7 ms·

A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

139 points by rkwz 16y ago

swombat 16y ago
What is the chart measuring? The article implies that it represents App Store visits. Do they buy anything, though? That's the metric that's important to developers.
- wvenable 16y ago
  This article[1] suggests that the Ovi store gets 2.7 million app downloads a day. The Apple App store gets 17 million app downloads a day with less than half the marketshare. [1] http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/11/09/10-reasons-why-you-should-develop-for-nokias-symbian-smartphones/ http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/11/09/10-reasons-why-you...
- mrseb 16y ago
  Heya, author here. That's the tricky thing. As far as I can tell, the graph shows what percentage of phone users (or mobile Internet users?) regularly access the stores. Basically, it suggests that about 9% of app users have iPhones in China (which still seems very high -- but I guess they're all in affluent areas), 13% have Android phones, and the rest have Symbian/Nokia phones (65%ish). Most of the top apps in the China Mobile Mobile Market seem to be Symbian/S60 apps, too: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm.10086.cn%2F%23 http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&#38...
- TheUSMarshall 16y ago
  Agreed. There is obviously a huge Nokia/Symbian user base, but it would be interesting to learn more about the demographics/buying habits/Internet-usage habits for those users. If many of them are in rural or developing areas, their ISP may only offer a capped bandwidth plan which may cause them to shy away from using data-intensive apps, or they may just not be as motivated to use some apps that ultimately lead to revenue generation (either directly through app purchases or down the line via upgrades or services that compliment the initial app download).
iwwr 16y ago
Any tales of HN-ers experience with Symbian?
- pavlov 16y ago
  The only way to do productive Symbian development in a non-deprecated environment is to use Qt. Run away from anything that says "Symbian" but isn't Qt. The latest Symbian ships with a version of Qt (4.6.3) that isn't the cutting edge, but is good enough. In typical Nokia manner, they've managed to make a dog's dinner of the SDK options: there's a regular Qt SDK, a Nokia-branded Qt SDK, a Symbian^3 SDK, a technology preview of Qt 4.7 for Symbian, etcetera ad absurdum. AFAIK, the "Nokia Qt SDK" is the one you want. (If you make the mistake of choosing the wrong download and ask about it in the forums, prepare for condescending replies from Nokia employees who seemingly can't come to grips with the idea that they should provide a service to developers. I hope the new management will be able to do something about the innovation-hostile, inbred, not-invented-here cultural factions at Nokia.) - - Despite the confusing options and cultural issues, the Nokia QT SDK is really quite nice. There are a few other very good things about the new Symbian^3 platform: - It has GPU acceleration as a standard, so you can rely on advanced features like OpenGL ES 2.0. - The platform is more than merely a single high-end device. There's a very nice mid-range option available already (the C6-01). The total sales of this platform should turn out quite impressive over its lifetime. - Nokia has promised to ship new features as free updates to Symbian^3, rather than baking them into firmware on new devices only as they used to do. AFAIK, these updates will include Qt 4.7 and a rewritten browser. - - Unfortunately, Nokia is also shipping devices with the older Symbian versions. Qt is also the best way to write software for these platforms. There's a "Qt Smart Installer" that is sort of a package manager. It's supposed to ensure that 3rd party applications can easily depend on Qt by simply packaging the Smart Installer with their apps. I don't know how well it works in practice, but if the alternative is to write to the crusty old Symbian C++ API, I'd take my chances with Smart Installer any day...
  - daliusd 16y ago
    Smart Installer works with old phones indeed. At least with Nokia E51 which is S60 3.1 and is almost 3 years old. Edit: What's fun. E51 does not have Qt support officially while works like a charm.
davidw 16y ago
Nokia is still pretty popular with the average person here in Italy, I think. The OVI store is a big ugly hairball though and unless they seriously fix things up, I've given up on trying to get my applications into it. The signing process is extremely bureaucratic.
nobody_nowhere 16y ago
Nokia has a pretty unparalleled manufacturing/delivery/logistics chain for low end phones. They like to claim they can put a phone on a shelf anywhere in africa for less than competitors' manufacturing costs. That's pretty impressive, if true. But we're talking about phones that retail for $35. The smartphones are a joke. But the software! I sure hope Qt is starting to pay some dividends for them. When i was dealing with native Symbian/S40/S60 development a few years ago, I wanted to stick a fork in my eye.
- daliusd 16y ago
  Just writing to agree. I have started learning native development at first. That was good experience from the point that you get some inner understanding how Symbian works but overall it is too hard to develop using native code. As well I am developing actively two Qt based Symbian applications during my free time currently. I really love it because I can in relatively small time develop nice and working applications. There are some problems still (e.g. kinetic scrolling, problems with QtMobility on some phones, like flagman N8, full screen issues and etc.) but it looks like those problems will be solved in the future. I love that development on Linux is possible as well.
