The Soft Underbelly of Nokia?

[Ewan]

ABI Research has an interesting article (via Tom Hume and The Mobile Weblog) on Nokia's future, and four areas the Finnish company could stumble on, including their slow reaction to the rise of the clamshell design; Linux powered devices and Espoo's reliance on Symbian; and the long term corporate effect of the Nokia Siemens joint venture.

Read on in the full article.

[jah]

WM5/6 was also supposed to make the handset side more commodity like and shift the value to the software. We must not forget the role of the networks in content delivery. The picture is not as simple as this blog implies.

[Rafe]

Of course you could argue that software becoming the commodity is precisely the reason S60 is so well placed. Its the biggest 'open' platform by some way after all.

I've always thought that analysis that sees Symbian as a weak point for Nokia often misses that the reverse is more often true that not.

[Shaxer]

that's exactly what I was thinking about the other day: should I be pissed at Nokia or Symbian because of my memory leaking, RAM hungry, ever so sluggish, practically abandoned (since qvga is the standard screen res) E70?

I know that symbian gives the flexibility that allows me to use 3rd party apps and games but why would they create an OS that can't work on a phone properly OR why would Nokia release a phone that is not powerful enough for the OS? the chicken or the egg? all I know is that nobody wants to wait a minute or two for a folder with 6 icons to open (just one of my pet hates).

[ajck]

Nokia need to make their user interfaces a.) fast and b.) simple - regardless of the underlying platform (S60/Symbian/Series 40).

Once S60 is as fast and simple as S40, they then need to scrap S40, put S60 in all their phones (while not increasing the price - if that means porting S60 to Linux then do it), and not make any further reference to smartphones as such as it scares the ordinary user off.

Alex
phonething.com

[rbrunner]

Ah yes, the "Porting S60 to Linux" meme. Very hard to exterminate, and anyway, people listen to lofty analysts, and not to lowly programmers, but nevertheless let me state it again: S60 cannot be ported in any sensible way to Linux. It is way too much entangled with Symbian.

Linux? Meh. The iPhone will wipe out Nokia from the US.

[mgroeber]

What I find interesting is that many such "analysis" pieces seem to overlook the fact that Nokia does actually have an in-house Linux option as well - Maemo, which is used with the Hildon UI in the 770 / N800 web pads.

True, these are not actually *phones* at the moment, and making the platform run in a feature phone would probably require considerable effort, but given the rather vague definition of what constitutes "Linux in a phone" (a kernel? a UI? a signalling stack?), it is probably on a par with most other options, at least with regards to buzzword compliance. :-)