Tomi gives Forbes a good rollicking

Yes, that phone had impressive innovations, in particular the size of its screen, touch-screen interface and accelerometers, all which have been since copied also (not touch-screen clearly yet as well) by Nokia.

The N95, which had been revealed to be released prior iPhone 2G, already has an accelerometer.

Wow, that is one hell of a rant.
He focuses a little too much on the iphone's "innovations" but I can see where he is coming from. Apple are famous for their advertising and hype, and they usually copy existing technologies whilst jealously patenting and coveting their own. What they do well is offer a good user experience and support, and people react to that.

> Has he bought Nokia stock options and now needs to push the stock price lower?

Eh? Why would he do that?

Does he mean to suggest that the stock was "shorted"? That would make sense.

davidmaxwaterma wrote:> Has he bought Nokia stock options and now needs to push the stock price lower?

Eh? Why would he do that?

Does he mean to suggest that the stock was "shorted"? That would make sense.

On topic:

As usual for Tomi's pices, it was a good read. He even missed some of the dumb parts in the Forbes article, like the "30$ iPhones in China" (Chinese networks don't subsidize handsets!).

I think Tomi is missing the point.

Apple has never competed in terms of technical specification. Remember their ads from the late 1980s where they declared that the most powerful computer wasn't measured in MIPS, MHz, or RAM, but in whether people used it. That's Apple's philosophy with the iPhone, and something that Nokia doesn't seem to understand.

It's one thing to install a smartphone OS on tens of millions of low- to mid-range devices and claim the largest market share. It's another thing to get people to use the phones the way they were intended. For all its faults, the original iPhone was the first to make it very easy to browse the web, check weather and stock prices, find your location on a map, and buy music over the air. Yes, you could do it on other phones before then, but Apple made it easy for a novice. In typical Apple fashion, successive designs have kept the ease of use while adding the features that "power users" expected.

Nokia missed the boat on touch screens, plain and simple. Sure, they tried it early on, but quickly abandoned it and clung to the notion that people didn't want them because they couldn't be used with one hand. 2 years after getting started with S60 Touch, they release a rather uninspired OS that doesn't offer many of the promised innovations, looks dated, and still manages to break compatibility. It's as if innovation ended with the N95. That was a truly remarkable phone when announced, and even today remains competitive. Since then, Nokia has put out several rehashes and variants (N96, N79, N85) but nothing really "new." Even the N97 feels like little more than an N95 with a touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard. In other words, it would have been extraordinary 2 years ago but looks like an also-ran now.

I think that's why Forbes described it as Nokia's "Motorola Moment." Back in 2005, Motorola described its strategy for growth as producing "more RAZRs". It seems that Nokia's in 2009 is "more N95s".

Unregistered wrote:The N95, which had been revealed to be released prior iPhone 2G, already has an accelerometer.

But Nokia didn't think to use it to change the screen orientation until later.

"it's a rant against the US-centric media"

Which is why the story has a London dateline and features comments from 2 analysts in the UK.

Unregistered wrote:"it's a rant against the US-centric media"

Which is why the story has a London dateline and features comments from 2 analysts in the UK.

Nice reply, but Forbes itself is very American and the article was written to appeal to USA vanities. And the UK firms weren't quoted with much useful text. Parmy may have been in London, but she's an American. Worse, she's a young American with no 'feel' for the ups and downs of the mobile world over the last 15 years.

slitchfield wrote:Nice reply, but Forbes itself is very American and the article was written to appeal to USA vanities. And the UK firms weren't quoted with much useful text. Parmy may have been in London, but she's an American. Worse, she's a young American with no 'feel' for the ups and downs of the mobile world over the last 15 years.

As an American who has lived in London, I can say that living overseas gives one a feel for the international perspective. Anyway, Forbes is right in that the iPhone is the phone that every other phone is compared to. Nokia may have stabilized its market share by going further downmarket, but the trend isn't their friend. That isn't to say Nokia can't get it back. They were down a few years ago, but the going is a bit tougher now.

