Nokia Nseries chief responds to iPhone

Thats the way to Welcome Competition, By saying, "Bring em On."

Atleast this would make people realize that there's nothing special Ipod does that Nokia can't do. True this new device will be vying for the market share right from Nokia's plate. but we shouldn't forget that directly pitching Ipod against Cellphones like this would make Ipod followers look at Cellphones as an alternative music device, eventually putting Ipod's own market share at risk.

Whomever may win this multimedia war (i personally feel, Nokia/Symbian will), one thing is for sure, the future of stand alone music players like Ipod seems dim now. The future, for sure, belongs to the Converged devices.
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It was quite funny to see some pro-Apple commentators "turning on a dime", many of them had preached for years that convergence was a bad idea and that separate devices are far better than trying to cram lots of functions into one device. Suddenly Apple seems to think convergence is a good idea too (actually Apple almost certainly realised it many years ago as phones started to get gigabyte sized memory cards) and now these same commentators are having to take back their criticism of the whole idea of a phone being a music player too.

Once again though I'm worried that Apple's approach to hardware and licensing (i.e. they make the hardware and no one gets any licences) is going to make them do another Macintosh.

If the iPhone takes off there's nothing to stop Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson etc copying its finger-based interface, just as Windows copied the Macintosh's interface (and Apple copied the Macintosh's interface from the work done by Xerox at PARC).

Indeed it's a little-noticed fact that Nokia showed off a finger-based touchscreen on the Nokia 800 internet tablet on Monday, and Sony Ericsson already has a touchscreen based Walkman-branded smartphone albeit one that uses a stylus. They're not that far off already having something like the iPhone if they wanted to go in that direction.

If Apple licensed their user interface, that would be attractive to a wide range of manufacturers, but if they keep it to themselves there's a danger that others will just clone it and there'll be no demand for a licence because each manufacturer will have their own equivalent. The iPhone would become a new Macintosh, not a new iPod.

Agree. Nokia does, however, take this to heart and seriously focus on simplifying the experience, in particular in purely "end consumer" oriented multimedia computers (i.e. devices geared at people who do not care about installing apps, editing a lot of office docs etc).

I expect interesting patent disputes as well...

Hi Steve, thanks for the link, much appreciated! The rest of the interview is now up on Tech Digest, if you're interested. We got the iPhone comments up early because it was so topical ;o)

Wirelessly posted (Nokia6600/1.0 (5.53.0) SymbianOS/7.0s Series60/2.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0)

stuartdredge wrote:Hi Steve, thanks for the link, much appreciated! The rest of the interview is now up on Tech Digest, if you're interested. We got the iPhone comments up early because it was so topical ;o)

Bangladesh

krisse wrote:It was quite funny to see some pro-Apple commentators "turning on a dime", many of them had preached for years that convergence was a bad idea and that separate devices are far better than trying to cram lots of functions into one device.

Their arguments still hold and i don't know why they would take them back. These arguments were based on what "convergence" looked like today and was likely to look like in the future. And let's face it: it's not pretty. Today's "convergence" phones are a chore to use as music devices or more generally, converged devices. Most music-enabled phones do not have a standard headphone jack and require an additional adapter (often no even supplied with the phone) just to be able to use your own earphones. Loading music on them is often far from being as easy as synchronizing an iPod with iTunes and their UI is often bloated and/or difficult to use.

I've tried several times to use my E61 as an MP3 player. In fact, when i bought it, i really thought that it'd be great to be able to use it as an everyday MP3 player. My 20GB iPod is just too big to keep in my pocket all day long so i only use it when travelling (which happens quite often). So i bought the �12 adapter, a 2GB mini-SD card and loaded some MP3 and AAC albums on it. I've tried long and hard but had to resign to the fact: the E61 is unusable as an MP3 player.
For a start, you always need to remember to take this bloody adapter with you and you'd really need to have 3 hands to be able to connect that thing to both your phone and earphones without risking seeing your �300 smarphone crash on the ground in the process. Then you need to use that built-in MP3 player that isn't even able to recognize the tags of my AAC files. When starting to play a song, you've got to suffer this loud and horrible "pop" noise. Once it's started, you can not easily lock the phone to put it in you pocket. You've got to go back to the main screen then lock the keypad. Whenever you want to skip tracks, you've got to get the phone out of your pocket, unlock the keypad, scroll down to the music player plugin and press the joystick before being able to do anything. And you always have to be very careful with that pop-port connection because it look scaringly fragile. In fact, after 6 months of usage (not as MP3 player, gave up on that), my pop-port seems to be already broken. It regularly looses the connection when i connect the phone via USB to my PC. Sorry but no, not for me.

