The! plan! is! To! Move! Away! from! Download!
Yes, Nokia being a 'services company' will copy google and yahoo and have a single sign on set of services.
The current trend is to give everything away for free in order to increase initial takeup and subscriber base, and work out how to charge for it afterward (mostly hope that ads can be shoehorned in at a later date).
I use gmail, and the ability to sign up to a new service without having to remember another fucking username and password brings down so many barriers in the adoption of new services.
This works for google because gmail was a necessary product for many people - reliable, uncapped email. It works for Apple because iTunes is such a strong brand and is fundamental to the use of the iPod.
Nokia? - Their PCSuite is consistently the worst written software on my PC and I am suspicious of the quality of their services.
I worry that Nokia think that throwing loads of services into OVI will make people use it, whereas maybe they should find the lowest common denominator first and then trickle services one people realise it might be useful.
Otherwise OVI will quickly become the web based analog of the S60 menu, where new features are added as apps and the menu gets ever more cluttered and confusing.
Well said Steve, there is nothing more to add...on my n95-3 I don't even have the folder of 'try for free' and 'greenroom' and yes 'widsets', instead I have the GSP/location folder, the app and support really sucks. Is Nokia serious about becoming also the very visible 'internet company' that it been speculated that its set on becoming? If that is the case then they need to get really serious about those basic issues of apps such as dowload.
Man oh man, do I agree with you here Steve.
I'm just hopeful that the Apple AppStore and MobileMe (both of which, might be in the end more important stories than the iPhone 3G itself) will spur Nokia on to make serious improvements to both the useability and usefulness of Download and Ovi.
Additionally, I really wish that services for North America could be rolled out a lot quicker (I hate reading about some cool new service or feature, clicking the link and then finding out that it's "not available in your country"😉.
Its been quite a while now since I had a phone upgrade and so my S60 3rd Edition experience is not all it could be (N71, 5500, E70, E61) and so I've never actually seen Download! All I've seen is Catalogs. Every 6 months or so I find myself having a squizz and when I come across the Anti-virus software I usually kill it and swear to never go back. I dont think anything has changed in Catalogs since the 1st time I checked it out, except for the inclusion of a couple of crappy local (South Africa) sites that sell ringtones and the like. So my question is will Ovi replace all these seperate things(catalogs, Download, N-Gage, etc) and will Nokia continue their double standards ( as for N- and E-series) and make it available for all? Or do we all just give up and head over to Apple. I dont wanna do that. I feel loyal to Nokia, albeit let down (a lot)
I held out against buying an iPod until it reached 5th gen - but once it did I bought one and was hooked.
My car is now fully integrated, I use it on the bike and I have a drawer full of various minidisc players, cheap MP3 players and old phones with music capability.
I nearly defected to WM on my last upgrade but got a good enough deal on an E90 to "keep the faith" and I didn't see the point in the iPhone.
However, I was recently with an iPhone owning colleague and I was desparately trying not to be impressed but ignoring the specs it was just so slick.
This download comparison is just another example of why I guess my next phone will probably be an iPhone - Nokia products - are just not "finished" enough.
I'm glad you brought this up. The DOWNLOAD app is appallingly bad. What is such a shame is that Nokia make better phones than the iphone. Their feature set is incredible and in many ways incomparable (Camera, Flickr integration, turn by turn GPS and traffic info with MAPS....) but what Apple have in terms of polish Nokia really do miss out.
It seems as though someone has just hung up his or her coat for the day and left a lot of their software implementation unfinished.
As users become more savvy and expect decent UIs then Nokia better ramp up their game.
It is a shame that download has been available even before apple store announcement (I think), Nokia didn't take interest to bring mainstream users into the world of installing third party software, now Apple comes along yet so much silence in that arena. I wont be surprise if one ignorant person comes up and tell me to get an Iphone/Touch because i can get external applications other than the pre installed Apple applications
I too have been loyal to Nokia but after buying an iPhone and using the App Store for just a few days, I can see that unless Nokia does something real soon and I mean with the quickness, they will lose the game and be so far down the rabbit hole that they will not recover. Sad to say but my new N82 is now relagated to a backup phone.
On my E65, first thing I noticed was "Security" only has F-Secure, not Kaspersky in addition.
What if you hate the S60 Webkit based browser? You gotta use that junk (sorry if anyone likes) to browse to Opera.com , dig it to find Symbian version and install. They didn't bother to put it to "Internet" section. Speaking of Internet, they only put Gizmo, not Fring. What did Fring do to them? They seem to have paid that amazing money to get symbian signed too. They give people ability to use Skype. Is it evil?
Not just lack of titles, there is actual developer discrimination there. For some reason Nokia hates them.