I feel like he missed the point too. Now remember i'm a nokia fan using a 5800 and very much like my phone. However the point is the the iphone made smartphones easy to use, look pretty, and appeal to the average joe installing apps. 3rd party apps is what nokia has been trying to drive home for years to regular users, and apple walked in and made it happen seemingly in the blink of a mobile industry's eye (in terms of 1 year). Thats something nokia only dreamed of doing. I know iphone is still lacking, i.e. Multi tasking. But look at the bigger picture, average person knows what an app store is and are using it. Nokia had that horrible downloads app, and for years us nokia fans complained to nokia to make something out of it. Put good apps in it and sell it to users. But they did nothing, all the while saying their phones are "open to anything".

This guy's rebuttal is justified and i feel his pain, we all sit here and scream "nokia phones have done that for years!" But the iphone have it a smooth interface that's fluid, fun to use and easy to use. Nokia is just too stubborn and stuck in their ways, THAT'S their "motorola" moment.

Now i like s60, but what has nokia been doing for the last 2-3 years since the iphone? Why is the symbian foundation only just NOW beginning to change the OS? And yet we still won't see a change in UI for another couple years. So that's half a decade it takes nokia to respond to apple with a pretty touch screen OS. What happened to those touch videos we saw in 2007? All the sensor API stuff? They showed those videos with the implication that that's what the n97 would be. And here we are 2 years later with an n97 and all that new stuff groit coming till 2012! That's what this guy is not getting, its not the features.

Nokia hasn't innovated anything since 2006-2007.

[QUOTE=KPO'M;428883]I think Tomi is missing the point.

Apple has never competed in terms of technical specification. Remember their ads from the late 1980s where they declared that the most powerful computer wasn't measured in MIPS, MHz, or RAM, but in whether people used it. That's Apple's philosophy with the iPhone, and something that Nokia doesn't seem to understand.

[/QUOTE]

This is where I think Apple miss the point. I've got better things to do than use a computer, any computer - including one that wastes coding time and processor cycles performing eye candy effects designed to attract me into using it. I use a computer much like I use a pair of scissors, pick it up, do a job, put it down and then go and do something with PEOPLE.

As for the innovations, lets look:

Big screen? Means a big phone, less portable. A backward step in my opinion. Seems other manufacturers including Nokia now think it's OK to go back to making huge slab phones.

Multi-touch? One of the reasons the phone needs a big screen and now we need two hands to do things that used to need only one. FAIL.

It doesn't say much for our western society that a company can sucker so many people into falling in love with an electronic gadget.

Gotta go, got better things to do.

I can remember in 2004 when the US press was saying almost identical things about Nokia because Motorola was doing so well with the RAZR. There was talk that Motorola would overtake Nokia globally because of the RAZR being some kind of market-changing feat of innovation (which it wasn't, it was actually just a trendy fad phone with a sleek casing and little else).

The US media in 2004 made exactly the same mistakes then as now, assuming that the US mobile market was somehow representative of the global market (which it isn't AT ALL) and that any trendy expensive device was somehow representative of the mobile market as a whole (which it also isn't, even in the US most people buy low-end mobile phones, not high end ones).

Now five years later Nokia's market share hasn't gone away at all, yet Motorola's share has collapsed and Moto is being used by Forbes et al as an example of how NOT to do business.

The truth is that Apple's mobile success has been strongest in the areas where Nokia was already weak before Apple even entered the business. The iPhone has done really well in America, but Nokia was already in fourth or fifth place there before the iPhone was even announced. So no matter how well the iPhone did in the States it was never going to take much market share away from Nokia because Nokia's US market share simply didn't exist to be taken away.

Nokia's top three customers are Europe, China and India. For Apple or anyone else to seriously harm Nokia they would have to be taking share away in those markets, NOT the United States. So far Apple hasn't really made any kind of serious dent in those places, especially not in India or China.

