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Nokia handset sales down 19 percent
Alec Saunders provides his analysis of Nokia’s recent report that profits fell 90 percent in the most recent quarter. I agree with Alec’s points. I would add that this news fulfills my predictions (here and here) that it’s not about the hardware. If it were, Apple would already be in trouble. The iPhone doesn’t compare on a hardware level to Nokia’s high-end phones. As I said before: Apple isn’t winning because their phones are better. Apple is winning because the experience is better. iPhone has opened up a whole new world of uses for a mobile phone to ordinary consumers. People are doing things they never dreamed of doing before on a mobile phone (even if these things were technically possible on the phone they had before).
Nokia is playing a hardware one-upsmanship game, while Apple has swooped in on the flank and utterly redefined the handset landscape.
And the really bad news for Nokia is that even if they are able to realize they are playing the wrong game, they are in no position to be any good at the new game that Apple has created. Apple knows how to build good-enough hardware. More importantly, they know how to market it and they have their own distribution - all things out of Nokia’s reach. And the nail in the coffin? The App Store. Not only do they not have one, but Nokia doesn’t own enough of the parts to create one, nor do they have the expertise for operating one.
Nokia’s numbers will continue to slide as the DIY niche continues to narrow. I’m not smart enough to know how to get them out of this situation, but I can make one suggestion: Make your platform the easiest to build for. Get rid of “Symbian Signed” and let a third-party app marketplace thrive. Don’t make it easier to get certs - get rid of certs entirely! This is one place Nokia can immediately leapfrog Apple - not follow, but lead. Get rid of approval and let anybody write code and let the market, the community, rate the apps, and let end-users decide which ones they want to install based those community ratings.
Nokia N97 - when will they get that it’s not just about a touchscreen?
Om has a nice post about the forthcoming Nokia N97 Superphone to be released “sometime in the second quarter of 2009.” He says:
As for the 5800 Xpress, a friend of mine recently brought one to the U.S. and after I played around with it for an hour, my response was meh! The touch was OK, just like it’s OK on any other device, but it’s not as responsive as the iPhone. So no, it’s not an iPhone killer, not by any means.
The N97 however, seems, like a worthy competitor… it will be sold in the U.S., where it’s going to cost $650; it will go on sale in June 2009…
I agree with these comments, but I would add that none of these other mobile players, whether carriers or phone manufacturers, seem to understand what battle they are fighting. They seem to think it’s about touch screens and hardware. Even Om emphasizes the touch screen issue:
The very fact that Nokia is only now getting out touchscreen phones shows that as a company it is stuck in bureaucratic quicksand, with a culture of consensus that makes it difficult to respond to new challenges. Nokia — and I have been following them for a while — has become one of those companies that, much like Microsoft, is good with announcements, not so great with the follow-up.
Stuck in a “bureaucratic quicksand” perhaps, but it’s really more than that. Nokia is selling just another piece of hardware. At one time, that mattered, because that’s how the industry worked. Apple changed all that and nobody has really grasped the magnitude of it yet. Apple changed everything about the mobile landscape. It may seem the same, but it’s not. It seems few people really appreciate what happened. That’s good for Apple - bad for the all their competitors. As long as Apple’s would-be competitors continue to respond in 20th century ways to the new 21st century mobile phone landscape, Apple will continue to run roughshod over the industry.
Nokia is offering a Do-it-yourself solution, where users have to bring their own carrier, service plan and applications. That’s never going to be an “iPhone killer” because it’s not the same market - it’s not the same battle at all.
The problems for Nokia and any would-be “iPhone killer” don’t end with simply realizing the situation they’re in. Once they realize it, they will also realize they can’t compete on the same playing field. Apple owns the hardware, the distribution, and the service plan. (I know people get an AT&T plan with iPhone, but it might as well not be. It is an iPhone plan.) Nokia can’t do this. They don’t have distribution or control over the service plans. The carriers can’t do this. They don’t have Apple’s expertise at controlling the hardware. And most importantly, none of them have the App Store.
