In *5 years*, your screen prediction may be true (it’s not as if Nokia can’t deliver in that department when it wants to). Or it may be something different altogether. Not sure of the distinction really is all that significant.

One should remember that Nokia is still globally biggest by volume by far, is profitable, and has money in the bank from having been the world leader for so long. So there *is* room to maneuver, financially. As I see it, there are essentially two problems:

1) The developer mindshare issue
2) The additional back-end — non-phone — infrastructure issue where Google is strong

It’s kind of appalling how quickly the ground can shift in this kind of an industry when pieces just fall together right for someone to put them together. But I guess that’s life in business…

Re: capacitive screens, I disagree. My prediction: in 5 years, fewer than 5% of mobile devices will have anything but a capacitive touch screen. It’s not the only hallmark of a smartphone, but it’s a key part of the new paradigm:

OLD: Clunky unnatural interfaces with keys or stylus. NEW: Natural gestures with capacitive screen.

OLD: Handset makers sell to carriers. NEW: They sell to consumers.

OLD: Carriers influence contents of phone screen. NEW: “How do I uninstall that stupid app that came with my phone” [my wife – non-techie]

OLD: Customization not possible for average consumers. NEW: Simple app stores open up a new experience for mass-consumers.

Now that the app revolution started, I literally *can’t* buy a Nokia any more, as none of my apps are available. And it won’t change anytime soon, because Nokia has probably lost the US market forever. The last ecosystem to launch and survive in the US may be Windows Phone 7, and even that is doubtful because it is so late to the game. It may squeak by thanks to $billions from Microsoft – money that Nokia today does not have.

So the door closed in the US. The question is, how many other countries will also become app-societies and close their doors to straggling, late platforms without the critical mass to survive?

But anyway, about the “new paradigm”… I’m going to get a phone for work soonish, and I suspect it will be an Eseries — I can’t imagine actually typing anything on a touchscreen. I like my buttons a lot, thank you very much

I am not so sure what the design rationale for the Blackberry technical solution was — it never has been any kind of a factor here in Europe — but Nokia’s phones have always integrated very nicely to a corporate network over a secure VPN (with theoretically any application running then on the phone making use of the networked resources), push email services and all, and with remote management of the device. Corporates really love that. Not sure what more would be required. Anyone I’ve talked to has considered Blackberry a lightweight hack in comparison… it may have something to do with US carriers’ networks or something, I’m not sure.

About running apps for a decade — well, time wasn’t ripe for it for many reasons. First; certainly application development had been more demanding… it was genuine embedded development (remember, on devices that span a decade) which really require you to have a real programmers writing a real product that you’ll then ship to, say, corporate clients onto their corporate phones. This is not about kids turning out crappy games for $10 a pop on the appstore. Of course Nokia also contributed by having a bit of a difficult certification and so on process… but it was a whole different application production/distribution model.

Second, what Apple and Google are doing really requires not only easier application development, but also for a lot of the wireless infrastructure to be in place. Especially the US was slow in coming in a good digital cellphone infrastructure… we might have had the prerequisites for the 3rd party app model in around 2004-5 over here (Finland) — the sort of infra that Nokia had been working towards since late 90s — but it was hard to create the needs that would have then driven mobile data bandwidth growth, which would have created more opportunities… it was a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

So essentially for Apple it was just a matter of exploiting a couple of things coming to maturity at the right time. Nokia could have done it probably too, but they were somewhat asleep at the wheel with the 3rd-party application idea. Not that they weren’t there, but not in the sense of what Apple did.

About the cultish fad — it’s about the capacitiveness. It seems to be an article of faith, and anyone who focuses on that alone in their “smartphone” definition does not have any credibility in my eyes, sorry

No doubt, managing a bunch of ActiveSync-capable phones individually is cheaper than using a BES — but US IT managers have budget to pay for the added convenience of a single powerful management console and integrated experience.
I would say that Nokia does not offer the new paradigm yet.
First, its ASP per device is around $78, where Apple’s is $650+. Nokia sales in the $400+ capacitive segment are minimal. It’s selling smartphones that are not actually smart.
Second, while Android’s app store may have rough edges, Ovi is a train wreck. Again it comes down to one central question: can Nokia create a virtuous circle of ‘developer support = consumer delight = consumers buying apps = developer support’. This is the sine qua non of the post-phone, battle of the OSes world — and so far I don’t see it.

Nokia’s E series phones have 1500mAh batteries that last DAYS in normal usage. I’d agree they need faster CPUs in the touchscreen phones though. E Series business phones tend to be less demanding on a CPU. They’re for grownups not people who play games.

