Let’s go back to Spring 2010. Nokia friends invite me to their US headquarters in White Plains, NY, where we’ll discuss Apple with an audience of local management and remote viewers in Europe.
As the conversation proceeds, I’m struck not by what I hear but by what I don’t. They’re right to wonder about Apple, about what makes it tick…but they have an even bigger problem called Android.
I venture a few politically impolite suggestions:
1. Replace your CEO. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, a little too proud to be a lawyer and an accountant, is way past his “best if used by” date.
2. Drop all your aging software platforms, your Symbian S60, S^3 and S^4, your Maeemo/Moblin/Meego chimera (I didn’t say clusterf#^k). You’re doomed by pursuing so many projects…and you might want to consider that your competitors are a bit better than you are at writing system software.
3. Go Android right now. Join the winning OS team.
4. Focus on your strengths: Hardware, industrial design, manufacturing, worldwide distribution.
5. Move to Silicon Valley, that’s where the action is. The future of smartphones won’t be decided in White Plains, NY.
People don’t appear overly upset. Actually, quite a few heads nod when I mention kicking the mercurial OPK upstairs. Judging by audience reaction, the Go Android suggestion isn’t news, it’s been debated already, heatedly it seems.
I get two kinds of pushback: “We’ll lose control of our destiny!” and “How will we achieve differentiation?”
With the regard to the former, by 2010 Nokia is already past the point of controlling their destiny; sales are “gaining vertical speed”…in the wrong direction. And to the differentiation objection, I suggest that the audience share my faith in Nokia’s proven hardware strengths and in their Finnish tradition of sparse, elegant designs.
It becomes an open — if occasionally pained – exchange. My hosts are visibly as concerned as I am about Nokia’s current direction.
On my way back to the Valley, I try to put a humorous spin on the discussion: I pen a Science Fiction: Nokia goes Android piece that shows the great company waking up and turning itself around. But, inside, I know humor is the politeness of despair, and I can’t avoid a somber note at the end of the otherwise lighthearted article:
In a more plodding reality, Nokia is likely to continue on its current course, believing their problem is one of execution, of putting more faith in their sisu.
The king will be deposed, Google and Apple will divide the spoils.
A few months later, Nokia’s situation worsens, OPK is deposed and Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft executive, replaces him.
A year ago exactly, Nokia’s new CEO writes his infamous Burning Platforms memo. In it, Elop makes three crucial statements:
1. The smartphone war isn’t one of platforms any more, it is a war of ecosystems.
2. Our current system software won’t win.
3. To win the war, we’re joining the Windows Phone ecosystem via a special alliance with Microsoft.
The first point is beyond dispute. Two successful ecosystems, Google’s for Android and Apple’s for the iPhone, have settled that score.
To outsiders, Elop’s second statement is merely a frank assessment of Nokia’s failure to play in the same software league as its Californian competitors. A few insiders and fans take offense but…numbers are numbers.
Things take a turn for the worse with the jump to Windows Phone. In the abstract, the decision is defensible, but by announcing the switch ten to twelve months ahead of actual shipments, Elop has effectively osborned his current product. Who will buy Symbian-based smartphones when Nokia’s own CEO tells the world it’s a has-been platform with no future? Nokia’s fans are furious; so are the shareholders. (See Tomi Ahonen’s blog for a rich, vocal, well-argued compendium of everything wrong with Stephen Elop’s move.)
Nokia’s market share and profits drop precipitously. The December 2011 quarter shows a loss with little hope of a turnaround in the short term.
But the wait is finally over: Nokia now ships Lumia smartphones running on the latest Windows Phone 7.5 release. A Nokia friend asks if I want to try a Lumia 800, the top-of-the-line model in Europe. Having read good things about both hardware and software, I jump at the chance.