It’s not about the hardware. If it were, Apple would already be in trouble. Compared to many other mobile phones, including many of those from Nokia, the iPhone is a piece of junk, hardware-wise. Apple isn’t winning because their phones are better. Apple is winning because the experience is better. People can actually use the iPhone. Ordinary non-technical people are doing things they have never done before on a mobile phone - things they would never do on a Nokia or other DIY solution.
Nokia may do fine in the DIY niche they’re in - but they will never have anything approaching an “iPhone killer” unless they make a bunch of acquisitions and change who there are.
Execs provide (more) excuses for why users aren’t interested in video-calling
Continuing in my recent theme regarding the dead end that is talking-heads video-calls, we find the VP of Nokia’s Nseries speaking in Barcelona attempting to explain why customer’s haven’t embraced the feature even though it has been available since 2005. According to techdigest.tv in Customers didn’t embrace video-calling as they’re vain Nokia’s exec said:
Users “aren’t interested” in video-calling, mainly because they find the angle a handset must be held at for the best quality video-call “isn’t very flattering”.
UPDATE: in short, he was saying people don’t use videoconferencing because it makes them look fat. How funny to read this today, since this is exactly what I said just a couple of weeks ago as my top two reasons why talking-heads video-calling will never take off:
- real people are not attractive - we are not movie stars or models. people on TV are not normal. we are not used to seeing normal people on “TV” (in the form of real-time video).
- we are not directors. we do not know how to properly produce video content, how to light it, frame it etc
Other excuses given by Nokia for why video-calling hasn’t been embraced included:
“[The technology] hit the market too early”
“There wasn’t enough support from carriers”
“The marketing push wasn’t big enough”
We have seen this all before. Video-calling has repeatedly failed to meet expectations. And each time we see the experts grasping at straws as to why. Comments like “maybe it will still be a success” from Nokia’s Sari Ståhlberg suggest that we’re sure to see it repeat again. Instead of learning, they believe their own spin and use the excuses like the above to throw more good money after bad on this fundamentally broken idea - video-calling is a classic case of a “solution in search of a problem”. It’s irresistibly cool - unfortunately, it’s a money sink without a market
S60 Google Maps on N95 Rocks
I my recent post “N95 GPS Revisited”, I mentioned that I’d be trying and reporting on the new native Symbian S60 version of Google Maps as an alternative to the pre-loaded Nokia mapping application.
Well, in short, the Google app blows the Nokia one away, IMHO. It finally makes the GPS function of the N95 useful and totally changes this phone for me.
Quick Overview
The Google application integrates with the N95 GPS hardware and it shows your current location as a blue dot on the map. You can jump to your current location at any point using the 0 (zero) key. The 1 key zooms out and the 3 key zooms in.
The search function has been amazingly impressive in finding the right location with a small amount of text entry (even with misspellings). It must use the GPS position to make a lot of assumptions about what one is looking for, prioritizing local places, and so on.
Click ‘Directions’ and you get a ‘Route overview’ screen showing the step-by-step turns. Click ‘Show’ and the route is shown on the map. You can move from step to step with the 4 (Prev) and 6 (Next) keys.
Hit 0 and you go to your current location (with the route still overlaid on the map) and then press 6 to go back to the ‘route’ again. Even when in ‘route’ mode, your current location is shown live, moving on the map, at the same time as the ‘route’ overlay. This feature alone is a tremendous improvement in usability over the pre-loaded Nokia Maps app.
You can do other stuff like show traffic (for selected areas) and show a satellite view if you prefer (although it’s more data, so it can slow things down). As a native S60 app, it doesn’t use as much RAM as something like the Java-based Yahoo Go 2.0 app. It also integrates with Contacts and Web in nifty ways.
The speed of the app is pretty much dependent on your Internet connection speed. Also, all the maps all come in over the data connection, which may impact your bill if you don’t have an unlimited data plan.
In summary, this is the best mobile phone GPS app for practical use in driving that I’ve seen yet and really improves the value of the N95.
N95 GPS Revisited
I previously have written about the N95 GPS in August 2007: My love/hate relationship with the N95 GPS .
