Tag Archives: nokia

Nokia: You say Mango, I say MeeGo

Historically, Engadget has driven me a bit nuts in their handling of Nokia.  Indeed, the way most US tech journalists approach the Finnish company has made little sense to me in the past couple years.  With that said, I found myself nodding my head vigorously to Vlad’s post titled, Dear Nokia, you cannot be serious!, and the following blurb re: Elop.

I just don’t get it, really: MeeGo looks incredibly powerful, and is a Linux-based system running Qt entirely in the hands of Nokia.  Tossing that away seems silly, to put it lightly.  While I have been having warmer thoughts towards Microsoft than I’ve had in the past, they still have had problems executing their vision, and with basic user experience.

I’m sure Windows Phone with its “Mango” update will be a reasonable mobile operating system.  What doesn’t make sense to me is why, with a good team and a single piece of hardware per year, MeeGo can’t come along for the ride.

It’s hard to say what the future will hold, but it seems like the good parts of Nokia are slipping away as time moves forward.  I truly hope that won’t be the case, and that Linux can exist on mobile outside of the Android platform.

Symbian 2011: no platform as platform

I was listening to the 91st Phones Show Chat today, and it hit me as to why I still enjoy being on the Nokia/Symbian platform.  Namely, in a world of various ecosystems, Symbian is in some ways in the Zen spot of ecosystems: having no real platform as its platform.

Through talking about iOS and Android, Tim and Steve pointed out that smartphones are increasingly more about the services which are tied to the device, rather than open devices which can speak to a variety of open / free services.  Mostly this came up with Tim investigating iOS 5, where he found that it was much more tailored to the Apple services and not the Google ones.

In terms of carving out portions of the market, it makes a lot of sense for the manufacturers to corral its users into its own walled fortress.  Why should Apple rely on Google services when they are primary competitors?

Points of Control

Increasingly, my thoughts go back to the Web 2.0 Summit Points of Control Map.  However close or far from reality these lines in the sand are drawn, the fact is clear that they lie somewhere between excitement and frustration.  Indeed, the Web companies are playing the same games outside of HTTP, and with iOS 5 we are seeing the potential for even more of that traffic to be piped through the new Apple data warehouse.

Symbian: out of it

Back to Nokia and Symbian, I now realize that I see that Nokia’s lack of a real strategy in these new economic wars almost seems like a feature.  I have my notes in a Notes application, which stores plain text in a very simple way.  I have my single, personal calendar which is not synchronized with the cloud.  I buy my MP3s from Amazon, without DRM, and I grab my podcasts via RSS feeds without intermediary services.

For whatever reason, I still believe in the Web.  As a Web developer, this does not mean huge, flash-laden websites which require iOS or Android browsers.  The web is a place for content, for streamlined, efficient communications without sidebars or clutter or too many advertisements.  I’m not too excited about the next Check-in service or coupon, because I don’t see it as bringing me that much closer to my friends or saving me that much money.

It’s all about the data

As with the web, most of these concerns are really about personal control about as much as it is about the control of the various mammoth industrial players against each other.  It is clear there’s some use, though until I can’t function and communicate effectively with the tools in my largely offline belt I’ll take comfort in the fact that I know where my data is, and where it’s been sleeping.

Rich Green, future of mobile

Nokia Conversations has a post featuring Rich Green, Nokia’s CTO, which has been up for a few days.  It’s rather lengthy so I saved it a couple days before watching.  Unless you’re a Nokia super-fan or you missed certain aspects of the previous articles there’s a reasonable amount of repetition here, though the second video, “Part 2,” is worth watching regardless of affiliation.

Quick numbers, scale

Namely, Nokia has an initiative towards shipping the next billion devices.  What’s interesting about the strategy are the numbers: about three billion people don’t have cellphones, and of the 3.7 billion who do, 1.5 billion of them are not connected to the Internet with them.  The second part of the slide is that while 80% of the world has network access, only 20% of those connected individuals access the Internet.

Compression + proxies

One primary connector of this talking point was in Nokia’s development of S40 and their plans for those devices.  Namely, Nokia’s plan is to allow all of their cheap phones to have access to the Internet, in part fueled by their Ovi Browser, a browser that utilizes a compression proxy to allow for browsing with low data requirements.  Opera has had a similar technology in Opera Mini for years now, though a billion users on the Ovi platform is a rather stunning figure.