When the package lands on my desk, I ask myself The Question: Is this the phone that will put Nokia and Microsoft back in the race? By late 2011, Microsoft’s share of the smartphone market stood below 2%. Does the Lumia line of devices have what it takes to regain the ground lost to Samsung’s Android devices and to iPhones?
What follows, here, is a highly impressionistic diary, with no pretense of objectivity, chronicling a week of abuse of the Lumia 800. (I’ll skip over the phone waking up speaking Finnish, or that it arrived with a European plug for the power adapter. Not a problem, we have Google Translate and I have my own stash of euro-gizmos.) For a dispassionate and professional discussion, please turn to AnandTech’s exhaustive review (12 pages).
At first glance (literally), very good: Elegant, sleek hardware with equally elegant type on the welcome screen, followed by the clean Metro UI (Nokia UK provides a nice tour here). All it takes to get a pre-paid month-to-month subscription and micro-SIM is a short walk to the T-Mobile store.
I encounter my first problem when looking for ways to take screenshots for today’s note. The documentation is mute on the subject, and all Google can offer is that I need software developer tools. Is there really nothing for normal humans? I email my friends, I tweet nokia-connects (as recommended in a nice handwritten note that came with the phone)…still nothing. A simple two-button procedure, followed by a no-hands Photo Stream upload – in other words, the iPhone method — seems to be the type of solution to aspire to.
Cognoscenti will argue over details, but I was impressed by Lumia’s email presentation and management. Setting up my Exchange, Google, and iCloud accounts is as simple and reliable as the best of what I’ve seen with Android and iOS devices. So is the polished use of type, the ease of linking and unlinking mailboxes, handling single messages, and bulk-editing an inbox loaded with spam. Office attachments read well, naturally — as they do on all leading smartphones. But while competitors read PDF docs natively, Windows Phone tells you There’s An App For That. It’s free and installs easily, as every other app I tried. But, for such a basic function, rendering PDF files, why not make it part of the device?
Surfing the Web proves less satisfying. Tabbed browsing isn’t as intuitive as on an iPhone 4S, and there’s no “Reading List” of pages you can save for later or sync with your PC. Worse, there appears to be a purplish tinge on the screen as I read Web pages and the type rendering is lackluster — I wish I had screenshots to better explain what I see. I don’t know enough about what’s under the hood to place the blame, but perhaps it’s the lower screen resolution (480 by 800 vs. 640 by 960).
Music, at least on the device I got, is also disappointing. Contrary to the claims of the Nokia Music support page, there’s no Nokia Music Streaming on my Lumia. Perhaps this is just a temporary or regional situation. Downloading music from iTunes is theoretically possible, although it seems one needs a DRM Removal Tool, followed by a batch conversion to Windows Phone music files. Spotify offers a Windows Phone application, or one can turn to the Microsoft’s Zune Unlimited Pass, both with a $9.99/month subscription. Opinion will differ as to the attractiveness of these music offerings. In any case, there’s no ‘‘iPod Inside”, as I hear an AT&T salesperson say.
The Lumia 800 features an 8 megapixel camera with a “Carl Zeiss Tessar” lens. As a test, I took side-by-side pictures using the Lumia and an iPhone 4S, both in idiot mode (auto white balance mode, auto everything else).
First, my two pigs. I found them 20 years ago in an antique shop in Arcachon, France, and christened them Victor and Charles, as in VC. This was in my early entrepreneurial days, when I thought VCs were…you know. Now that I’ve gone over to the Dark Side, I still keep them on my desk and show them to entrepreneurs who give me lip about my brotherhood.
The Lumia photo:
…and the iPhone:
To the inexperienced viewer, the iPhone 4S picture looks better
I tried another subject: Handwritten numbers on a piece of paper.
The Lumia:
…and iPhone:
Take a close look at these pictures and you’ll see that the iPhone images are marginaly sharper.
The rather dull tint of the Lumia pictures can be corrected using any decent photo processing program (I just did it in iPhoto, it works quite well). Of course, that means moving the pictures to a “real” machine.