Since that time, Nokia has released new software that improves the utility of the GPS significantly. Opinions vary about the N95 GPS, as can be seen from the comments on the above post. However, the fundamental flaw back then was that it took so long to get a fix (to figure out where you/it are), that it was effectively useless.
With N95 firmware version 20.0.015 that problem has been corrected. The N95 now gets a fix within the same time as dedicated GPS devices from Garmin, Magellan etc. That means it’s usually nearly instant, or within one minute (It can be longer in rare cases).
So with that problem behind us, I recently had an opportunity to spend time with the N95 GPS again, in real-world driving situations (i.e. when I actually wanted to know how to get from point A to point B). Here are few highlights:
- Never use the GPS yourself while driving - let a passenger use it to help guide you. if you’re alone, pull over, check out the maps, and then drive again.
- The N95 will now create a “route” (driving directions) from Point A to Point B, without requiring any additional purchases.
- Turn-by-turn “navigation” (spoken real-time navigation) is optional and must be purchased on a subscription or pay-per-use basis - I did not test/try this and, therefore, I can’t comment on it further.
- While the driving directions (routes) seem accurate enough, they are difficult to use. I could not figure out how to display both the route and my real-time position on a map at the same time, which kind of defeats the purpose of having GPS.
- The point of interest database is very incomplete and, as a result, its practical utility is limited.
I think I still have a love/hate relationship with the GPS. The love is better, but the hate is still there, albeit to a much lesser degree than with previous versions of the N95 mapping software. Perhaps something that best captures the state of the N95 GPS is that, in real-life situations, I found times when it was “easier” to load Google Maps on the laptop, manually figure out where we were, use Google Maps to create a “static” route to where we wanted to go, and then follow that, rather than use the live, real-time GPS and routing of the N95.
Next time I’m going to try the S60 version of Google Maps, which now comes as a native S60 version that runs directly on the N95 and uses the built-in N95 GPS hardware, to see if it works better than the standard N95 mapping application.
UPDATE: Check out my mini-review of the native S60 Google Maps application: S60 Google Maps on N95 Rocks
Alec’s iPhone experience
Alec Saunders has a terrific post: iPhone: Brilliant. Frustrating. Alec has pretty much echoed my sentiments described at iPhone - Look but don’t touch and summarized beautifully with “I want to love this phone - it’s that good” but in the end he can’t due to its limitations, saying “The iPhone has the most potential to change the mobile phone industry of any device out there today, but it’s not the best phone … yet.”
Alec and I are in almost 100% alignment, but here are a few details I can challenge.
The network. [The Edge network is] so slow as to be unusable outside WiFi hotspots.
One man’s “useless” is another’s “adequate”. Edge is indeed slow. But it’s not useless on the iPhone. At least it provides a functional connection out of the box, in almost any area. The slow speed constrains what it can be used for, but it does work and permits on-the-go Internet access when there is nothing else available, for travel, news, and even Youtube movies, if you have some patience. Don’t forget that there is still a significant population of Internet users on dial-up and Edge is about the same performance, and somehow those users still find the Internet useful.
Stability. My other two favorite phones (BlackBerry 8300 and Nokia N95) crash, probably once a day.
Unrelated to the iPhone, but my N95 used to crash frequently. However, with software version V 20.0.015 and disabling a certain app (that shall remain nameless - you know who you are), the phone now essentially never crashes - it may still do so, but it’s infrequent enough that I can’t even remember the last time it crashed.
The browser. It’s a desktop class browser. Websites that don’t render correctly on any other mobile device work fine here
The exception is flash sites - The iPhone does not support flash in any way, shape, or form. Some say flash support is coming soon while others say it will never happen.
I’d also add a section on Fragility. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why I cannot make iPhone my primary mobile phone. It is simply too difficult to protect, and putting it in a large protective case sort of defeats the purpose of it being so light and thin.
Many people would also consider battery life an issue and in this regard, iPhone beats the N95 hands down.
