By Nokia isn’t going to be at the Mobile World Congress this year… same place that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is giving a keynote speech. I doubt they’re opting out for the reasons too-cool-for-school Apple doesn’t attend, it’s more likely they just don’t have anything good to share. Oh wait, yeah they do!
A Reuters article shares this awesome tidbit about a Nokia app you can play with at the event:
At next week’s mobile trade show in Barcelona you can find a program that measures how high you can throw a Nokia smartphone, an apt metaphor for Nokia’s efforts to raise its game.
Oh wait… I forgot… Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin made that app for an Android Phone when the G1 launched. As a joke.
That was 2008. Congratulations, Nokia… you’re 2 years behind and either walking backwards or laying down. The company still has ridiculous economies of scale because of their market share and reach in the low-end phone market:
Nokia is seen among the best positioned to cope with the onslaught thanks to its own operating system, investments in services, and huge scale benefits in phone production, but Apple already makes more profit from phones than Nokia.
But much of the phone market has switched from a hardware driven focus to a software driven focus and Nokia is WAY behind in that regard. Their Symbian Foundation isn’t likely to gain ANY traction in my opinion and at this point they would be better off adopting Android. But they won’t.
With Nokia looking like the old fogie of the phone market… do they have a chance to return to glory? Will they?
They should cut their losses and join the Android movement. They make great phones. Now they just need to apply a wider spread OS. :)
Nokia has a linux based OS called Maemo running on there flagship phone the n900. The phone is a bit slugish and large right now and needs a beefy cpu to get things going on maemo, but as soon as moore law kicks in to solve that problem they will be a real contender to any phone maker again.
AFAIK Nokia rented a whole hotel next to the exposition area and presents new devices there.
the “Nokia is dying” articles have been going around almost as far as “MS is dying”. While they are not big in the US for smartphones, heck, I would be surprised if they have 5% market share in the US. Don’t forget that there other countries outside of the US border. Nokia still is #1 worldwide.
I’ll agree that Nokia is hemorrhaging market share right now and they seem to be losing influence, but they are still extremely popular overseas and Symbian has by far the highest marketshare of any smartphone OS worldwide. They are working on Maemo 6 and Symbian^3, which will hopefully make things prettier and more functional. They are fading, but it would be foolish to count them out just yet or say that they are moving backwards.
Good Lord, Rob. You sound like a prophet foreseeing the coming of a new divinity!… Let me know where you are preaching next and I’ll surely come, listen and convert!
As much as I hate Nokia, that app they are showing wasn’t developed by them. It was by a guy who was learning how to use the accelerometer in his N900. He also made it as a joke.
Sluggish thinking from the author.
Agree, pretty UI and responsiveness is where Nokia is running behind now. This won’t last forever, though.
Unlike TSellers wrote, Nokia is actually gaining global marketshare. US view distorts the truth, looking from there makes trouble seeing the whole picture. Somehow Nokia has managed screwing up the US presence, but anywhere else in the world it is firing at all cylinders. And US counts only 5% of the world, you know.
Count on this: Nokia will get its act with UI together faster than you think and in 2011 with Symbian^3 and Maemo 6 their flagship offering will look completely different.
iPhone will do good anyway, as will BlackBerry. But Google and Motorola will not rule the world, believe it or not. China, India and Europe will set the course of mobiles, not the USA – no matter how you see it.
Nokia=meh
i used to have that very phone. it was great. it was also a very long time ago. nokia 3210 right?
yea, alright just thought i’d share
Are you serious about that 2008 phone??
Maybe that’s USA-only, as *that* was my phone in 2000, not 2008!
As you mentioned, Nokia is far, far more popular outside the US, probably because everywhere else is mostly GSM/GPRS/3G, not TDMA/CDMA.
I agree with the headline at the moment, Nokia is far behind on software at the moment. But they have, by far, the largest smartphone marketshare (and mobile phones in general) in the world and they will come back I am sure.