Perhaps the dull tint is unique to the phone I got. If it isn’t, it needs to be fixed in order not to disappoint. The Autofix feature in the phone’s camera software didn’t fix the picture.
I used Microsoft’s SkyDrive, a free “drive in the Cloud” that appears as one of the sharing options in Windows Phone. It’s not as clever as DropBox, or as automated as parts of iCloud, but it works well (and reliably) on PCs, Macs, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS.
Still on the camera topic: unlike other leading smartphones, there is no front-facing camera. As a result, no video calls in Skype or FaceTime fashion.
Using Nokia-owned Navteq maps, navigation work as expected: very well.
Last item for this cursory review: battery life. The Lumia’s screen dims in a matter of seconds and shuts down soon thereafter. My unscientific impression is that the battery drains quickly if you do a lot of browsing and downloading on 3G or WiFi. A glance at AnandTech’s thorough numbers shows that this is indeed the case.
…or nearly the last item: I forgot to mention phone calls, we use smartphones for those, too. Nothing to report; voice, SMS…everything works as expected.
This is a well-made, elegantly designed, and capable phone. But let’s return to The Question: Is this the Killer Phone? Will the Lumia 800 and its siblings put Nokia and Microsoft back in contention? My answer is, regretfully, No.
The Lumia contains neither the revolutionary new features nor the fresh approach that any serious smartphone needs to compete with the two new giants, Samsung and Apple. The Korean company is very, very determined; it takes no prisoners — ask Sony. And Apple is no longer Little David fighting the Microsoft Goliath: Last quarter, the iPhone alone generated more revenue and profit than all of Microsoft.
I can’t help but retro-fantasize an alternate reality: In 2010, Nokia starts a secret project with Google and an Asian contract manufacturer. The industrial design is done in-house, the rest in collaboration. In February 2011, Elop announces a special relationship with Google — and starts shipping the device immediately. No osborning, no revenue gap.
This fantasy comes with a bonus: Google doesn’t have to buy Motorola and it gets Nokia’s patent portfolio – infringement of which Apple has paid more than $600M — as part of the “special relationship”.
Back to reality: Without a clearly superior product and a dominant ecosystem, Microsoft and Nokia are now forced to shell out big marketing dollars against richer adversaries. This isn’t going to be pretty: Microsoft can ill afford to be a bit player in the smartphone revolution and Nokia can’t keep bleeding money, squeezed between the new giants and the emerging Asian providers of entry-level devices.
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26 Comments
“Downloading music from iTunes is theoretically possible, although it seems one needs a DRM Removal Tool, followed by a batch conversion to Windows Phone music files.”
Actually, iTunes has been selling DRM-free music for a while, and I would expect Windows Phone to play AAC files without the need to convert.
@ Marcos Kirsch: You’re right, I’ve got a mix of older DRMed and newer DRM-free iTunes files. What I didn’t say in this already long MN is I was surprised by what _doesn’t happen_ when I connect my Lumia 800 to a Mac using the supplied USB cable. Whe you connect a camera, it shows up as a USB device to be viewed by most apps. None of that with the Lumia. Image Capture or iPhoto, or Preview don’t see it. That’s why I used both email and SkyDrive to transfer pics, both work fine. But it’s not automagic as with Photo Stream — still in need of one tweak, the ability to slectively delete pic from the stream.
In the end, my point isn’t to pick on one isolated feature, but to look at the overall experience and, most importantly, as the Lumia’s position vs the two giants and their ecosystems.
Thanks for sharing your Lumia impressions, Jean-Pierre. I feel your disappointment.
Have you tried reading your emails on it? Plain, black text in various sizes (dependent on whether its the subject line or the email body text) on white background with horizontal scrolling to read the email?!? Painful and so unnecessary.
And when I opened the wrapping paper of the box, I was unsure whether someone had played a joke and sent me an iPhone packed in a blue, rather than black box. Coincidence or copycat?