Now, I know what you're going to tell me: get a N91, the E61 is not a music phone. Well, the thing is that i do not want to get a N91. I want a large screen and a keyboard to watch movies, browse the web and write emails. Have you ever tried to do that on a N91 with its awful keypad? I have and let me tell you: it sucks. I thought that the whole point of "converged" devices was to be able to use an all-rounder device for all that i needed to do instead buying devices designed for a specific purpose. That hasen't happened yet and with Nokia's intentionally crippled devices, it doesn't look like it's going to happen soon.

So there we are. With these great "convergence" devices, you've got choice: you can either get a phone that's great as an MP3 player but sucks big time as a smartphone or a phone that's great as a smartphone but sucks big time as an MP3 player.

Enter the iPhone. Their goal with that is to do convergence right. Whether that's gonna work or not remains to be seen (i'm not that convinced so far to be honest). If it does work, those who were against convergence purely on usabilty grounds will change their minds obviously. Because somebody has at last done it right which was not likely to have happened anytime soon without the iPhone. For those who prefer to have a simple, small phone and separate music device, i don't know what the iPhone is going to change. They won't change their mind. As for me, i'm still waiting for the converged smartphone done right but it looks like i'm gonna have to wait for another while before that happens. In the meantime, my E61 and my iPod are getting along well together.

He has a good attitude - rather than saying iPhone sucks, too expensive blah blah blah.

They recongise what Apple have done and hopefully Nokia can build from there to make their phones more usable ( because atm, S60 is ugly and could do with a usability make over ).

Also, the stock applications needs to be improved. If Apple can make a email client that works with IMAP ( none us know how well, but lets assume for this instance, its good enough ) - so can Nokia. Nokia need to look at the Psion apps and look at theirs.

Oh, and stop being so tight with the RAM!!!

"Nokia's intentionally crippled devices"

I could make the same accusations about the iPhone: no 3G, no EDGE, no support for MMS... these are key things missing from a $500 smartphone. Do you think Apple deliberately left them out in order to trap people into buying another device?

No, I think they left them out because hardly anyone uses them in the American market the iPhone is aimed at, and you can find similar reasons for the other devices which you consider lacking in some way. You can't compare the N91 and E61's screens because they came out at totally different times, the N91 was one of the last small-screen devices while the E61 was the very first horizontal screen S60 model, there wasn't any intention to present them as two alternative options.

The E61 was a business phone, it's manufactured by Nokia's business unit, not the mobile phone unit. None of the advertising even mentioned that it had a music player let alone stereo sound, and I'd wager that most people who bought it don't even know it can play music.

Look at Nokia's E61 website and try and find a single reference to music or sound:

http://europe.nokia.com/link?cid=EDITORIAL_5523

There isn't one, except buried way down at the bottom of the tech specs which says it's MP3 compatible, and even that doesn't mention stereo playback (what's more the headphone that comes with the E61 is mono so no one would ever guess).

"an all-rounder device for all that i needed to do instead buying devices designed for a specific purpose. That hasen't happened yet and with Nokia's intentionally crippled devices, it doesn't look like it's going to happen soon."

If you want a big screen with external music controls that don't require you to unlock the phone, take a look at something like the 6290 or the N75 or the N76 or the N95, they all have external music controls and large 240x320 screens.

"Their arguments still hold and i don't know why they would take them back"

The drift I was trying to get across was that these particular commentators were more concerned with praising Apple than having an opinion of their own. That's why they would take them back, because they followed whatever Apple did. If Apple suddenly started making blenders and fridges, they'd probably say it was just the right move for an electronics company.

"These arguments were based on what "convergence" looked like today and was likely to look like in the future. And let's face it: it's not pretty. Today's "convergence" phones are a chore to use as music devices or more generally, converged devices."

I hear people say this all the time but I can only assume they used a smartphone for music once and decided it was horrible and never did it again. Perhaps they were so used to the way their dedicated music player worked, they felt anything else was difficult, but that's exactly how I feel when I try and use a Macintosh after years of using Windows.

If you use a smartphone for music released within the last six months, you won't find any major differences between it and a separate music player, they're pretty much equal in abilities.

I'm not sure what you'd define a chore as, but I find no problems using my smartphone (a Nokia E61) to play music. I click once on the music icon, the music app pops up straight away and I click again to start it playing. It's great, I have absolutely no desire whatsoever for a dedicated music player because I can't find any problems in the way this one works. I use it differently to you though, I use it on the train, on the bus etc so there's no need to lock it or put it away. I also use it at home plugged into speakers if I don't want the bother of booting up my PC every time I want to listen to digital music.

If I want to find tracks from an album I click on "albums", if I want to find tracks from an artist I click on "artists", if I want to find tracks individually I click on "tracks"... where's the chore?

Three years ago smartphone music players were terrible, they were slow and clunky and could only handle a limited number of tracks, but that was three years ago. They've all changed radically since then, all of them.

The only weak point I can think of with smartphone music players is transferring CDs using the PC software which can sometimes be a pain compared to something like iTunes, but that's a PC software problem, not a problem with the device itself or convergence as a whole. That's a question of getting better PC developers, not better phone designers.

stewart01 wrote:He has a good attitude - rather than saying iPhone sucks, too expensive blah blah blah.