Nokia understand the general world market much better than Android and iPhone OS developers, all mostly US based. They however do not know the US market and I think this is very importent her. The US market is important but the market in the rest of the world is much more important. To give you an example of where Android developers, in this case Google, fail to understand the needs of non-US markets. Google navigation is brilliant in the US because it is such a large country and many americans do not need travel to other countries nearly as much as eg. us europeans do. Therfore flatrate dataplan for the US is very often suffcient to make Google nav very usefull for americans. This however is not the case for europeans and it is extremely expensive to data roam for us and this makes Google nav much less usefull for us. In that regard the Nokia OVI maps with full worldwide offline GPS nav is much more attactive. For reasons like this I think Nokia will come back and stay in the lead.
This is the only thing mentioned in the last few years about nokia:
“Ooh. Nokia’s are real nasty. You’ve gotta respect the Japanese. They know the way of the samurai.
Nokia’s from Finland.”
Actually, european market it way bigger then the U.S. market. (I was in Russia last summer. We do not touch how much time they spend on cell phones)
Nokia will be fine. But if they want to play in the US they should offer something with a nice baked desert item. I like Gingerbread.
Being a Nokia owner for 14 years, never been tempted by any other handsets even the iphone.
UNTIL, the wife got a Samsung Galaxy on upgrade with T-Mobile UK.
I’m now deciding which android handset I’ll be getting with my upgrade in March. Hopefully The Nexus will be out here on contract.
IF Nokia had an Android phone, then I’d get it over the rest out there. But the email I had from Nokia says they have no plans for an Android handset in the near future. :(
Nokia has already saturated the world smart phone market. They will be heavily focusing on emerging market economy countries to continue acceptable growth. Meanwhile, Google, Apple, MS and others will continue to outpace Nokia on the software side.
“N900Fly” is the app you’re looking for, and it was coded by an independent developer. Nokia had nothing to do with it.
As for Nokia being so far behind the ball, Maemo Linux has been around since 2005; Android has really only been around since 2008, making this “OMG it’s linux on a mobile device!!11” idea nothing more than old tech with advertising.
And finally, as posted above, the US market is inconsequential. Nokia isn’t going away any time soon, no matter how awesome Android is.
hahahaha u guys are hilarious…Nokia GAINED marketshare this year.
World does NOT EQUAL USA, and Symbian is going to the lower end phones with MAemo on top.
Maemo (if anyone has used it here) is pretty amazing. MAemo 5 is like the beta before the Maemo 6…and its absilutely amazing, it has some bugs but as a platform its got limitless possiblities.
This happened the last time in 2002/2001 with flip phones…they were at 30% market share..so people spelled doom.
Today they are at 40%…they have 50-50% share in India/China and most other BIG markets…so they arent going anywhere.
They recently released a RS500 in India, that about $10. THey’re the King of hte low end and market share wise are still king in high end. THis is before they;ve even begun they’re overhaul.
“Their Symbian Foundation isn’t likely to gain ANY traction in my opinion” they just went open source a few weeks ago so developers can play with the os and help improve it.
blutooth transfer in android phones only works with other android ph…..cant transfer to other symbian or java phones…
whats the fuzz about..nokia is still growing stronger and smarter.
Omg that is a big lie Nokia is not doing bad and nokia has the best technology on the smartphone market come on guys do you think because droid does multi task and has gps and do some video stream, it will make droid bette? Nokia has that technology long time ago if you don’t believe it go and take A look to Nokia n95 or n90 or even the crappy e63 these 3 phones are like 2004 year and the n95 and n 90 has 5 megapixels on the camera both of them uses full flash not lile.droids with flash lite wich sucks , the nokia comes WiFi gps video streaming and video call enabled all the thing these droid does. Nokia did it 5 years ago even the street view from Google maps I remember having a e 63 with Google maps and street view option , you are far wrong if you think that the best technology is from droid.os take a look to Nokia n 97 is the best phone from.Nokia and it is over a year old and it kick all the droidphones on the us market only bad thing about that phone you have to prder it from nokias webpage and then activate it with the carrier of your.choise but the phone price is.like 680 dollars , if you have that money to get it you will see what is technology and by the way on the e 63 I had an animated theme and it is a phone 5 years older than any droid I remember I could.control my pc.from the Nokia and that phone had almost the.same.features that my droid has but Nokia did it 5 years ago so just imagine what it does now ,
Ps: moto droid owner
That means advertisement is more important than real ability for appealing to brainless people.
