After my review last week of the Nokia N91 Music Phone, a number of people got in touch to say that I shouldn’t have been as nice to the phone as I was because it was missing application x, feature y, or that none of the third party applications they had already bought would work. And you know what, for the very small subset of people that buy every single power phone, they’re right. But in every other way, they’re wrong.
So here’s a question for you all – how should we review a phone? Should we assume the bleeding edge user, who’s not going to be happy unless every box is ticked (and a few new ones are created), or should we aim slightly lower, to the person upgrading their phone, looking for that certain something and happy to stick with what they buy for a couple of years?
Well, generally we aim to hit somewhere in between. Symbian OS phones have generally been aimed at a very tech-savvy audience in the past, but as the manufacturers push the phones towards the mid-tier of the market, people aren’t focussing on a massive tick list; they’re in a store looking at a bullet point of around three or four things. And while it might be a sales strength to say “Microsoft Windows Mobile powered” to attract people, there’s no benefit to putting “Symbian OS” on a tick box.
You know and I know that there are massive benefits to having Symbian OS in a phone. The manufacturers and networks realise it too. Having a standard OS means it’s much easier to roll out new services (watch for some more ‘iTunes like’ music services coming out this year for example) when you can be assured that it’s going to work over as many phones as possible in your range. They know that a decent email client and web browser is going to boost the amount of data traffic end-users will use. They know that eventually they’ll discover third party applications. Right now, they just need to make sure that as people reach the point where they want to upgrade to a new phone that they all upgrade to a Symbian OS-powered device.
In other words, phones that are consumer focussed.
Step back a bit and it makes sense. With over 650 million phones sold last year, the 25-40 million smartphones market isn’t a huge money spinner for the networks. But if they can standardise across the medium and top level users, then you’ll approach 3-400 million devices, and those numbers will appeal to the finance departments (and to Symbian’s licensing department!)
So don’t expect to see Series 60, UIQ or Symbian OS being shouted out at the top of sellers' voices. Expect to see features such as “3 megapixel camera”, “2000 songs on your phone” and “Pick up your email”. The cutting edge users are not the ones needing a nudge to upgrade the phones to something spiffy. And eventually, consumers will work out they can do a lot more with their phone. If you program it (to paraphrase Jim Morrison) they will come… eventually.
And while we wait, we’ll keep Nokia et al honest on how they’re using Symbian OS. Both from the standpoint of the cutting edge geeks and the informed man in the High Street.