrible windows, which is good and means that a proper SDK for Mac is probably possible. You use Qt which is apparently pretty good. So, good news all around.

Nokia needs to fix a lot of other things to keep their game going in the smartphone market. They need to stop messing around with resistive touch screens for one thing. But without a great OS they can't make anything else happen. So, I hope that they follow this up with more symbian abandonment and more alternative awesomeness.

UPDATE: And here it is (video of N900).

Nokia's new N97, I was hoping it would be the next great phone. But looking at a review in AAS, it looks like they totally blew it on the keyboard. There are only three rows of keys, which means that the space bar is in completely the wrong place. Gak!

ZDNet UK notes that the touchscreen is resistive instead of capacitative and apparently this results in a substantially less appealing touch compared to the iPhone. Yet another strike against.

Finally, I note that the camera is still the 5MP unit in the N95. I have that camera. It's good, but it's not great.

Despite the fact that the new home screen looks really cool (and much better than iPhone) and that it actually has keys, this means that we're not looking at the next great Nokia device that I was expecting. My search for a great device that combines a huge touchscreen and a decent keyboard/keypad apparently will have to continue.