The N95, which had been revealed to be released prior iPhone 2G, already has an accelerometer.

...and the Nokia 5500 had an accelerometer in 2006, almost a year before the first iPhone. Plus I'm sure Nokia wasn't the first, I bet some other manufacturer in Asia had one even before that.

In general Apple isn't really innovative with hardware at all. I'm amazed people talk about others playing catchup with Apple, when Apple was the one that launched the iPhone with no 3G, no autofocus, no video calling, no video recording, no third party applications, no Flash web browsing, no MMS, no TV Out, no turn-by-turn navigation, no laptop tethering, primitive Bluetooth etc. etc.

That's not a criticism of the iPhone, it's just an attempt to put its achievements in perspective: it has a great interface, but its hardware and feature set has been consistently weak compared to rivals.

Good post Tzer2, I fully agree. Apple have basically produced the same device for 2 years but with extra features, and people complain about the dual slider N95 successors! Nokia may not have matched the iphones excellent touchscreen experience, but why should it jump into an attempt to develop an iphone beater when it has a range of handsets that cater to all tastes? Slowly slowly Nokia and Samsung and SE are creeping up on Apple. The next couple of years are going to be very interesting.

The comments really give good perceptions.

My Take:

1. US media is biased, Very true - this is like any home grown media (European, British or even Indian). The truth is we hardly get unbiased coverage these days.
2. A strong and aggressive market leader cannot be written off with a single stroke of pseudo-analysis from anybody
3. Regarding Nokia and India: Nokia has been the most trusted company in Indian mindshare for two consecutive years. So yes, India is a big market.
4. Apple has never looked at India as a business oppurtunilty. The moment Setev Jobs turn his eyes around India and launched an iPhone at the right Indian price. I�m sure Nokia will take a beating.
5. The very reason our NUMERIC key pad has been replaced by QWERTY/TOUCH based keyboard emphasis the fact that we have STARTED USING MOBILE PHONES DIFFERENTLY.
6. It�s just a matter of time before all users switch to this mode. Nobody wants less. It�s just that some have more access to �MORE�.

Conclusion: Nokia especially S60 needs a turn-around (This will be the single differentiating factor in the times to come). Because profits come from higher margins than selling more pieces.

But thats the point! Nokia has a type of phone that caters to every person and form factor, so why not objec high end touch competitor to the iphone? Nokia has the resources and experience to do it. So why not keep their existing strategy, and add high end touch to it? Thats kinda the point here. The two are not mutually exclusive. It doesn't mean nokia has to completely change their portfolio and throw away all their current handsets. They just need to add one more level to capture that market share too. Because i think there's a lot of potential there and nokia could do such a good job at it if they just made the attempt. Instead it seems they are sitting back idle.

Well, maybe Tomi is not all right or all wrong. After all, honestly, since the N95 8G, what really, really fantastic and innovative phone has Nokia created? Nothing that can be honestly called groundbreaking.

Maybe Tomi is a case of can't see the trees for the forest. If he's such a Nokia insider, maybe he can't see it the way consumers see it...it IS slightly parallel to what happened to Motorola...slipping percentage of market share, rehashing the N95 into different shapes and sizes (RAZR), but...where's the NEW Nokia?

Maybe, if you think about it, keeping the N series and E series, Nokia is painting themselves into a box, the way Motorola did with the RAZR phones, maybe it's time to come up with a new series or some other radical idea to blow the competition out of the water.

I'm not defending the article (it was stupid in my opinion), but I do think there is a valid point that Nokia may be treading water and not realize it yet.

Bloggers like Tomi make Nokia look even worse, that really was not cool at all.
Just a hysterical personal attack on the journalists. Mad people don't know when to stop ranting, he does sound mad here.

