Weekend Read: Nokia Death Spiral
It’s not like we haven’t discussed this enough already, but we’ve got a tip from a couple of readers wanting this shared.
It’s written by Mark Wilcox. I’ve not encountered his work before, nor am I aware of his background but what he puts forward are quite interesting perspectives about the current dire Nokia situation. If you follow or participate in the comment sections here, this won’t be very new to you, but it’s a good read nonetheless.
http://mobilesoftware.tumblr.com/post/27056631536/nokias-downward-spiral
Cheers jiipee and NeNoRmAl for the tip
Category: Nokia
About the Author (Author Profile)
Hey, thanks for reading my post. My name is Jay and I'm a medical student at the University of Manchester. When I can, I blog here at mynokiablog.com and tweet now and again @jaymontano. We also have a twitter and facebook accounts @mynokiablog and Facebook.com/mynokiablog. Check out the tips, guides and rules for commenting >>click<< Contact us at tips(@)mynokiablog.com or email me directly on jay[at]mynokiablog.comSubscribe
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There’s one thing he’s missing. S40 is really appealing. The new Asha devices (305,306,311) are looking really nice. They’re not full on smartphones, but they offer a lot of what smartphones provide, at a fraction of the cost. Nokia’s still the largest manufacturer as far as unit shipments go, and that’s almost entirely S40.
The C3 is one of the best selling devices where I am, and if Nokia can get the 302 out in its place, they’ll do very well. Same with getting the 311 out where the C5 and 500 were before. Put the 311 up against any sub-$150 Android and the 311 clearly wins.
Now I could understand that if this guy isn’t hugely interested in Nokia to begin with, and is more concerned with business in general that he might overlook how good S40 is turning out to be, but I can’t fathom why a lot of supposed Nokia fans are ignoring this as well.
the new ashas does look nice. but i dont know how the app situation is with s40. are they good?
Given the general use of smartphones, the app situation isn’t a huge deal at that price point. Apps on a $150 Android are pretty miserable too. The thing with the new Ashas is they have a nice UI, taking a good number of things from the N9, and run stable and smooth. That’s something the Lumia 610 can also say.
Given availablity, I’d recommend an Asha 302 or 311 over any low end Android every time. Unfortunately, Nokia hasn’t got their distribution muscle going (or they’ve still got a bunch of unsold stock of C3s out there).
Nokia has a great opportunity to deliver a consistently good experience to people who really can’t afford to shell out more for a higher end smartphone. This will be further supported by the fact that WP8 won’t go down that low any time soon. Anything lower than ICS with a dual core CPU on Android isn’t really a good phone, and looking at current device prices, it’s not going to go below $250 any time soon.
i dont know about rest of the world but atleast in india and uae.customers with a budget of over 6000rs/500 dhs simply buys an android phone eyes closed.nobody gives a flying f**k about symbian /wp/s40 and whatever other existing.
Symbian failed totally in countering android low ends then how on earth s40 is gonna take down. nobody cares of it.android phones are reaching the bottom price point with galaxy pocket/micromax a45/lg new cookie phone etc.series 40 will be dead in a year or two.
S40 isn’t targetted at people with a budget over a certain range, it’s targeted at people with a budget under a certain range, so your point doesn’t apply.
and what i mentioned is android is coming under that budget.also price of device like 302 overlap with galaxy y.i believe 311 will cost as much as htc explorer.
You both make good points. S40 does have some merit in the very low-end, possibly a smoother experience than a cheap Android and so on.
But also it faces the problem of disconnect with another ecosystem. Whereas cheap Android benefits from he continuity all the way to a Galaxy S III, S40 has no such benefit with Windows Phone – nor the perception of a lot of apps.
So, Nokia indeed does have their work cut out for them in this space too. We’ll see.
Well that is an opportunity in itself. Talking of ecosystem. I’m not an app developer, but if people sign on with a Nokia account at S40, they should still have all their apps available all the way up to WP or Belle
You don’t even need to go Nokia Store even if it’s the better start. All the other Stores all over internet providing java apps are just good enough, like http://www.getjarcom or m.getjar.com.
I think Meltemi could have been the real challenger to the lowcost android phones. Now Nokia will need to make an extra effort for java development.
S40 have plenty of apps and some are very very good apps.
Its called Java apps.
You can make pretty what you want with Java ME. It is a virtual machine just like Dalvik or those from iOS and Windows Phone.
It is only Symbian, Meego and to some extent Android if not using Dalvik that are able to run native stuff. iOS and WP are unable whatever you ask for and so need lots of huge hardware specs and Android native apps have one version for every kind of hardware.
So S40 is not worse than iOS, WP, Android, only worse than Symbian/Meego and Ashas have pretty same hardware as Symbian^3 so run java apps at the same speed.
No!
Seriously you cannot be a developer.
Java ME is a development environment that stopped getting better about 6 or 7 years ago and it was never very good, standards process just took too long.
iOS does not have a virtual machine, Objective-C is compiled to native binaries, not interpreted.
