News - What the hell is going on at Nokia?

[HEXUS]

No sooner does the Finnish handset giant replace its CEO, than its smartphone guru decides to call it a day.

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[AGTDenton]

How times have changed,
A decade ago anyone who didnt own a Nokia was thought of as strange.
Now if you own a Nokia you tend to be thought of as behind the times.

Nokia used to have a really good interface designer but it would appear he also left the company, I hate using newer Nokia's. I have both an old & a new Nokia and if it wasn't for the fact I get free calls on my work phone I would use my old one every time. Having used a Nokia touch screen phone, it's nothing on Apple's or Google's.

My next phone will be something else.

[Stringent]

MeeGo and Symbian^4 are make/break for Nokia. Shame he didn't want to see this through, and I must say the pic Hexus has of him is slightly more flattering than the one over another tech website.

[miniyazz]

I tend to feel that Nokia would be doing better now if they started using Android instead of proprietary OSs, as people will stick with what they like - and that is now starting to be Android phones. And still being Nokia, they won't lose significant sales from people who will stick with them because they 'like Nokias'.

[joshwa]

I'd expect Android margins (profit) for handset makers to be continually in decline as everyone starts making and selling them... Acer, Dell, etc

The new CEO has improved stock value... and Nokia are still doing well financially, despite all the negativity online. However, I do agree, the head of mobile announcing it just before Nokia World is a little strange, although saying that he does have another 6 months "notice" to work.

[Funkstar]

Nokie still do a very good job at competing with BlackBerry's. Their E series don't use a lot of power, have physical keyboard/keypads and sync with Exchange. We use that at work and as far as i know they work well.

[TheAnimus]

joshwa, nokia at the moment are seeing falling market share, been pushed into the lower profit areas.

However they are still able to turn a small profit on these. But go back 10 years and they were the top dog, the idea of them been displaced was foolish. It all came from a hard to maintain, hard to dev on OS, which they made series of screw up after screw up with.

All the time as well the talk of the "linux phone" was laughed at, the linux kernel been very bad in so many ways required for a mobile device (battery life been the clear number one), it also required seperate hardware processors for radio etc. The Symbian OS was just far better, so I think Nokia got complacent at laughing off the competition.

[aidanjt]

I tend to feel that Nokia would be doing better now if they started using Android instead of proprietary OSs, as people will stick with what they like - and that is now starting to be Android phones. And still being Nokia, they won't lose significant sales from people who will stick with them because they 'like Nokias'.

Maemo, now merged into Meego, aren't proprietary OSes, in fact, they're both using a proper Linux userspace rather than Android/Java userspace, thus the n900 is about the most tinkerable phone on the market (so it's very popular with Linux destkop users, and EVE players for e.g.). Apple's iOS is a proprietary OS and it has the highest collective sales of any smartphone.

The vast majority of consumers are mindless idiots who eat up whatever sales campaign is thrown their way, and Apple's marketing department is much bigger than their legal department, and probably engineering department too, given the flammability/explodability/overall poor engineering of their products. They certainly wont be concerned about whether or not they can tinker with their phone.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand, I'm not even sure what all this hoohaa about Nokia is for, they're still experiencing growth, albeit that growth is diminishing. Nokia's problem isn't technical, it's that they're not bull****ting their customer base. I don't see this as a bad thing btw.

[usxhe190]

Nokia need to get on the smartphone market properly. They are still profiting due to the old busienss (i.e. normal phones).

[Funkstar]

Their new handsets are looking lovely by the way.

Have a look on Engadget