I was really looking forward to receiving and using a serious iPhone contender, but 2 months in, I find myself choosing my iPhone 4 and HTC Desire S Android phone over the Lumia any time. And by the time I want to use the Lumia, the battery is dead.
Funnily enough, I was meant to share my own experiences with the Lumia 800 with my work colleagues but never got around to finishing the post… I wonder why…
To be fair, WinPho on Nokia is kinda lovely. The placement of the charging connector and the daft little door aside, I really like the way the hardware feels. We have found the battery life to be at best lacklustre and at worst, frustrating and mysterious.
As for the software – it does what it says. Have you downloaded the Connector software to your Mac? It…works. It’s buggy….(we just had the Lumia 800 replaced under warranty and Connector won’t connect to it) …but when it works, it works nicer than iTunes. It must be about time that Cupertino realised that most people use iTunes to connect to their iOS device and don’t really use it for music as the primary interface.
Nokia Lumia 800 + Windows Phone 7 = Nicest phone and software experience that didn’t come from Cupertino.
Victor and Charles! My wife wants them. I think you could get rich selling knock-offs.
Purely hypothetically, mind you: if Elop foresaw more than a 20% risk that Oracle and Apple would land sufficient blows to force Android to significantly re-engineer in 2012, could he have legitimately put the company’s entire revenue stream at risk?
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Or maybe, rephrased: how seriously would he have had to taken the risks before they were not acceptable? Certainly he couldn’t have acceptably said anything about third parties’ decisions controlling his, but this must have been at least a teensy part of his calculus, no?
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I’m not optimistic about Nokia’s chances since I don’t see Microsoft’s desktop muscle bringing users onto *personal* tablets (and there’s seemingly less business–>personal synergy for phones). But there is also no apparent risk of their being enjoined from selling their flagship devices, and a robust OS, if not the full ecosystem.
Re. The screenshot issue; whilst I don’t disagree that an easy way of taking screenshots would have been a benefit to reviewers (and subsequently, reviews) I think it’s a non-issue for regular folks – how many people (who aren’t reviewers or techies posting their home screens on blogs or forums) really use that feature? I haven’t on any of the iPhones I’ve owned, I know my wife hasn’t on hers, and I’m pretty sure my mother hasn’t on hers either (88 btw – and loves her iPhone).
I re-read your “science fictional-Nokia goes Android” piece from 2010, and must admit I had to giggle at the “…and don’t forget about that bunch of tough Canadians up at RIM…” line; funny how things turn out, isn’t it?
Of the five points you mention, some are really easy (1 & 4). But then it is always easier to be wise after the fact, it is not that easy to implement a rescue operation (they had products on Maemo, should have polished those; Android seems to have huge IPR problems, and it seems not that winning now; I think Nokia has some presence in Valley, HQ doesn’t have to be there). I suppose the seed was sown during Ollila era, meaning the organizational way of thinking, concentrating on secondary things. And I’m not convinced Mr. Elop is the man to change that. And this MS thing is one clusterf#^k more…
BTW, Finnish is not that hard, I remember having read Norbert Wiener learned it in three weeks, you should visit here:)
Your Nokia post doesn’t seem to take into consideration the possibility that Nokia might have come up with a 3rd ecosystem on its own.
Back in February last year, before Elop decided to throw everything away, we were presented the Meego + Qt strategy by Nokia. The N9, the (only) representant of this branch, looked like an excellent accomplishment of this strategy when presented back in February last year.
Not just as a device, but also as a development environment, thanks to Qt. The symbian API was a complete nightmare for external developpers, and a good reason for them to not invest in this platform. As an answer, Qt was bought by Nokia, and seemed to really change the situation for the better.
This on top of Ovi Store, advertisement, music and map solutions made us feel that Nokia had finally joined most pieces together to stand a chance.
Then, a few days later, everything was scratched for the biggest benefit of Microsoft. Not just Meego for Windows phone, but also the Qt development environment, the advertisement business, the independant app store, etc. etc.