Summary
As I state above, I think Alec highlights some key points, which I’d summarize as follows:
- So-called “Smart Phones” like the Nokia N95 have better hardware specs, but the iPhone does a much better job of making these features accessible to us mere mortals.
- Blackberry is still the number one device for extreme mobile email, bar none.
The iPhone is an incredible achievement for a first attempt at a mobile phone, but still has a way to go to be “the best ever”.
Symbian Signed Followup
Bruce Carney from Symbian was nice enough to comment on my earlier “Why Symbian Signed must die” post.
There is no intent to prevent long term access. The Symbian Signed infrastructure hit a step change in demand. In periods of overload we have a policy to prioritize the service to ensure professional users can continue their work.
– The problem is shown in this link (i.e. a massive spike)
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/symbiansigned.com
– The underlying reason was posted in our developers forums here https://developer.symbian.com/forum/ann.jspa?annID=36
– Free Developer Certificates *already* downloaded over the past years are valid for 3 years, There are millions and millions of developers who *are* not being impacted by this outage.
– We have been trying to contact the developer of RotateMe to get the app signed (for free) and awaiting response?If anything, this underscores
(1) How Symbian OS is around an order of magnitude more popular than iPhone or any other mobile OS.
(2) As the smartphone OS market leader, Symbian OS is solving real world mobile developer problems every day, not preaching to the faithful on podiums with powerpoint.We just ask our developer community to be a little patient
Bruce Carney
Director, Developer Programs & Services
Symbian
Thanks for posting, Bruce.
I’m sorry I missed your call and I hope you are able to call back.
It’s great news that Symbian intends to restore the ability of people to get devcerts. And I understand and have read all the reasons and reported causes for the Open Signed outages.
I also agree that the volume of certs does suggest the popularity of the platform.
However, all that misses the point. The Symbian Signed server being down is just a symptom, as is the load on that server caused by the volume of developer cert requests. People are requesting so many certs because the signing restrictions are broken. The problem isn’t that the Symbian Signed site is down - the problem is that people have to use it in the first place. The problem is that apps need to be signed to be installed and the mechansm for freeware developers, or even small-time corporate or in-house developers, to get certs and manage getting apps signed (and tested and “approved” by Symbian) is defective. It’s untenable.
This is how we end up in the situation where developers release the apps “unsigned” and have the users themselves sign them (and thus, the high volume of “developer” certs). The arguments in favor of the signing requirement are about making phones “safe” and ensuring users can “trust” the apps. However that trust model is antiquated 20th century thinking. Look what they have to go through now to try to get freeware installed (getting a “devcert” and signing the freeware apps themselves). If they are willing to sign it themselves, it suggests that they “trust” the app, even though it has not been “blessed” by Nokia or Symbian. Why? The reason people trust these apps is not because some authority in the sky, like Symbian Signed, gives it a “thumbs up” but because the community provides a powerful degree of trust. Applications that jack around with people would be immediately discredited by the Symbian freeware community - everyone would know about it, and people would avoid the app like the plague. This works with things like Linux and Firefox and it would also work with Symbian freeware.
The current Symbian Signed process creates the opposite effect of its stated objectives. I’d suggest that Symbian Signed apps are actually less trustworthy, in the true sense of the term - it’s more likely for “official” apps that have been “approved and tested” to have bugs than the freeware ones because it takes months to get an app tested and approved (and it cost $$$) so bugs never get fixed; whereas problems with freeware get reported all over the place and they tend to get fixed quickly.
The solution is to release a version of S60 3rd edition that lets those users that are willing to take the risks install unsignd apps and grant the features, privledges, capabilities they wish to the apps, even if this is a “unsupported” “hacker” version of Symbian with “forfeit all rights to support” restrictions or some such - that would still be vastly better than the situation those people have today, where the only officially supported options are to not install the apps at all, ever or switch platforms/phones - and the “unofficial” solution is to overload the Symbian Signed site with “developer” cert requests.