  - rue 16y ago
    Just yesterday I attended a presentation on the upcoming Qt Quick toolkit and QML, the language for defining UIs. Should have support for both Meego and whatever Symbians remain. QML looked quite nice in itself and a definite improvement but, in historical context, I'm not yet convinced…
    - daliusd 16y ago
      I have not considered using QML at all. At the moment samples were unusable or very slow on Nokia E51. Pure Qt from other side was faster than I have expected. Actually I do not feel difference from native applications.
    - Geee 16y ago
      TwimGo is a nice example of using QML: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak-Py3cf_Ac http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak-Py3cf_Ac
latch 16y ago
Isn't there quite a bit of data though to make this very static picture of the market somewhat irrelevant? I'm not trying to spread FUD. I would seriously like enlightenment if I'm wrong, but these are the conceptions that I have with respect to the more fluid nature of the market: -The trend, throughout the world, is going heavily against Nokia -Nokia's margins on each unit is a fraction of the competition -Nokia's relevance is largely in a market (phones) which is being overtaken, faster in some parts of the world than others, by SmartPhones -Profits for 3rd party developers of Nokia products are smaller than profits for 3rd party developers of the competition. I'm sure there was a point in history when horses were more popular than cars in most of the world and we all know how that turned out.
- wvenable 16y ago
  Nokia's quarterly profits have dropped 40 percent year-on-year. Symbian lost 10% of it's marketshare in one year and Android's worldwide marketshare is now quickly approaching that of Symbian. I think the future (and the profits) are undoubtedly in smartphones and that's an area where Nokia has, so far, been unable to compete and they don't seem to have a working strategy going forward.
- greyman 16y ago
  Yes the penetration of smartphones is increasing, but I personally know a lot of people who don't want smartphone. For example, 2 out of 3 of my friends who owns iPhone said to me that "...but my previous nokia [dumbphone] was better", and are not planing to buy another smartphone. So it's still an open question what the ratio between smartphone and dumbphone will be in the future. But Nokia's dumbphones are certainly not going away anytime soon.
  - Joakal 16y ago
    Wait until the internet capabilities on smartphones get realised. On a bus for 30 minutes? Use the phone to browse HN. etc
    - rospaya 16y ago
leon_ 16y ago
Until I can get a proper asian localization (on a shoestring budget) Nokia can have 100% market shere over there. It won't be of any use to me :(
- jamii 16y ago
  I believe that Android does a pretty good job if you can find a good 3rd party soft keyboard. I havent used done much more than kick the tires in hangeul but Android seems to be pretty popular here in Korea.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
barredo 16y ago
It's not about the current data, it's about the trends. This is like saying that "90% of people still uses horse-powered vehicles to make their trips" five years after the invention of the steam engine.
- jawee 16y ago
  I don´t know if that´s fair, as the Nokia smartphones I´ve used are really quite nice. Their high-end options like the N8 and N900 are phones I would rather have than my Droid 2.
- mrseb 16y ago
  This is basically the default avid-tech-blog-reader response :) The only real trend is that Android is gaining ground -- which is no surprise, given that Android phones are the cheapest to make, and will only get cheaper! Nokia/Symbian phones have just as many 'rich' features as their iOS/Android cousins. They're just not marketed as well, and they don't have the orgiastic support of the tech blogs.
nolest 16y ago
I just got a Nokia N8. Installed Opera Mobile 10.1 immediately last night. Still, i cannot find any menu which allows me to access it. Not kidding you. But best built piece of cellular hardware i've had since the 80s. The camera sensor is better than most compacts, and how on earth do they make speakers in this thing which shame laptops? (only took an hour to find out how to launch the FM radio . . ) Yours, darned confused why i cannot even find a proper menu on my N8 . . . - j
subbu 16y ago
The article doesn't consider India where Nokia is the dominant player. But most of the phones they sell here are low-end to mid-range. They aren't that popular for smartphones. I don't have any statistics to show for this just my experiences.
ashutoshm 16y ago
nokia is ubiquitous in India.heck the subaltern has a song about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpKodZMQr8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpKodZMQr8
- MrScruff 16y ago
  About 3 years ago in the UK, business people had Blackberrys and everyone else had Nokia or Sony Ericsson phones. Fast forward to now and business people have iPhones or Blackberrys while teenagers tend to use Blackberrys (they're cheap and good at messaging). Others have iPhones or Androids with the exception of people who haven't upgraded their phone in a while who still have Nokia or Sony Ericsson devices.
  - teamonkey 16y ago
    Nokia has very little presence here in North America for reasons I haven't been able to fathom. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that most people in the UK will have have owned a Nokia at some point in the last 10-15 years. The brand really is that common. It's the cheap first phone you get, or a fast replacement if your smartphone dies and you still have a contract to uphold, or the phones parents buy their kids 'for emergencies'.
