Symbian desperately needs a Gok Wan style makeover. This ain't just TechEye's view. IDC analyst - Francisco Jeronimo – has highlighted the struggle the Finnish handset vendor is having with Symbian.
Jeronimo relates how Nokia CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, commented at the Nokia Capital Markets Day back in December 2009 that: "Symbian UI won't be an issue anymore by the second half of 2010."
However, Jeronimo himself says, "The Symbian user interface continues to negatively impact Nokia's results, though this is expected to change by the end of this year with the launch of a new version of Symbian."
Sounds like Q4 for anew GUI more than the Q3-Q4 which Kallasvuo was hinting at. Nonetheless, IDC dares to say what we have all been thinking – namely that RIM with its Crackberry and Apple withs its iPhone are far easier-to-use devices.
Curiously IDC argues that in the smartphone market, Nokia has benefitted from, "Disgruntled Sony Ericsson and Motorola users, and because Samsung and LG are minor players."
But there maybe trouble ahead. According to Jeronimo, "LG and Samsung are investing in smartphones and plan to announce a number of new devices this year that will run Android and Windows Mobile 7." Oh dear.
Significantly, IDC doesn't dare to speculate about what exactly Nokia is going to do about Android? Can it afford to ignore what is radily becoming the smartphone Number Two OS?
TechEye thinks that it is another head in the sand jobbie like Nokia adopted towards clamshell phones.
Eventually Nokia participated in this fashion industry but only after it had decided to rename such devices – 'fold-design'. And was forced to commission its first clamshells from the Chinese.
Really, Nokia is fast becoming the King Canute of the handset world - trying to hold back the inevitable.
Perhaps Nokia will eventually cave in and launch an Android phone, but the working name for such an un-nokia beast will surely be Paranoid?
They generally got away with holding off new technology (presumably to save money) because of little competition. Now they're up against firms with short lead times and a desire to innovate.
Still, I submit that Nokia's Series 40 range and their non-touch Symbian devices have top-notch UI: function driven design, usability, rational screen estate usage, consistence, localization support. They do fall short on the higher range where touch is now a trend and their attempt to scale-up the existing UI framework without disrupting the developer ecosystem has had only relative success.
Nokia's size is part of their problem. They have 10 years of application development, 3rd party developers involved in large projects (Nokia's phones were running large enterprise solutions for years) and with business cases built around Nokia's platforms, so they don't have Apple's or Google's clean start. In this context their are doing very good job migrating.
Yes, better hardware would help. And better marketing. Android would not help at all and you will never see it on a Nokia device. In fact, Android has nothing to offer to Nokia - the base UI is lame, the only cool stuff show up as fragmented customizations. Maemo and Symbian do provide Nokia with all the flexibility they need and you will soon see them both having great UI while still benefiting from their key strong points: the advanced power management of Symbian which gives today smartphones with 1 week battery life, and the community driven, Maemo
@Jonathan Morris:
See http://bit.ly/bsCaN and http://bit.ly/1H3wyA
Have you seen Nokia's Q4/09 results?