So save yourself some money on upgrading the Symbian Signed server crypto hardware and instead release a simple version of S60 3rd edition. You’ll be happy, I’ll be happy, and users will be happy. And your phone manufacturer customers like Nokia will be happy too, happy that they don’t lose their customers to Windows Mobile, the iPhone, or other alternative platforms.
Why Symbian Signed must die
With the latest S60 “3rd Edition” phones (such as the N95, N81 etc), Nokia in their infinite wisdom, has decided for us that we users don’t want to install “freeware” apps any more. These phones now require all apps to be “signed” - they don’t give the option to the user to install an unsigned app.
Nokia says this is supposed to protect users from “bad” apps. So what is the result? Freeware developers now release “unsigned” versions of their apps and provide step-by-step instructions for users on how to get their own “developer” cert and sign the app themselves.
See the irony yet? Nokia told us that users wanted to be “protected” from “bad” apps, yet what we really see is users going to the trouble of acting like “developers” so they can sign these “bad” apps and get them installed on their phone. They clearly want freeware, whether it’s officially “approved” by Nokia’s “Symbian Signed” or not.
And with all these pseudo-developers requesting certs so they can install these “bad” apps, guess what? Nokia’s certificate creation site “Symbian Signed” can’t handle the load. It has been mostly down for weeks. Here’s what it says today:
Not to mention all the support costs for Nokia and the overall costs to the entire ecosystem (where about 90% of S60 3rd edition discussion seems to be about signing and certs). Hopefully Nokia will wake up and put an end to this ridiculous nightmare soon. Here’s a few reasons why the time has come for enabling users to install unsigned apps on their 3rd edition phones, just like they can on 1st and 2nd edition phones:
- The overhead of depending on Symbian Signed for signing promotes bug-ridden software that is never updated.
- It is destroying the Symbian third-party ecosystem (which is where all the best Symbian software has always come from)
- It leaves the door open for competitors like Apple, Microsoft, RIM, etc. and dilutes Nokia’s significant lead in third-party developer support.
- If plain users, through step-by-step guides, are signing apps, there is really no argument for the “all apps must be signed” restriction
The signing debacle is nothing new, but the prolonged downtime of Symbian Signed is.
Nokia, please. It’s time to close the door on the the Symbian Signed experiment and let us install the apps we want on our phones again.
UPDATE: Monday February 18, 2008:
Today the site says:
Note their words “huge demand for developer certificates”. Nokia doesn’t that tell you something? And by the way, it is Monday February 18, folks, and the ability to get certs is still down.
UPDATE: Weds Feb 20 the saga continues:
So now it looks like end-users and hobby developers cannot get certificates at all, meaning they cannot write code or experiment with freeware on their Symbian S60 3rd edition phones anymore. I cannot tell from the above message whether this the new permanent policy or just more “damage control”.
Reviewing the Nokia N81 - a teenager’s perspective
[Editors note: When I was asked to look at the N81, I decided, since Nokia is targeting youth with this new phone, who better to review it than my 16-year-old son. Thus, what follows is his opinion of the N81 8GB]
When I first got the Nokia N81, I was pleased at its sleek look and relatively nice size. Its weight is a little on the heavy side but that does give it that overall Nokia “tank of phones” feel which I like, as opposed to the awkward skinny light phones whose purpose of being small and light is totally countered by the fact that you are so scared of dropping the tiny piece of plastic, that you have to go out and buy a massive cover that defeats the purpose of having a small and light phone anyway. The Nokia N81’s interface is the classic Nokia [Symbian Series 60] interface which I am a big fan of and I enjoy that Nokia keeps a constant user interface rather that scrapping it every time so you have to learn how to work a whole new type of system with every new phone.
The battery life on the N81 is rather impressive, going for roughly three days without needing a charge.
The phone has a N-gage application, which from playing the demos, looks solid but I cannot picture anyone who would really buy the actual games and not just play the demos to death. The fact that Nokia is now trying to incorporate one of the most failed gaming systems in the history of man back into their phones makes me chuckle at how horribly N-gage failed in the past and how imminent its future failure is.