    - Tuna-Fish 16y ago
      Nokia owns much of the GSM standard, and thus dislikes making CDMA phones. This limits their major models to the AT&T network in the USA. Nokia also dislikes selling phones trough carriers -- they prefer marketing directly to consumers, not tying their phones to carrier-specific plans. Together, this means that in the US there is only one carrier where their major model phones work, and that carrier considers Nokia's strategy to be openly hostile to them. So no wonder they don't sell much.
      - huertanix 16y ago
        Nokia also doesn't cut deals with carriers to subsidize the cost of their phones like many Android phone manufacturers do. "$520 for a phone? I can almost buy a laptop for that!"
memr 16y ago
Nokia sells alot of dumbphones right? Nokia sells more smartphones than dumbphones. Oh, and they've also been the most successful in transitioning customers to smartphones (60-70% of nokia dumbphone users become nokia smartphone users). Reading the US-centric blogs and tech-sites makes it seem like only the US companies are in the smartphone market (Google with Android, Apple with iOS, etc)
aes 16y ago
Nokia is also finally about to catch up on the developer side, which might prove to be a big advantage. If ease of development is in any way correlated with application quality, we might see some action in the Nokia world soon. For the little glimpses that I've seen, UI development using Qt Quick and QML and is actually pretty nice. Nothing like the Symbian hell, and seemed a good deal more fun than developing for Android. (Can't say it's on par with iOS though, at least not yet.) This is the first time I'm actually _excited_ by a Nokia technology. Now is a good time to check it out, since the first phones supporting 4.7 are supposed to come out "soon" (my source at Nokia was reluctant at naming a specific date). And they just put out a new technology preview: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-preview-released/ http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-pr... If Qt / QML Quick seems a bit barebones, there's a library called Qt Components which adds things like checkboxes, progress bars etc.: http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components
ernestipark 16y ago
I was in Rwanda last summer teaching a class on programming/entrepreneurship centered on mobile devices. The ubiquity and penetration of Nokia phones there is pretty incredible. Even some of the poorest of people have cell phones. Essentially, they are the only form of computing device for many of them, so it IS their smartphone. There are many services and businesses centered around SMS applications that are very useful. Rather than expensive plans, there are people lining the streets selling prepaid "airtime". Their 3G network is also just as fast as any I've had in the US despite not being connected to SEACOM (although this may be due to lack of traffic on the 3G network, I had a Nexus One Google provided while I was there). Nokia was one of the sponsors of my program because they see how valuable the African market is with their explosion of cell phone growth in the past few years.
gacba 16y ago
Maybe Nokia has 41% of the market today, but back in 2006 they had 76% of it (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian). They're losing ground like an avalanche, Symbian is quickly becoming irrelevant in this world.
TylerBrock 16y ago
Nokia has always made great hardware so they should have bought Palm. Would have been a match made in heaven.
maguay 16y ago
Hey, we still keep a prepaid Nokia around for basic phone calls. If you're just needing to call someone, they still get the job done, and oddly enough, the calling experience is often better (better sound) than on a smartphone. Plus, it has a built in flashlight. Who can argue with that? ;)
S_A_P 16y ago
While I understand the need for a metric to see where you should allocate R&D resources, most of these types of articles(as in not just this one, most of the iOS or Android as well) seem to be more interested in a branding popularity contest than providing any sort of useful info. Personally I dont care if swarms of people love or hate the device I use as long as it serves my needs. It just seems sorta tabloid-y to me.
jessriedel 16y ago
Are those percentages of users? How about market share of revenue?
gyardley 16y ago
Whenever I read an article like this, I wonder what exactly they'd like me to do. Build software for customers whose markets I'm not familiar with, languages I don't speak, and customs and tastes I'm ignorant of? Sounds like a recipe for failure to me.
- borism 16y ago
  they want you to have a perspective
stcredzero 16y ago
While Americans carry dogs around in handbags, Koreans eat them. This is racist shock-talk aimed at Americans. Yes, this happens in Korea. My understanding is that some older people believe that by eating a dog, you gain the creature's vitality. I know that the majority of Koreans who live in the United States do not do this and their only involvement with the practice is to find such talk embarrassing. In many european countries, people also eat horses, which many Americans would find just as shocking. In parts of Louisiana, a lot of people will happily cook and eat just about any mammal. Personally, I find this hypocritical, as many Americans happily (likely unknowingly) feed their family dog the processed meat of other dogs. http://www.bukisa.com/articles/294021_is-there-dog-meat-in-dog-food http://www.bukisa.com/articles/294021_is-there-dog-meat-in-d...