Offline + online

The second aspect of what Rich Green talks about is in the fragility of connectivity for these next billion Internet users.  Namely, while most of today’s systems rely on constant Internet access, Nokia are going to be looking for solutions which work seamlessly online and offline.  I imagine caching is going to be some part of the equation, though if we get into this space further then technologies like CouchDB and other database projects spring to mind.  Not connected to the Internet?  OK; then work with local data, and at the point in time when we get back online, synchronize the local and the cloud systems.

In general, technology has been moving away from this, putting everything in the cloud; personally, I still have reservations about this philosophy, and would prefer at least the option of a local copy alongside its implied offline competence.  Sort out any synchronization issues, and we’re talking about being robust and flexible, if nothing else.  It sounds as though Nokia are working towards solutions to this end, and I’m quite excited to see how the space in general will be developed.

Thank you, Rafe

Here’s another post about Nokia, and a second referring to All About Symbian.  Rafe Blandford wrote out a rather epic analysis of the Nokia/Microsoft situation, and at the end of it I am much more understanding of the situation.  My frustration has ebbed, and the picture seems to come more clearly into focus.  Namely, as Rafe points out, this was not about today, but about the future over the course of the next few years.  Furthermore, it was not as much a technology decision as it was about competing economies.  Windows Phone is certainly a ways off from maturity, though after using Windows 7 on my desktop for the past year or so I’m quite impressed with what’s coming out of Redmond lately.  It’s going to be interesting to see how the future plays out, and I think Nokia’s contribution might actually make it work.

In any case, here’s another massive shout out to Rafe, who is truly wonderful at what he does.  I’m looking forward to following his thoughts in the upcoming months and years.

AAS Insight #154: Bravo

My guess is that most people aren’t all that interested in listening to an All About Symbian podcast at this point.  A week or so later and I’ve cooled down a bit from my initial reactions about the fate of the mobile OS, and Nokia’s new partnership with Microsoft.  There are a wide number of variables out there at this point, and it will be fascinating to see how everything is going to play out.

All About Symbian, based in the UK, is one site which I’ve followed for the past year or two since I picked up my Nokia 5800.  This week they released their 154th podcast which, in two words, is simply excellent.  Each member of the team has their own particular role in the podcast, and they all mesh together quite well in this week’s episode.  I highly recommend anyone interested to give it a go.  It’s also quite clear that there’s high talent in the AAS crew, and that won’t be going anywhere, even if Symbian will in the years to come.

Sad day for Nokia

I’m still in a bit of shock from the announcements today at Nokia, via new CEO Stephen Elop.  I keep thinking that maybe if I wake up again the words that I’m reading might take a turn towards sanity.  As it stands, Elop has said that Symbian is going to expire, and Windows Phone 7 from Microsoft will be the primary flagship platform for Nokia henceforth.

A process of reduction, focus

Not so long ago, Stephen Elop seemed to be a voice of reason, noting that Qt would be the primary platform, and that Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 would be reduced to Symbian.  Looking back, it’s now rather clear that the trend was toward focusing the company and, perhaps, getting rid of some dead weight.  While there are still many aspects to the Qt framework, it still was a much more unifying roadmap than continued support of Symbian C++, WRT, Java, and other platforms.

Hardware vs. software

Nokia’s strength for years has definitely been in hardware.  Even US tech journalists have lusted after Nokia hardware, despite crapping on the Symbian platform and UI.  The trouble, though, is that when you have too many people working on hardware and not as many with software, the balance is tipped in such a way that software divisions are reduced more to support for all of those hardware platforms.

Apple has one hardware device per year, and the developers can focus on platform features rather than dealing with the mass number of firmwares, updates, and bug fixes for each device.  Nokia, on the other hand, have released a staggering number of devices which were essentially the 5800.  The N97 was released twice, and even in 2011 they carried out yet another S60 5th edition handset, the C5-03.  Why?!  For each device that’s released, there has to be a software team that handles all updates, and in many cases different updates for each version which ships to its various regions: a NAM or North American version, a UK variant, etc.

The pattern was simply insane.  No company can keep up with that.  The only thing I can imagine is that Nokia had a number of good employees who could do hardware design who they didn’t want to let go.  Doing so in some sense killed the platform, since it created far more problems for the software teams to then fix up.  Again, how else can one explain the huge number of Symbian developers who have not gotten out firmware, software, and other crucial updates out in time?  The balance had to be shifted towards the software side.  As it stands, everyone at Nokia is now going to suffer as a result of this mis-management.