The music player is quality and simple, operating very similarly to an ipod. Nokia does not yet offer the downloadable software for the N81 that allows it to sync with itunes, so I had to place music on the phone by plugging it in like a flash drive and dragging and dropping songs into it. This method is tedious but works fine and I have full confidence that the N81 software will work just fine when it is released. The likable things about the music player are that for a phone, 8gb is pretty large and definitely enough to have a good selection of music. My favorite feature of the music player is that it takes a basic headphone jack. Most phones require that you buy an adapter or use the strange uncomfortable ear buds that come with the phone but being able to plug any old headphones you want into the jack makes it seem o-so-much better. Oddly enough, the music player also has one of the least thought through features I have ever seen, which makes operating the phone insanely frustrating. The aforementioned problem is the combination of small buttons and the fact that the play button works no matter what else the phone is doing. The play-stop-pause-rewind-etc. buttons encompass the up-down-left-right buttons. So when navigating around the phone, it is easy and almost unavoidable to hit both up and play at the same time because both buttons are so small and so close together. Now normally, no harm no foul, you’re not in the music player so nothing should happen - but since Nokia always has to have one massive flaw that was probably thrown in thoughtlessly towards the end of production, no matter what you are doing, the play button still plays music and since the speakers are rather loud and startling when you did not plan or even think that random music could suddenly stream from your phone, it is often an embarrassing moment when you are trying to text whilst walking down the street and Hardcore gangster rap blasts out of your phone unexpectedly. This is something I have yet to learn how to fix. This dilemma continually frustrates me to no end and is the only thing that would make me consider not using this phone.
I’ve discovered several things with the N81 that I consider bugs that could use fixing. The first is that the phone has trouble finding service and once service is lost, you have to turn the phone off and back on for it to start searching for service again. This bug is surprisingly not as inconvenient as one would think, although the phone would be greatly improved if this was fixed. The only other bug that is worth mentioning is that text messages sometime take five to ten minutes to send or be received causing you to seem rude for taking too long to respond [editor: that may be T-mobile]. Other than that, it has no actual effect being that eventually the texts get sent or received.
The N81 is a good combination of the classic, simple “Nokia sturdy brick” and the advanced little flashy features like music or gaming that make a phone sell these days. Overall the Nokia N81 is a quality phone that has potential for excellence, with the right subtle tweaks.
Hands-on with iPhone - Look but don’t touch
As many reading here know, I’ve been using an N95 for some time now. After one day with the iPhone, here are some first impressions.
First, of course the two phones appeal to different kinds of users. There may be overlap, but for the most part, the N95 is for the self-proclaimed ultra-geek while the typical iPhone buyer is more likely to be less tech-inclined, perhaps one might even say “the average phone buyer” (with a little bit of extra cash). So to a large degree any comparison is somewhat lame. There will not be a lot of common ground between the two camps.
That said, here’s my quick take. Some things are easier and more comfortable on the iPhone. At the same time, the closed nature of the phone surfaces frequently and in ways that effect more than just geeks. The N95 is open to the extreme. Somebody that paid $750 for it will probably find all these deep and powerful features (why else would they pay that much). But if you just gave the phone to someone as a replacement for a common phone, that kind of person is probably not going to know how to use the majority of the features. These people might buy the iPhone. They will just accept that it is AT&T only (that’s all they know anyway). But even they will eventually wonder why it’s so restricted.
For example, take something as simple as ringtones. The iPhone can play MP3 files. Yet Apple wants to force customers to buy ringtones for $2. Yes, there are hacks to overcome that, but the point is with the N95, no hacks are needed. Any media can be loaded as a ringtone. Apple had to code specifically to block this capability (i.e. it’s more work to prevent it than allow it).
The two phones are at the EXTREME ends of the spectrum in terms of openness. The N95 is incredibly powerful but requires a serious geek to operate. The iPhone is easy (mostly), but closed and annoyingly so.
So for me, the first impression is I kind of wish I could use the iPhone as my phone, but Apple’s decisions to make it closed, keeps it just out of my reach, like it’s behind a window. I can look, but I can’t touch.
