Staska – Symbian not smartphone, but smarter phone?

Here is a long but an interesting read from Staska of UnwiredView.

http://www.unwiredview.com/2012/04/18/nokia-didnt-have-any-smartphones-until-late-2011-only-smarter-phones-and-whats-a-smartphone-anyway/

He discusses whether Symbian phones were ever ‘smartphones’ or ‘smarter phones’, and how Nokia was disrupted. Staska says Nokia knew far in advanced what mobile phones were transitioning into (mobile computers) but allowed their own cash cow (Symbian) to strangle Nokia’s answer to iOS (Maemo – which was too good for the definition of simply smartphone, it was a genius pocket computer.).

I guess it depends on the definition of smartphones. Technically, yes it is. Even the likes of the 5530 are technically smartphones. Smartphone may mean different things to different people. With time, expectations change and the new categories of devices need to step up to meet those expectations. For a long, long while when Symbian was king, it was setting the trends. But suddenly, expectations of what smartphones were supposed to do changed – and it changed in areas where Symbian, despite all of it’s features, could not catch up quickly enough. Nokia recognized this hence why for years they had a migration path to Maemo which they threw away in the bin.

What has also most definitely changed is the consumer – smartphones were no longer just for ‘smart people’ aka the geeks, but for your everyday non-techie person too. People may not have appreciated purely features but first, being able to use the phone easily, even if it meant a trade off on features.

Controversially, you may remember Staska previously wrote that  he believes the reason Symbian crashed was Android eating Symbian’s sales.

Android’s smartphones – were they more attractive purchases than Nokia’s smarter phones?  Do you agree that only now is Nokia making the transition from mobile phones to smartphones with WP?

What is a smartphone? Does the definition matter anywhere apart from marketshare stats? Are consumers wanting a smartphone or a smarter phone or a phone that is just intuitive, does what they want to very well and by virtue also happens to be a smartphone (e.g. Nokia N9, intuitive, beautiful, simple, does core smartphone things well)?

Source: .unwiredview.com via @Bharadc23

Category: Nokia