“You’ll remember the ‘scroll and select’ days of S60, hopefully. Smartphones driven by a navigational d-pad with central ‘OK’ button. Now look in your hand to see Symbian in Belle Refresh or Belle FP2 form and there’s very little similarity. How did we get from one to the other and could things have happened differently? I say yes.”
To be honest, I didn’t like Symbian at all. Of course I haven’t seen Belle, but my girlfriend used one of the touchscreen-only (resistive of course) models for a couple of years and I hated the thing. About the only good thing about it was the battery life, which was distinctly un-smartphone-like
I’m quite happy with my Lumia 620 and not convinced it’s a bad thing for Nokia that they went with Windows Phone.
Yeah, if you compare 2008 S60v5 with 2012 WP8. If you had tried anything newer than those sluggish first-generation touchscreen Symbian devices, I bet you’d revise your opinion. They had many good points, but completely lacked speed.
Too many options and features are missing from Windows Phone and Nokia itself does not have enough control on its development and that’s on of the main reasons why Nokia completely screwed up the transition.
Anyway, it’s been repeated over and over, so I’m not going to sound like a broken record again.
Yep Belle on N8 is great. I would always choose Symbian over WP.
Nokia has considerable input into Windows Phone, and over time, more Nokia features are making their way into Windows Phone.
Double tap to wake up and the always on clock being the two most recent examples.
I can’t believe the article is trying to make the argument that the 5800 could do more than the iPhone one year after the iPhone’s launch. Seriously deluded thinking.
The iPhone had a superior music player, a superior browser, a superior email client, superior contacts management, a superior video player, superior maps application (OK it didn’t do turn-by-turn navigation, but was superior in every other way).
A year after launch, the iPhone got an app store, and then it could do way more than the 5800 ExpressMusic.
It’s fine to argue that an Android phone can do more now than an iPhone, but to claim that the 5800 was superior to the iPhone is delusional.
In terms of feature count and expandablity, the author might be right in that sense, but in terms of quality and fitness for purpose the iphone was vastly superior. Two minutes playing with each, and 9/10 people would choose the iphone even without the app store.
I myself might be part of that 10% that would prefer the 5800, but I’m crazy like that. Seriously tried to buy it in the US, but Nokia refused to ship to a different address than billed to.
which company dies first, nokia or blackberry?
Edited 2013-04-20 13:10 UTC
While RIM is unlikely to regain the business market share they once enjoyed, their BB10 phones look good enough to me to maintain a sustainable business. (I’ve never used a BB, but I know many people who still do and would like to stay with them.)
With the crash of Symbian and the rapid decline in feature phones, though, Nokia has hitched their star firmly to Microsoft. If Microsoft changes direction again and becomes a sole source WP phone manufacturer in light of its current poor market performance, as they have so often in the past, Nokia is Screwed For Sure. (Of course, Microsoft may just buy Nokia… in which case Nokia is Screwed For Sure.)
Edited 2013-04-20 15:35 UTC
I agree. I think BlackBerry will be able to emerge from this bloodied and battered but alive. Their new CEO is a pretty smart guy and he’s making the right moves mostly.
Thankfully Symbian is almost completely dead, Nokia only sold 500,000 last quarter. Their feature phone segment I think is only slipping away from them because of a lack of investment.
Asha does a lot to reverse this, and over the past few quarters it has eased the pain but not completely removed it. I think when faced with a sub $100 Android phone, and a sub $100 Asha, or even a $180 Windows Phone the choice will be clear for a lot of people.
If anyone has a chance of reversing this trend its Nokia.
I can’t see them doing this, and if they did it’d be a bad bet. Nokia does phones better than Microsoft would.
Microsoft has recently said they have no plans for a Surface Phone and they’re happy with Nokia.
Question though, is Windows Phone’s overall performance an indictment on Nokia or on the other OEMs? If every OEM moved almost 6 million devices a quarter Windows Phone would be a lot better off.
I’d place more blame at HTC and Samsung’s feet than at Nokia who seems to be doing everything they can despite having a fraction of the money Samsung has.