Stefan over at IntoMobile wrote a post showing a grainy photo of a Nokia MeeGo tablet. That wasn’t my interest though. Stefan took the opportunity to summarise his perspective on the smartphone (and tablet?) industry thus:
Nokia lost the hardware battle a long time ago when everyone started jumping on top of the Qualcomm Snapdragon and ARMv7 bandwagon. Many of you will say that Symbian is awesome because it performs remarkably well on old hardware. Truth of the matter is no one cares about that. They want a spiffy browser and a few games from EA. Can’t deliver? You end up in the discount hardware section of a small family owned electronics store.
via Leak: Grainy photo of an unannounced Nokia tablet surfaces.
He makes a very, very good point.
A good browser (a la iPhone/iPad/Android), some whizzy graphics, an easy-to-use interface and a few games from EA. Do you agree?
One way to put it is that Nokia failed to learn the Microsoft lesson – that fast hardware allows you to run slow software. Yes Symbian is generally faster than Linux on low spec hardware, but as the rest of the industry centered around Linux, the cost for Nokia to just maintain Symbian became staggering – not to mention trying to keep up with the rest of the world.
I’m not sure about the EA bit – I don’t think i’ve ever played one of their games on my mobile. A good browser and interface absolutely.
Ah fascinating perspective Sebastian!
Ah fascinating perspective Sebastian!
eye candy and a good browser are nice, but they will only get you so far. when you combine these things with functionality you will start to attract customers. symbian has always had functionality, but they failed to make it easy and fun to use. now that ios and android are a few years older the gap in functionality is negligible (vs symbian), so when people are presented with products that have similar functionality they are starting to gravitate towards the one that is more enjoyable to use.
and that guy at intomobile should not be allowed to write anything about nokia. he is the most biased blogger i have ever seen. seems like a bad case of sour grapes. it seems like 90% of what he writes is negative articles about nokia
I’d call Stefan’s posts highly informed — and I most certainly think he’s
pretty realistic. I think it’s more disappointment than sour grapes.
Thanks for coming to my defense, but people will never understand my point of view. I view Nokia like a parent views a child who is dicking around at school, when they know they’re capable of so much more.
Seriously, before I worked there I thought the company was full of dunces. Now I know that, in the Espoo headquarters alone, there are geniuses everywhere.
The boys upstairs … they need to be kicked out.
But yea, if the N8 browser didn’t suck so hard, I’d own it, for what it’s worth.