WRT, and other silly software choices

Beyond having trouble balancing between hardware and software, the next clear culprit for Nokia was in its ability to focus towards functional platforms for software development.  Indeed, one might argue that Nokia could not effectively do anything with the balanced described above lingering above all aspects of their management, though in any case there have been some rather clear decisions that Nokia failed to make.

WRT, or Web Runtime, is, in my opinion, one of the worst things that happened to Symbian.  Everything that has been released in WRT performs terribly, and in terms of functionality it has never added all that much to simple HTML + JavaScript pages.  It is a short-sighted platform that confuses the market, the consumers, and, most importantly, the developers.

Furthermore, Nokia’s Social application, while vaguely functional, both runs on WRT, and thereby is slow, and, more importantly, was a Nokia project in direct conflict with Gravity, generally considered the most powerful and best-written application for the Symbian platform.  Gravity has been the flagship for Symbian development, and Nokia undercut the power of the developer, Jan Ole Suhr, just by shipping Nokia Social on their devices.  Let me say it simply: this was a very stupid move!

Qt, growing increasingly less cute

Finally, Qt, the final frontier for Symbian, has been in many ways a thorn rather than a jewel for Nokia.  The fundamental problem with Qt has been Nokia’s inability to launch and support v4.7 successfully to its devices.  Again, I am sure the reason for its many delays relates to the crazy number of devices that Qt is supposed to support, and the fact that their software team was therein (or otherwise) ineffective at releasing features in a timely manner.

Qt has been around for years.  I first interacted with Qt more than ten years ago when experimenting with KDE in Linux operating systems.  Today, Qt is the only development system which runs on C++ and is supported in Windows, Linux, OS X, and, mostly, phone operating systems.  As of today, it seems as though Qt is about to die a slow death, seeing as it does not fit into the Windows Phone 7 plans for Nokia, and where Symbian is now on its way out.

Probably the single decision that could make me even more angry with Nokia and Elop would be for them to take Qt away from the open source community in the long term.  Time will tell how this all plays out, but it is incredibly sad to think that code written today could not be extended by third parties because of poor choices of a single mis-guided corporate entity.

Management

Perhaps the most important take-away from the events today relating to Nokia is that this is really a matter of poor management, not poor technology.  It is indeed cartoon’ish to think that Elop, a former Microsoft man, is now single-handedly going to fire thousands of workers in Finland and around the world in a brash attempt to drive up a stock price and to appease those who don’t fundamentally understand the technology.

Microsoft has suffered with the same problems as Nokia in many ways, and a drug addict doesn’t get better by hanging out with fellow junkies.   Here’s the similarity: both Windows and Nokia have supported a wide range of hardware and devices, both with significant problems bubbling up from that compatibility.  Conversely, Apple is such a huge force in the market right now in no small part because they have gone the opposite direction: concentration on software, UI, while greatly limiting the number of hardware platforms supported.  It seems rather clear that both Nokia and Microsoft are going to head towards the ground until they start to find an alternate business model that works.

It’s hard to imagine that someone in charge of the fate of so many lives might be so short sighted.  No one seems to think this partnership is going to work.  When I say “the fate of so many lives,” I am of course not speaking of consumers but the developers and employees of Nokia worldwide.  Again, there will be a large number of firings as Nokia move their workforce away from Finland and into the USA, in their long term strategy.

Moreover, Nokia today is now on a trajectory which will rather clearly kill the Symbian platform before the date in their graph seems to indicate.  Even today there is already a large sucking sound pulling consumers away from Nokia and Symbian, and yet Symbian is supposedly the primary source of their income over the following months and quarters.

Developer psychology

I’m a full-time developer and have been for a number of years now.  There is a great amount of importance in knowing that the projects I’m working with are worthwhile, helping people, and pushing boundaries ahead of expectations.  Most of my work is entirely my own, which allows me a great deal of flexibility and future thought, and that’s one of the primary reasons I keep doing what I do.  I can’t say I can see anything even closely related to that for anyone who is working at Nokia for the Symbian platform right now.

Elop’s words effectively say, “yes, you can stick around for another year or so, but at that point you’re in the trash bin.”  I can’t imagine being in that position, and my heart goes out to anyone who is there today.  Even before today, I feel that the general conception of Symbian has fallen in the past year with the rise of Android.  That cannot be easy, either, and I can imagine it would have an effect on my productivity to at least a small degree.