Thanks for the link love! Yes, I leapt on the AAi.net domain, but my number one site for mobile news and well-informed discussion is All About Symbian, and will remain so for a long time I think.
Getting back on-topic, I think Nokia Download suffers from fragmentation (I�m banging on about this, I know). That�s partly Nokia�s self-imposed regional differences, but then on top on that you have carriers restricting what is in their firmware specific version of Download, if the app is even allowed on the device (someone please correct me if I�m wrong).
The generally good experience of Apple�s App Store has surely woken Nokia up to pushing a better on-device application download service. A quick browse through Handango (why haven�t they created an on-device strore I wonder?) shows so many excellent applications for Symbian phones � it�s mostly their route-to-market that needs to be improved IMHO. Although, there is the added complication of S60 (2nd ed., 3rd ed), UIQ and MOAP differentiation to account for.
Matt from allaboutiphone.net
I appears like Nokia would like to sell S30 devices to the end of the universe, but due to faithful users demand they feel somehow forced to do better devices (S60) and they don't feel good with it. Nokia is no more creator in this market, they just stand still and I wonder, if they even look around to see new directions created by others - evolving WM and blasting iPhone. The mess in "Download!" looks like everybody there is out and there's only one left to switch off the lights....
The Applications section on the NSeries mobile site (usually bookmarked out the box in the browser) is quite nice to look and use ... there's not a massive selection but I'm sure that is easily expanded and it's got a few of the favourite ones... it's just a mobile page but it looks nice... get the content in....
Steve, I couldn't agree with you more. Download for me has always appeared to be a complete waste of time in its current structure, with apps which are not really that useful, prices that are not attractive for what they are, and as Bart says, their on-line site don't even show the prices, just Try for Free, and again, as Bart correctly stated, no search, so you cannot look for a specific application you may want, you have to trawl through what's there, page by page.
Im really hoping that Nokia have something up their sleeve however, with the new forums one-for-all username/password structure, so that you can log into several of your Nokia related sites with just one username, and password is a step in the right direction. A long time overdue at that.
Lets hope they will surprise us with something.
Guys (AAS),
William Volk, CEO of MyNuMo one of the leading iPhone web games makers, just posted an interesting message on Forum Oxford at http://openmoodle.conted.ox.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=2447#13315
(reg. required).
I've cross posted here:
"I really think Nokia should consider a webapp portal. This is something they can do right now, the N-Series handsets have a similar webkit browser as the iPhone.
IF Nokia did this I could justify taking our most popular webapps and reworking them for the screen sizes of these phones. As it is now, without a mechanism for discovery it doesn't make economic sense to do so.
I've made overtures to Nokia on this and I am hopeful they will get this."
This is significant, coming from a top iPhone software producer.
Nokia need to get a clue, and fast...
Alex
phonething.com
Nokia Download always seemed boring and very absurd to me.
Whole infrastructure just to try to sell few apps? Hm.
Why did not Nokia partner with some major ditributor (MySymbian, Handango etc). They just did not put enough emotion and thought behind the project.
Heck, even the "Open" Installer.app for the cracked iPhones, which debuted one year ago, was a much better experience. BTW now I have two "Download" clients on my N95 - one was built into ROM, another installed as an update from some beta version. Weird huh.
@ Sergey Zak...
You're spot on when you say we should have 'iSuite for Nokia Phones!' on your blog. 'Download' is poor and the Nokia PC software is generally half arsed. You guys on here presumably know your way around Nokia phones and how to get the best out of them but as a newcomer to all this I found it bewildering. PC Suite, Ovi Suite, Map Loader, Software Updater, N-Series PC Suite, Music Manager, Download, Video Manager.... STOP! All from different links on the Nokia site, some included in suites, some not, some out of date, some current. It's ridiculous.
I thought some of Sony's software development was poorly thought out but Nokia take the biscuit. I imagine different Nokia development teams all working independently of each other. And without each others phone numbers to check what everyone else is up to. Maybe Ovi will be a 'one stop' eventually but in six months from now I can imagine someone in Nokia's marketing department thinking 'Hey, what we need is a new software suite for our phones...' and it all starts again.
What do you make of this? http://www.apps.nokia.co.uk/ Stumbled across it looking for service centres.
Just a page that says 'very soon'?
Not much so far!
Ha ha! True, not very exciting I grant you but it was the combination of 'apps' in the address and Nokia saying 'Very soon...'
Maybe someone in Helsinki has been looking into these new fangled iBone things and kicked some arse? :tongue:
I hope so. Even if you hate the iphone, its probably done a world of good for you in other ways.
If you don't like what Download! has to offer, why don't you go to Nokia Mosh and download apps from there?
http://mosh.nokia.com/
Because its just another website, which the vast majority of users will never know about.