Dalvik virtual machine is also really quite different from the traditional Sun style JVM/KVM architecture.
Unless someone does something pretty amazing with the Java runtime on S40 then that platform will not be able to compete with similarly priced competitors for apps by a very long way.
J2ME apps often ended up being better than Symbian counterparts, but I guess that says more about Symbian’s failings than J2ME’s strengths.
I have to agree with Mark to an extent on this one.
However, I must add that Nokia did add some nice stuff on top of it with the first Touch and Type devices – and seem to have done even more with Asha touch. So, I’d say it is still getting better at Nokia.
Beyond that, I’m no longer qualified to comment. Haven’t been paying nearly enough attention to this space.
S40 has much much more existing apps than WP. It’s called Java Me. This is also a misconception about Symbian. Symbian had its native apps and also could handle java Apps, even huge ones that old series of S30 and S40 couldn’t. Java ME takes care of everything. On tactile phones it shows a virtual keyboard for old keyboard apps, for dual touch it holds and uses these functionalities and the latter S40 from Nokia have more RAM and 1Ghz ARM CPU which make those apps as good as on Symbian^3.
In fact Java is a virtual machine like Dalvik on Android, that of iOS and WP, and so S40 is more close to those OS than to Symbian who is superior in also running native apps with great compatibility which Android does not so well.
The amount of existing Java Me apps is probably the most extensive of all mobile systems.
I concur, and I’ve metnioned S40 all along. I think that might be another chance for Nokia, and the videos on the web look good. But, as arts is pointing out, I’m not sure about the app situation.
agreed and winrt directly into phones?? It may be due to high consumptions of resources of ram and etc. so they are using win rt lite.. just guessing
im wondering on that.greg sullivan in an interview has told that m.s dont have any plans for mutual strategy of wp 7.x and wp8.x.
No, WinRT could run on current hardware, it’s just that it wouldn’t run *well* on current hardware. There’s no WinRT lite, they just jacked up the minimum specs to run WinRT smoothly.
if thats so nokia’s mid range and low end smartphone sales will get f**ked up.people will not buy wp7 devices.
Not necessarily. As long as they can keep 610NFC level hardware selling at significantly cheaper than dual core ICS or better hardware with Android they’ll be fine.
That’s unknown, it could just be the effort in re-writing the drivers for the current WinCE class QUALCOMM chips that could be the issue.
Having had some experience of this in the past its no mean feat.
I’m running Windows 8 CP on a Netbook with a 1.6GHz Atom and 1GB of RAM. That’s slightly more than 512MB RAM for most WP7 phones, and given architecture differences, 1.6GHz Atom vs 1.4GHz S2 is pretty much a wash. It runs, but it lags at times. Rather like Android (which I’ve also gotten running on the same hardware). Since it would only be WinRT, the 512MB RAM would probably be the same as 1GB including legacy support.
While rewriting the drivers certainly is a problem, I don’t think that solving just that would be enough to get WinRT running smoothly.
Your on W8CP ? Chuck W8 Release Preview on it and let us know. CP is not known to be “optimised”. I would say 1.6ghtz atom is way faster than S2.
Some specs are putting S4 Dual core at 4x S2 apparently.
Run sunspider or browsermark(chrome) or java single core linpack and let us know your results.
Just to say I’ve run W8RP on 700Mhtz with 1gb RAM it was still very nippy.
I’m trying to get RP stable on my MB at the moment. I’ll give a shot with RP on the netbook for interests sake if I’m successful, or out of necessity if I’m not.
I think you’ll have more luck on the netbook from what I’m hearing, state of MB drivers etc.
I think a Atom 1.6Ghtz will be the min spec for it to be usable and also you will want to use mostly the Metro apps as they seem more suited to a constrained environment.
Seems quite hard to get a real grip on what specs will be acceptable for W8 as none of the mobile phone benchmarks seem to really fully utilise the HW. Maybe OS constraints coming into play ?
You can see this for example SGIIvsSG3 sunspider0.9.1 SGII=1753,SG3=1424 lower is better, QC 1.4Ghtz vs DC 1.2Ghtz and only a 23% improvement.
Guess we will have to wait and see with W8.
Also have you seen the articles : http://www.wpcentral.com/experiment-19-how-windows-nt-was-streamlined-windows-phone-8
stating that WP8′s kernel is in fact FASTER than WP7.5′s kernel ?
Asha is brilliant. WP is a valid third player in the ecosystem. It has it’s own unique feel with tiles. Quite tidy looking if you don’t want fussy home screens and a sea of app buttons
That is a nice thing with WP, for sure. Also the consistent design language they’ve encouraged with apps. That said, my favourite thing with WP is that it hardly ever crashes. Android, Symbian, iOS, and BBOS were nowhere near as stable. (PBOS2 is pretty close though, and it’s more a case of limited multitasking requiring me to restart at some point rather than a full on crash).