Going forward, it looks like Symbian is going to be alive only in the hands of those enthusiasts who want to hack something together, more because they can than for profit.  That will be an even smaller platform/”ecosystem” than it is today.  Still, if Qt can continue outside the hands of Nokia’s control, and the firmware hackers can move along as they have, I don’t imagine it will disappear completely.  As of today, I still have a desire to play with Qt as an exercise, and I hope there’s at least a small community of people who feel the same.

Sans that, I wish everyone who writes code the best of luck in their future endevours, and that they might believe in the code, if nothing else.

Nokia: kick it into gear

I’m a big fan of Nokia, which is admittedly a rarity here in the USA.  Technically, I believe they have the best position in terms of technology, and about the worst in terms of a platform.  It’s the latter, not the former, that’s hurting them.

Today’s big news was that Android handsets have recently passed Nokia/Symbian in terms of the percentage of devices shipped.  The trends have been headed in this direction for a few months now, and the real story is that Android has rose because it’s found in handsets at a wide range of price points and configurations.

This is all important, and if Nokia aren’t worried then they really ought to be.  With that said, if they play their parts right all is certainly not over.

Qt, platforms: pay upfront

Qt has been around for a bit now as the primary development platform for Nokia/Symbian/Meego devices.  I’ve taken a few good tours through the Qt SDK, and truth be told it’s a great system.  I’ve never coded in the previous Symbian frameworks, though there is just a lot of promise in what is here, now.  I’m mostly a web developer at this point though I think making a good Qt app is well within reach for me.  QML and other future improvements, including advancements in the Qt Mobility framework will tend towards fast development of some great, powerful systems.

Here’s the problem: it’s not here yet.  Sure, the SDK is in pretty decent shape, and Forum Nokia is a strong resource.  Symbian still isn’t seeing the peak benefits right now.  Sure, we have some ports of other applications into the system, and Ovi Maps is both Qt and strong.  It’s just not enough in the long run, however, and that can kill the platform for Nokia going forward.

Big names; Calling All Innovators, visionary examples

Nokia need more than its Forum and the SDK.  Realistically, I think they need to pay a few good developers for some killer, big-named apps to show the world what can be done using Qt.  Moreover, there are key applications which are clearly lacking on the Symbian platform.  Both of these goals could be combined rather effectively.

If I were Elop, I would pay a good chunk of cash to developers to make an official Kindle app using Qt.  Pay out for Pandora, Evernote, DropBox, Facebook.  Yes, these are third parties, and it might cost some real cash in certain instances, though Nokia certainly have the bankroll to afford such a project.  Qt must be a big part of the message, and if it’s possible, release code snippets to entice other developers as to what the platform can do.

Calling All Innovators is certainly an interesting push in this direction, though it seems clear it isn’t having the desired effect.  It certainly is being pushed via a variety of outlets, yet the deadline was recently extended.  I’m not sure how to explain that without saying that there haven’t been enough quality submissions to the project.  I’ve even thought about digging in on a project myself, but I haven’t had the motivation nor the time to go ahead, even with cash prizes in view.  Again, the platform isn’t present; the big names just aren’t there, and the vision lags as a result.

Looking to Apple and Google, it’s easy to see the difference in position in both companies.  Apple has slick versions of Mail, Maps, a killer browser, and a variety of other built-in systems.  Google, similarly, is wildly innovative by their Google Goggles, Google Earth, and other visionary systems.  Yes, Nokia has Ovi Maps, but otherwise there aren’t the same kind of wow-factor pushes into new territory to attract the right kind of developers or attention.

Again: Nokia’s strengths

It drives me a bit crazy to see how many members of the US press don’t seem to understand Nokia.  Focusing on things like the above, it is easy to forget about what Nokia and Symbian do well: the N8 is a technological marvel in so many ways, though it doesn’t attract the same fanfare because of limits on the Symbian platform.  That can be fixed with cash, at which point Nokia’s strengths will become clear.

Hardware has always been a major strength for Nokia.  My first Nokia was a 3120, and I beat the hell out of that device.  It never gave me any trouble, always kept a signal, had days of battery life.  My 5800 and, now, N8, are similarly robust.  Bluetooth 3.0, NFC, the best camera in the market, penta-band 3G radios, MEMS microphones, USB On-the-Go, AMOLED with polarizing filters.. and the list continues.  Moreover, as much as everyone likes to dump on Symbian, I repeat again: there’s nothing wrong with Symbian; the Nokia platform, OK, but not the underlying technology.

The reality is that I know Nokia can win their place back and take the reigns at the top.  The question is really when and whether they decide to kick their engines into gear and push their platform to the forefront.