Forbes is correct to say Nokia is lagging, many discussions here about using 2-year old tech in the N97 "flagship". The analyst quoted makes the point many fans and reviewers have made.

it is lagging in perception and lagging for real with User Experience. Apple has captured the imagination, use a Pre or a Hero if you want a Forbes is correct to say Nokia is lagging, many discussions here about using 2-year old tech in the N97 "flagship".
-of-the-art modern mobile UI. All so nice and easy to use.

Asians like Samsung and LG have responded better and faster than Nokia.

Tzer the point is Nokia makes some great tech but it is all very predictable, they are risk averse and the consumer in India or China can see that today. You put bets on where a company is going not jus where it has come from.

Lots of people (the Register) were saying this for 1-2 years so it is nothing new.

Why is everyone so concerned about how Nokia do business? Go out there, check out the products available and buy the one you want. If it's a Nokia or not a Nokia so be it. I don't see the point in anyone sweating about it unless you are a Nokia board exec, then that's their business not mine.

gibberishy wrote:Maybe Tomi is a case of can't see the trees for the forest. If he's such a Nokia insider, maybe he can't see it the way consumers see it...it IS slightly parallel to what happened to Motorola...slipping percentage of market share, rehashing the N95 into dWifferent shapes and sizes (RAZR), but...where's the NEW Nokia?.

Tomi completely ignores why Nokia share price crashed: the profit margins are lower and falling faster than anyone expected.

And Nokia is stuck with old-looking clunky S60 for 2 more years.

Without high profit margins it is another cheap manufacturer that does no innovation.

Unregistered wrote:Tomi completely ignores why Nokia share price crashed:.

You completely ignore the fact that the Nokia share price hasn't crashed.

I think Nokia faces an automatic level of criticism as market leader, but rarely gets a commensurate level of credit. Comparisons with Motorola and Sony Ericsson would put Nokia in a good light for example. Of course you can counter that they the old-school rivals... Even so much of Nokia's business is still about competing with them (and Samsung, LG etc etc.). I suppose the issue is that Nokia also faces off against HTC, Apple, RIM, Google, Microsoft as the mobile market evolves and this is the bit that attracts most attention / comment (and is obviously key going forward)...

Writing off innovation at Nokia because they've done little in the UI space is just a bit short sighted (and not completely true anyway). There's a lot of other parts of mobile (consider the chipset agnostic strategy, the move to open source, Series 40 Webkit browser, Qt acquisition and strategy, work coming out of the research labs, Ovi services (not perfect by any means, but is any other company do a similar scope on their own).

To take the Symbian Foundation as an example - what do you suppose the media response would be if Google, Apple or Microsoft took something fundamental to their business and did one of the biggest contributions to open source (10+ million lines of code) ever... and them matched that with a foundation that has a governance and contribution model that puts OHA to shame.

That aside it is interesting to see Symbian / S60 getting widely criticised. Aside from drawing a distinction between Symbian and S60 (which is a technical one, and doesn't matter so much to end users) there's also a failure to differentiate between touch (5.0) and non-touch (3.2) S60. Non-touch S60 is dominant in its segment, but it intends to be ignored (because of the hype about touch).

S60 5th Edition has its issues as have been widely discussed, but the 5800 should certainly give some pause for thought (there's an obsession with UI and UX - and yes it is very important - but you can't ignore the less sexy factors like cost and operator distribution / logistics).

Moreover Nokia is actively working on its other touch platform (Maemo). Nor is it a secret that S60 in it touch and hybrid version will get a makeover (late 2010). There's continuous development from all parties, so it is dangerous to make sweeping statement about any company, especially when they have a strong current market position.

Does Nokia face threats? Yes, of course, it is arguably facing its most competitive environment ever. Is Nokia slow to turn - yes - I think past history demonstrates this amply (flip / thin / touch trends). How much does that matter? Are they improving this? Is it 'open / co-operative' strategy stronger / weaker that Apple's 'closed / do everything oursleves' model? Can Google build Android success past the success of the association with Google? Can Microsoft evolve and effective, mass market consumer strategy for mobile? What role about the smaller low-cost Asian ODMs? What about Samsung and LG (bigger, but similar cost saving potential). How will this all play out against the increasing connectedness and convergence of mobile, Internet and media? These are far more interesting questions.