Apparently, you seem to believe that Nokia did not stand a chance by “going alone”, and therefore should have joined a winning ecosystem, such as Android. Would you like to explain why this scenario is not worth mentioning ?
The success of the iphone is played in great part be the iphoto, itunes, music, app and book store integration with the OS and desktop/laptop. I don´t understand why big mobile companies like RIM, NOKIA, have overlooked Amazon to fufill their strategy. Nokia could have gone with any other OS and the outcome will be the same, its all about the content in your phone and how you manage it. I hear people complian over an over about how they can´t upload their itunes music in their microsoft/rim/etc phones, how the don´t have a iphoto thing to manage their media, lack of apps, better music store, syncronization between devices.
NOKIA was in a place where it could see the whole picture and make things right. The answer to challenge apple is pretty clear, but everybody else has a halfbaked solution.
PS: Pardon my english, not my native language.
@Peter Millard
Actually, I use screen shots a LOT.
For action photos (kids running, dogs jumping, etc) I simply take video, scroll to the spot I want, screen capture, and crop a tiny bit. Get the best shots I’ve ever gotten, pre or post iPhone camera.
I also grab screenshots of app output or web content that I want fast, without a download, save, find, upload churn cycle. Just grab, crop and post.
Some of the best photos I have are the results of screen grabs.
e.g.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150388627054804&set=a.457910789803.245378.594289803&type=3&theater
@ Peter Millard: Agreed, not everyone uses screenshots. My 80-year old Mother in Law sure doesn’t, at list involuntarily, I found a few accidental ones on her iPhone, the procedure is _too easy_, and with Photo Stream, they show up in the 11″ MacBook Air I bought her
I use screenshots to help people around me: I ask them to send me a screenshot of their problem, or I send them a screenshot (sometimes edited in Preview) showing which settings to use, for example.
@ Jyrki Wahlstedt: Finnish is no trouble, you’re right. You’re also correct about being wise after the fact. That’s why I put the reference to the June 2010 “science-fiction” piece.
On Maemo, as you’ll see in another reply, to Yann, I don’t think Maemo had much of a chance. I used a Nokia 900, running Maemo, not bad, not great. The OS (in the old sense) isn’t a determinant anymore, it’s the application framework, the big, thick layer of software used by app developers.
Nokia’s presence in the Valley at the time was a small office on Page Mill: no power of decision there. Nokia failed to comprehend the world had changed, just like Motorola failed to see their world had changed when Nokia took the market from them. And, of course, some day, someone will take the market from Google/Samsung and Apple whe they fail to pay attention the way MS (Windows Mobile), Palm, RIM failed to see what the two new ecosystems meant.
As for my reference to RIM in the June 2010 piece, it was humorous, it was already clear they had lost momentum, that their software was old. About that time, they bought QNX, to get a fresh OS start — and failed to understand an OS didn’t mean an application framework. As a result, their new QNX-based devices lacked functions such as a native email client.
@ Yann: You pose an excellent question. Could Nokia have “gone it alone”? I gave that one a lot of thought and have spent a lot of time observing Nokia from the sidelines, admittedly, but also as a user of their products.
After accepting the invitation to go the White Plains, I spoke with developers, business partners, contractors, retailers and registered myself as a developer to get my own idea after spending my own money in Noika products.
I often heard “Nokia had all the pieces”. There are two answers to that.
First, one has to assume the “pieces” were all good. On this, I beg to differ. some were good, some weren’t acceptable, such as developer support (I had to buy a 99€ support ticket, or spend a much larger amount for a “bulk” support agreement). Nokia’s relationship with software, in my _opinion_ wasn’t great. Fragmented platform, terrible handling of Maeemo/Moblin/Meego. As discussed in another reply, everyone, including Android, uses some Linux derivative. The difference is in the app frameworks.
