sandy_1988 wrote:
@ Tzer2,
Why does these last minute technical hitches happen to Nokia only? Other companies these days do unveil their services on fixed date, why can't Nokia?
The answer is... they don't happen to Nokia only. It happens to all companies.
Which company has unveiled ALL their services on a fixed date, and has never EVER had anything slip? No company has ever been perfect like that, though they may seem that way if they don't ever announce dates to the public until something is finished.
Take game consoles for example: The PS3 was a year late coming to Europe. The Xbox 360 shipped on time but early models had to be replaced because they destroyed people's DVDs and overheated easily. The Nintendo Wii shipped on time and worked, but the supplies were so limited that most potential customers couldn't buy one until about a year after the launch.
To be honest I think Nokia's mistake was simply to put a date on something they hadn't got ready yet, and they've probably learned their lesson as none of the game releases or the 5320 app had any kind of pre-release announcement. If they stop giving out dates then by your standards there would be no delays.
Also bear in mind that N-Gage is a very ambitious thing, something that's never been done before: an online multiplayer phone gaming platform across many different devices simultaneously.
Launching a software platform on one device is comparatively easy, but to make a platform that can be used across potentially dozens or hundreds of different models (and even PCs too) is a much bigger task. AFAIK no one else is even trying to do what Nokia is doing now, so it's not exactly fair to compare them to other companies.
In recent times, only things related to this industry that I have seen to be delayed are games and Nokia's N-Gage.
If you actually saw behind the scenes you'd see the mobile industry is full of delays.
The iPhone was apparently supposed to launch in 2006 but it wasn't working properly, which caused a year's delay. The public didn't find out about this because the phone was kept secret until it was 100% ready. It seemed like the iPhone came out on time, but in reality it was greatly delayed.
If Nokia had kept N-Gage secret until it was 100% ready it would have seemed like it came out on time too. The only reason it seems delayed is because Nokia told us about it in advance.
Why on earth did they not develop the N-Gage application first and then go for games?
They did, the prototype app was on show way back in 2005 and 2006.
The problem is that the target hardware keeps changing in the phone world, and since the app was originally written there have been many new hardware and OS versions.
It also takes a long time to write good games, Reset Generation and Creatures Of The Deep were in development for about two years.
If Nokia got the app ready and THEN wrote the games, either the games would have to be very bad, or the app would be out of date by the time the games were ready.