Rita over at Symbian Guru has been collating a fascinating exchange of comments centred around the Nokia N95 and its impact both inside and outside the company. Rita goes off into an extended basketball/rugby metaphor that I'm afraid I don't quite follow, but she does make great points about the different strategies employed by Apple and Nokia. The first plays things safe and tests to the limit, the second produces bleeding edge releases ahead of the competition and then fixes problems as they go. Fascinating contrast.
Read on in the full article.
If apple tested things as thoroughly as is implied in the articles, then how come:
a. they messed up the iPod Touch firmware update so badly that it was virtually impossible to set up email accounts on the device (yes there is a workaround, but it is completely non-obvious)?
b. why does iTunes under Windows constantly (and randomly) reset the iPod Touch date and time when it is plugged in (yes, there is also a workaround for this too, but surely apple could have fixed this by now)? This is particularly annoying for those users who actually want to use their iPod as a PDA (I also have an E90, so it doesn't bother me so much).
c. why is it difficult/impossible to change the battery in most of their devices (ie. iPods of all types, iPhone, MacBook air)?
Unregistered wrote:If apple tested things as thoroughly as is implied in the articles, then how come:c. why is it difficult/impossible to change the battery in most of their devices (ie. iPods of all types, iPhone, MacBook air)?
You mean that this has something to do with testing, as in "They did not test enough, and so nobody at Apple noticed that the battery is not user-changeable"? Yeah, of course.
Comments like this make it clear to me that Symbian Guru's post is all the more valuable: Good analysis, good arguments, well thought-out, and sadly somewhat hard to find nowadays.
Let the hordes of fans (of both sides) descend here and start a flame war where nobody can learn even a little bit from it...
A long term living with the device test and feedback amongst enough independent beta testers might have revealed that having a hard-to-get battery would be irritating to many.
Comments like this make it clear to me that Symbian Guru's post is all the more valuable: Good analysis, good arguments, well thought-out, and sadly somewhat hard to find nowadays.
You think a headline like "Did the N95 kill Nokia?" is well thought-out? I don't even know where to begin on how brainless that is.
This kind of article puts far, far too much weight on high end phones, when they're ultimately very VERY expensive toys which almost nobody buys, and those that do buy them get them more for the novelty value than actual use. It's like judging the state of the car industry by looking at Ferrari and Rolls Royce.
It's the low end where the important stuff happens. It's the low end where phone makers get most of their sales and profits and growth from. In every measurable respect it's the low end which is significant in the phone industry. Tech journalists seem to be completely blind to this.
Try going down the street in virtually any city and you'll see lots of people using mobiles. How often have you seen someone actually using an N95 or iPhone? Statistically speaking, for every time you see one of those, you'll see literally hundreds of cheaper models.
krisse wrote:You think a headline like "Did the N95 kill Nokia?" is well thought-out? I don't even know where to begin on how brainless that is.
Ok, alright, you got me.
But nevertheless, sometimes you do want to compare Ferrari and Rolls-Royce, and if you find a post that does not only tell you "Ferrari is everything" or "Anything else than a Rolls-Royce isn't even a car", but explains how different those two brands are, and how different the markets that they address, and then continue to give a good characterization of those markets and the manufacturers, that's still useful.
Of course you are right: The fate of the auto-industry is not decided by who of the two sells more luxury cars...
OK, maybe my point about the battery was not entirely relevant, but my other two points clearly were....
And it was not my intention to start a flame war, as I have a foot in various camps; I have a windows laptop and an E90, my wife has an apple macbook, and between us we have various iPods, so I am certainly not anti-apple. In general, I am very impressed by apple's attention to detail, but their tendency to not have user-changeable batteries along with their reluctance to fix various long-standing issues does show that they are far from perfect.