The good part about the internet is that it enables any person to express its opinions freely. The bad part about the internet? Well, any idiots can do the same.
Today’s idiot: Rob Jackson
Obviously a fanboy of the Android thing he would dream (wet dreams of course) about Nokia’s downfall and Google’s dominance of the world. The argument? Well, there isn’t any …
Android sucks balls. Like any Java UI sucks balls. And underneath its ugly UI is nothing but Linux. Optimized for web servers but a power hog in mobile space. And with the Chinese manufacturers making crappy hardware with not personality and no design value. Oh, not only Chinese, but Motorola too, rising from its death only to be killed again by Google with their Nexus One bias.
I feel pity for fanboys in general. For Google droids even more.
That Nokia 3210 takes me back! That was one of my first phones.
As for an app that sees how high you can throw your phone. HELL NO! Neither a Nokia handset or an Android based one would ever be flung from my hand intentionally.
BS.
Ill-informed article. Conclusions are drawn based on an uninformed quote from Reuters. The app being showcased by Nokia was developed by an open-source developer as a joke and available on the maemo.org community portal. There are no good reasons provided by the author why Nokia appears like old fogies.
WTF!? What’s with this pro Nokia stuff? It’s always worrying when people have to defend something so furiously. It tells that they are worried about something. I’m from Finland and have had mostly Nokia phones. Last one I owned was 5800x. I have even tried the N900. In regards of usability an UI design Nokia is far behind Android and Iphone. My Hero seemed like from a different era. Sure Nokia usually has good hardware and excels in the lower budget market, but seriously guys, In it’s current state it can’t possibly compete with Android or Iphone with it’s crappy UI.
Now maybe they will get it fixed and hope to god they will let somebody else design the UI, because they seem totally lost with it. One fact remains that Nokia isn’t going anywhere for a long time. It still has almost half the marketshare and great resources to do something great. I surely hope that Nokia will rise again. On the downside, I was very disappointed when I found out that Nokia was never going to implement Android in any of it’s model.
Sorry if the text is pretty messy, but it’s quite late and I’m very tired :D
Pure drivel from a very ignorant author.
Its good to see Android gaining but sad to see such a disgrace of an article that conviniently skips the fact. Nokia sold 10 times more Symbian phones than all the Android phones combined and almost 3 times more than the iPhone. To use a picture of the 3210 to depict Nokia is unbelievable and points at an attempt to degrade it. Nokia continues to lead and Maemo OS is on a different level to Android. The opensourced Symbian OS will address UI issues and will stay far ahead of Android – according to IDC. I like Android but pls lets leave silly reality distorting articles like this to the Apple fanboys.
Has anyone tried those large blue buttons on the N97 lately? Feels like you are using an old DOS based Tablet. Nokia really have quite some catching up to do in the software OS field!
Some months ago, Nokia’s N900 got my full attention but then figured out, it would stay with Nokia-only OS.
If it would have been ruuning Android, I would have bought it.
In reference to “21. sati wrote on February 13, 2010”
I agree with everything you said – I have an e71 unlocked – wonderful phone…
What you don’t realize is that USA has CDMA & GSM – Nokia has only GSM.
USA is not the world. Nokia is the number 1 phone brand in the world so this article is pure Android biased and pure ignorant. Nokia has sold more phones then android and iphone combined worldwide. Nokia might not be popular in America like it used to be, but it sure is not done. Android is the most overrated OS to ever hit the mobile market. Sure it looks sexy and can do all kinds of things, but it’s a battery hog and drains your battery life bad!!
Nokia will always be around due to their worldwide loyal fanbase and success. Android will be here for a min but gone in a little bit.