They recongise what Apple have done and hopefully Nokia can build from there to make their phones more usable ( because atm, S60 is ugly and could do with a usability make over ).

Also, the stock applications needs to be improved. If Apple can make a email client that works with IMAP ( none us know how well, but lets assume for this instance, its good enough ) - so can Nokia. Nokia need to look at the Psion apps and look at theirs.

Oh, and stop being so tight with the RAM!!!

Discussions about the difficulty of using N-Series devices in a converged fashion are always amusing.

Nokia's approach with S60 (currently) is really very hardware-key focused, so if the device doesn't have the right keys, it's not going to be good at a feature.

Don't believe me? Just look at Nokia's coming devices, such as the N95, or their current ones, such as the N93. Appropriate hardware keys are crucial to a softkey-based UI such as S60.

There is an alternative -- the five-way hierarchy pioneered by app's like DreamScribe and Keystick, but Nokia chose not to go that way -- perhaps wisely, since it does demand more from the end-user, in order to deliver more.

Anyway, the closest to the iPhone (and vastly superior to it currently, since they are available) are the UIQ 3 phones. The choice here is really: do you want a camera or not. With modern 3G plans, WiFi is rapidly becoming redundant, so the P990i's WiFi is only of use for a few months more.

The M600i, with it's good touchscreen and great keyboard, and nice, tidy form factor, is a great little device. Add the handsfree from the W950, which provides music keys that work even when the M600i is keylocked along with a 3.5mm socket, and you've got a great music player, email device, web-browser, and PIM device (with DC 3 😉 ). The P990i adds a great camera to the mix. All they need now is GPS.

Certainly UIQ 3 can be tidied up, but the basics are pretty well thought out (much better than UIQ 2). It remains to be seen how usable iPhone is in the real world. It was headline news on Aussie TV last night (despite the fact that we won't be getting it 'till 2008). And seeing Jobs' demo of "flick" scrolling made me even more doubtful about the UI's usability. I remember the bitter dissapointment of the Newton too well -- hopefully Apple does, too.

A must-read analysis about the possible impact of the iPhone:
mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2007/01/impact-of-apple-iphone.html

In a nutshell:
- the iPhone is the next phase of the Ipod (Apple needs it to compete in the converged phone/mp3-player market)
- the main target market and competition affected are the music/video/entertainment phones (Nokia 5300, N91, SE alike, ROKR, ...) not the smartphones. Although it remains to be seen how much the internet/email feature of the iPhone attracts other segments. Note also that the user-segment of rich-enough people buying a phone for its looks/popularity/status symbol is definitely going to be affected by the IPhone too.
- due to the availability schedule, all this is to happen first in US. Europe and Asia may only be really affected by the iPhone v2 or other siblings.
- The UI (if it really works, and that's a big IF) sets a new standard everything else will be compared to.

Like elp, I've tried using my S60 phone (a 3250) as a music player, and am not at all satisfied. And this one's even supposed to be a music phone! The pop port is the main problem, but the music player app really isn't very good, and the fact that the mp3 decoder has problems playing quite a few of my mp3s doesn't exactly make me enthusiastic either.

Now, to stay on topic, hopefully the iPhone will make Nokia and others concentrate more on their horrible user interfaces. 😊

OK, i may be biased, because i've been using Macs (but also PCs at work) for over 20 years. However, i've been also using Psions, and Symbian smartphones for 15 years, so i think i have a good idea why i'd be tempted to buy the iPhone if Nokia and Sony-Ericsson continue to fail my expectations.

I currently own a Nokia E61, which i bought mostly becasue i could not continue waiting for the P990. Now, i kind of think about waiting for the successor of the P990, which may be less buggy, according to what i read at the register.
I really liked the P900 and bought another one when my first one was stolen. It synced perfectly with my Mac at home, and was a joy to use. I do not understand why Nokia is not using a touch screen, because i cannot find in their current line-up the smarphone i need: i want to be able to use the internet through wi-fi, and the experience with the E61 is horrible, due to a ridiculous implementation of the Wi-Fi. But even when i log in through my gsm carrier, which is fast enough most of the time, the lack of an easy way to maneuver around the web page is frustrating, after my happy years with the P900.

I really cannot understand why Nokia realeases phones which have Wi-Fi, but no keyboard and no touch screen. If the N93 was with a touch screen, i would buy it.

The Nokia N800 should also have basic phone capabilities, to be intereting as a device.

Because of these major shortcomings, i am quite interested by the iPhone, which seems to me that it is proposing a really simple but rich interface, and even if i do not use all the functions available, it will be better use of my money than having to lug around two phones and an iPod.

PS: i am posted in Moscow, Russia for the time being, and there is no 3G networks here, so the lack of 3G is not an issue for me, right now.