Second, even if one posits Nokia had all the good pieces, their is the “small matter” of integration, this is very, very hard. And let’s ask ourselves, before Elop did what he did, how did Nokia get there? Is it OPK’s fault, all by himself? Or did Nokia, over the years, slowly evolve the culture that got it in a position to have 4 software engines, tens of different models? It’s a very sad tale for someone who lived 41 years in Europe and saw Nokia rise and become the mobile phone leader by virtue of its virtues, so to speak, only to become poisoned by its culture, by the toxic waste of success, by its belief system. Ah well…
@ Walt French: Yes, there was the Oracle/MS risk for Android, and Elop did come from MS. This said, companies making an Android royalty deal with MS keep making Android phones. Which leads one to think Nokia could have done the same.
Overall, what bugs me is the osborning of Symbian phones by Elop.
As for your point re. MS tablets, I plan a note on Steven Sinofsky long Windows On ARM (WOA) message, Juicy bits in there, including the comical — or is it sincere — insistence on calling the tablets WOA PCs and making a strange distinction (forking ststement) between Windows 8, on Intel, and Windows On ARM. To be continued…
I think Microsoft will ultimately unite the generic tech market around Windows NT 8, because it is the only system out there with the infrastructure to potentially compete with Apple. Google does not even really run C apps, and they have almost no games, and have shown they don’t know how to manage a platform. I think Android fades away over time just like Linux netbooks were replaced with Windows netbooks. The year Nokia lost may be made up later. I think the significant delay is the 5 years that everybody else is behind Apple. If there is a match to Apple’s 2010 product line from another company by 2015, that will be a surprise. NT is not even running on phones or tablets yet. Android is barely running on tablets.
@JLG, I read that Sinofsky post and thought I wasn’t bright enough to understand. Now I see that there ARE contradictions but there are somewhat deep marketing and technical reasons. Gruber, frinstance, links to one or two discussions. More sure to follow.
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But the big issue seems to be, who will buy them, and why? If as a laptop replacement at businesses, why? If as personal devices that are iPad wannabes, why?
I agree you cannot do anything when plugging your Lumia and not installing any application, but it’s the same for any iOS device and iTunes: ever wondered what happens if you plug an iPhone into a PC without iTunes ? Well, you can do nothing. So, this is a bad point: any phone should have mass storage support with a way to transfer photos/music without any application. But it’s not worst than any iOS device.
As for the camera, I fully agree. I’m pretty sure this could be enhanced to match the iPhone’s camera with some software. But the fact is it’s not good enough by default.
I’d add also the numerous little problems/bugs: sound get stuck to the maximum level once you receive a phone call while listening to music, the battery isn’t optimised,…
That said, I think it’s the first true Windows Phone: Nokia is clearly putting resources on this phone, unlike every other Windows Phone players who just use old Android designs and put WindowsPhone on it. And it’s nice looking, and different from other phones.
Since Android just runs emulated code, all Nokia/Intel had to do was get it running on Meego. Boom – a better Android than Android.
And with Nokia’s superior hardware, bound to sell.
Just as inevitable would be finding out that native software runs twice as fast as Dalvik.
There are already 2 companies claiming to have Dalvik running on Maemo & Meego. Phone companies are already slow to adopt new versions so there’s no concern about having to back-engineer them in a week.
@Leo “ever wondered what happens if you plug an iPhone into a PC without iTunes ? Well, you can do nothing”
Not true since iOS5 and iCloud. A new Apple device buyer never needs PC/Mac iTunes with all their content and apps backed up to the cloud forever and immediately available to whatever next Apple device that person buys.
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Lumia 800 is coming back!
Yes, there was the Oracle/MS risk for Android, and Elop did come from MS. This said, companies making an Android royalty deal with MS keep making Android phones. Which leads one to think Nokia could have done the same.
“ever wondered what happens if you plug an iPhone into a PC without iTunes ? Well, you can do nothing”
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