All E Series phones come with Mail for Exchange support built in and some have Lotus Notes support even. No BES server required. No expensive Blackberry account needed. They also have remote wipe/admin. VPN support and built in SIP/VoIP support. They’re quite popular with businesses in Europe. Why they aren’t popular in the US is not because of any disadvantage compared with Blackberry and certainly not simple phones like iPhones and Android.

Nokia makes ‘Old paradigm’ as well as ‘New paradigm’ the same as RIM do. The choice is yours.

Re: RIM, they won out due to their server (BES) and network integration with the device plus MS Exchange. Nokia has no equivalent of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, I believe. RIM’s capture of this market share is not simply marketing. It’s about a simple coherent vision on which they executed well. Nokia has not had a coherent guiding vision for several years now — apart from ‘pile em high, sell em cheap’ that is.

Re #3 If Nokia has been running apps for a decade, how come it has nothing to show for it? No developer passion or revenues; and no prospects for a ‘virtuous circle’ of buzz like iOS and Android have.

Re #5 This underscores Nokia’s problem. They don’t ‘get’ the new world. The shift from keyboard/stylus to touch interfaces is a new paradigm, not a ‘cultish fad’. It breaks the glass wall between person and device. Smartphones must have two elements: capacitive touch screens; and great apps (ie natural interaction + a simple, highly personalized choice about what my phone should ‘be’).

Apple invented this paradigm; Google copied it; BlackBerry OS6 is copying it and coming out in Q3; Windows Phone ditto in Q4. Which will leave Nokia as the last old-paradigm company standing.

2. Why won’t it fly? How is it getting better, on what metrics? I actually suspect that Android is from an architectural POV pretty hard to build into a more hardware-hugging OS (seen how the battery life is on most Android phones?), and I’m not sure about its enterprise features… which in Symbian are btw *absolutely* superior to RIM’s; it’s just that for some reason the idea of reading email remotely was sold to people by RIM and not Nokia in the US market… another fuck-up in the marketing, not the tech department. Over here I’ve never seen a RIM corporate phone, they’re all Nokias…

3. I’m fully aware that Symbian has been annoying to code for (after all, it’s genuine embedded development; much more demanding than hacking up some Javascript into a browser), and the app store concept (which Nokia had going first, but did not understand the meaning of — yes, they do have issues “selling”, being too much of an engineering firm) pulls in developers, naturally.

You have to understand that Nokia has been providing multitasking, application-running phones on top of Symbian for like the past *decade*. It’s only natural that the OS is a native platform; it’s much easier to just throw any crap on top of any hardware these days and call it a smartphone. It’s not so much that Symbian is “old”, I guess you could say that in modern times, you actually get by with less.

I deeply hope that Nokia gets the Qt stack running well on top of Symbian *fast*, because from a technical perspective (I’m a software developer), it’s a great, great idea. Symbian’s asynchronous programming model combined with Qt’s signalling… very nice and gets rid of the biggest issue in Symbian programming.

4. Well, the strategy is pretty clear; they’ll have Symbian and a Linux based OS. Both will run Qt-based applications. If only Nokia had this going yesterday.

5. I’ve heard a lot of positive stuff about the N900, although never owned one despite the urge… but I’ll get the next model in that line. The resistive/capacitive touchscreen stuff is just another superficial cultish thing… a bit like insisting on calling just touchscreen phones “smartphones”.

OPK screwed up years ago, but I have a feeling that if their current strategy ends up working — as soon as they actually manage to deliver — the new CEO ends up reaping the benefits of what is being done today. Just dumping everything they have from their decades of experience doing mobiles and joining the “let’s run generic Java on any hardware” crowd does not sound like such a smart move.

2. This thing about how Symbian is so much better “under the hood” won’t fly. Android is getting better and better much faster than Symbian. And what about RIM? How did they get where they are? Magic tricks or strong products, including their PIM sync with Exchange?

3. Have you taken a look at developers? Do they like the way Nokia treats them? Or do they flock to Android and Apple? Are they idiots or, collectively, smart?

4. What about the confusing messages: Symbian, future or past, Maemo, Moblin, Meego? How does this look like.

5.I got a N900. Who put this on the market? Is this evidence of inferior American thinking or of Nokia’s blind ignorance of market reality, with, among othr shorycomings, a resistive touch screen?

This said, I hope Nokia gets rid of OPK propmptly (and of Jorma Ollila, the chairman after all, he’s responsible too) and gets the individual needed to restore Nokia to its place place in the industry. JLG

Symbian is, under the hood, a very advanced mobile phone OS especially when it comes to hardware management and integration and power saving… it’s somewhat annoying to code for because of its design, but the Qt integration should help with that. Unfortunately, for the UI improvements that certainly are needed, that stuff may come too late. Which is a huge pity, as the underlying stack in Symbian is great.