Yes can see that some of this criticism is over dramatic. But there's always some truth behind those criticisms.

A good idea might be for nokia to add a high level tier on top of their existing E/N series phones, and this new high end level could be a combined e and n series phone. People will pay for this. Its about time nokia stopped this artificial segregation and stopped cherry picking features just for the sake of a device's "intent".

They purposely do stuff like lower the video recording frame rate to 15fps and claim "business phone" when it could easily have 30fps. Nokia CONSTANTLY cherry picks features. This needs to stop.

And finally, they need to make the "perfect device". I'm sick of hearing that this is not possible cause nobody will buy the other handsets. This is nonsense. Of course the other phones will still sell. Make one true 800 dollar phone with everything, xenon, etc. Only the high end people will buy this. And the average joe who wants a regular priced phone will still want the 300 dollar mid level phone with the average camera. Its silly to claim that they won't make the perfect device cause it will cannibalize all others. Nonsense. By NOT doing this the only people nokia is hurting is their faithful high end customers.

And besides, if they made that perfect device they could theoretically sell so many units that they would make a killing in sales profits. And there would always be the next device in 6 months that could improve upon, which people would move to when released. So enough with this artificially cherry picked "flagship" excuse and just add a top end super phone already! Do it, you'll only make money😊

Wow, Roger you make it sound so easy. And I'm sure such a device (possible or not) would cost more than $800.....

Unregistered wrote:This is where I think Apple miss the point. I've got better things to do than use a computer, any computer - including one that wastes coding time and processor cycles performing eye candy effects designed to attract me into using it. I use a computer much like I use a pair of scissors, pick it up, do a job, put it down and then go and do something with PEOPLE.

As for the innovations, lets look:

Big screen? Means a big phone, less portable. A backward step in my opinion. Seems other manufacturers including Nokia now think it's OK to go back to making huge slab phones.

Multi-touch? One of the reasons the phone needs a big screen and now we need two hands to do things that used to need only one. FAIL.

It doesn't say much for our western society that a company can sucker so many people into falling in love with an electronic gadget.

Gotta go, got better things to do.

You sound a lot like the GM apologists in the 1980s and 1990s. "If only consumers knew what was best for them, they wouldn't like the competition." The fact of the matter is, multi-touch makes the iPhone a lot easier to use. It would be useful on the N97, which is narrower and more pocketable than the iPhone. It's a more natural motion for resizing a browser.

Plus, who decided that everything needs to be done with one hand? For calling, etc. iPhone can be used with one hand. Messaging, browsing, etc. are often two-handed tasks, so why not optimize the device for two-handed use? Nokia does that with much of the E-Series.

Also, Apple does make a lot of tasks easier to perform. That's why people like them. Changing settings, starting an application, finding a bookmark require fewer steps on the iPhone than on the nested menu-driven S60 interface.

This isn't to suggest that iPhone is a perfect device or that all phones need to look like it. However, all smartphone manufacturers can learn something from what Apple has done. Some, like Palm and RIM, seem to be taking the message.

[QUOTE=KPO'M;429001]You sound a lot like the GM apologists in the 1980s and 1990s. "If only consumers knew what was best for them, they wouldn't like the competition." The fact of the matter is, multi-touch makes the iPhone a lot easier to use. It would be useful on the N97, which is narrower and more pocketable than the iPhone. It's a more natural motion for resizing a browser.

Plus, who decided that everything needs to be done with one hand? For calling, etc. iPhone can be used with one hand. Messaging, browsing, etc. are often two-handed tasks, so why not optimize the device for two-handed use? Nokia does that with much of the E-Series.

Also, Apple does make a lot of tasks easier to perform. That's why people like them. Changing settings, starting an application, finding a bookmark require fewer steps on the iPhone than on the nested menu-driven S60 interface.

This isn't to suggest that iPhone is a perfect device or that all phones need to look like it. However, all smartphone manufacturers can learn something from what Apple has done. Some, like Palm and RIM, seem to be taking the message.[/QUOTE]

Apologist? I have no loyalty to any brand, I will buy what suits me. However, I am not suckered by superficial eye candy and pretty things that have no substance or point. A lot of stuff that Apple has made easier to use is stuff that people just don't need and wouldn't miss if they didn't have it. Emperors new clothes. That'll cost you a thousand bucks over the next 2 years. Sucker.

Apple are the sugar-candy of the phone world. Nokia make the bread and staple.

Tzer2 wrote:I can remember in 2004 when the US press was saying almost identical things about Nokia because Motorola was doing so well with the RAZR. There was talk that Motorola would overtake Nokia globally because of the RAZR being some kind of market-changing feat of innovation (which it wasn't, it was actually just a trendy fad phone with a sleek casing and little else).

The difference is Apple isn't Motorola, and the iPhone isn't a fad. Motorola never really changed the RAZR, and just kept rehashing it. Apple is continually improving the iPhone, and, importantly, is making many of the improvements available to owners of older iPhones. This has allowed them to maintain premium pricing. iPhone sales have been growing solidly and the popularity of the iTunes store is undeniable. It gets back to the point that Apple is able to do what everyone else says they would like to. On the PC side, Microsoft said for years it wanted the PC to become the media hub at home, and even developed the Windows Media PC specs, which has struggled. Apple developed the iPod, iTunes, Apple TV, and Mac Mini and made it happen. On the mobile phone side, Nokia and others have said they want the phone to become a services-oriented device, and have developed concepts such as Ovi, which have struggled after years of investment. Apple made it happen within 2 years of iPhone's release.

The iphone has been a success because of hype and the ipod branding which follows on from the ipod's own success. Touchscreen on mobiles is a fad and will fare better in the long run on devices like the ipod touch and dedicated media players, already more and more companies are turning to qwerty keyboards on handsets.
Try using the iphone's interface to text after a few drinks.. 😊
I'm also flabbergasted as to how much stick Nokia has been getting over the N97. Are people saying that combining a touchscreen interface with a qwerty keyboard and a 5mp camera isn't innovative?

Unregistered wrote:Apologist? I have no loyalty to any brand, I will buy what suits me. However, I am not suckered by superficial eye candy and pretty things that have no substance or point. A lot of stuff that Apple has made easier to use is stuff that people just don't need and wouldn't miss if they didn't have it. Emperors new clothes. That'll cost you a thousand bucks over the next 2 years. Sucker.

Apple are the sugar-candy of the phone world. Nokia make the bread and staple.

What is it about the iPhone that is easy to use that people wouldn't miss if it had never been introduced? Web browsing? Maps? Are these the types of things that people wouldn't miss if they weren't so easy to use? If so, then why did Nokia and everyone else provide mobile browsers and mapping software before? Music? If so, then why did Nokia enable their phones to play media files?

Plus, this "$1000 over two years" is disingenuous to say the least. First, even a cheap mobile phone with a basic voice plan costs $1000 over two years in the US (basic postpaid voice is $40/month for about 400-600 minutes and weekends). Apple's data plan for the iPhone is $30/month, and $40 for enterprise plans, which are exactly the same as what AT&T charges for similar phones such as BlackBerry and Windows Media devices. Why did carriers spend billions of dollars on all those 3G licenses 10 years ago? Don't you think they want people to spend the extra money on the data network? iPhone is attractive to them because it finally gets people using and paying for the services that they developed.

Yes, mobile phone voice plans are a little cheaper in Europe and pre-paid plans are more popular than they are here, but at the end of the day, the differential isn't that much (I have had postpaid contracts in the US and UK - the main tangible difference I saw was the greater selection of phones in the UK, rather than the monthly cost).