139 points by rkwz 16y ago

What is the chart measuring? The article implies that it represents App Store visits. Do they buy anything, though? That's the metric that's important to developers.

wvenable 16y ago
This article[1] suggests that the Ovi store gets 2.7 million app downloads a day. The Apple App store gets 17 million app downloads a day with less than half the marketshare. [1] http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/11/09/10-reasons-why-you-should-develop-for-nokias-symbian-smartphones/ http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/11/09/10-reasons-why-you...
mrseb 16y ago
Heya, author here. That's the tricky thing. As far as I can tell, the graph shows what percentage of phone users (or mobile Internet users?) regularly access the stores. Basically, it suggests that about 9% of app users have iPhones in China (which still seems very high -- but I guess they're all in affluent areas), 13% have Android phones, and the rest have Symbian/Nokia phones (65%ish). Most of the top apps in the China Mobile Mobile Market seem to be Symbian/S60 apps, too: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm.10086.cn%2F%23 http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&#38...
TheUSMarshall 16y ago
Agreed. There is obviously a huge Nokia/Symbian user base, but it would be interesting to learn more about the demographics/buying habits/Internet-usage habits for those users. If many of them are in rural or developing areas, their ISP may only offer a capped bandwidth plan which may cause them to shy away from using data-intensive apps, or they may just not be as motivated to use some apps that ultimately lead to revenue generation (either directly through app purchases or down the line via upgrades or services that compliment the initial app download).

iwwr 16y ago

Any tales of HN-ers experience with Symbian?

pavlov 16y ago
The only way to do productive Symbian development in a non-deprecated environment is to use Qt. Run away from anything that says "Symbian" but isn't Qt. The latest Symbian ships with a version of Qt (4.6.3) that isn't the cutting edge, but is good enough. In typical Nokia manner, they've managed to make a dog's dinner of the SDK options: there's a regular Qt SDK, a Nokia-branded Qt SDK, a Symbian^3 SDK, a technology preview of Qt 4.7 for Symbian, etcetera ad absurdum. AFAIK, the "Nokia Qt SDK" is the one you want. (If you make the mistake of choosing the wrong download and ask about it in the forums, prepare for condescending replies from Nokia employees who seemingly can't come to grips with the idea that they should provide a service to developers. I hope the new management will be able to do something about the innovation-hostile, inbred, not-invented-here cultural factions at Nokia.) - - Despite the confusing options and cultural issues, the Nokia QT SDK is really quite nice. There are a few other very good things about the new Symbian^3 platform: - It has GPU acceleration as a standard, so you can rely on advanced features like OpenGL ES 2.0. - The platform is more than merely a single high-end device. There's a very nice mid-range option available already (the C6-01). The total sales of this platform should turn out quite impressive over its lifetime. - Nokia has promised to ship new features as free updates to Symbian^3, rather than baking them into firmware on new devices only as they used to do. AFAIK, these updates will include Qt 4.7 and a rewritten browser. - - Unfortunately, Nokia is also shipping devices with the older Symbian versions. Qt is also the best way to write software for these platforms. There's a "Qt Smart Installer" that is sort of a package manager. It's supposed to ensure that 3rd party applications can easily depend on Qt by simply packaging the Smart Installer with their apps. I don't know how well it works in practice, but if the alternative is to write to the crusty old Symbian C++ API, I'd take my chances with Smart Installer any day...
- daliusd 16y ago
  Smart Installer works with old phones indeed. At least with Nokia E51 which is S60 3.1 and is almost 3 years old. Edit: What's fun. E51 does not have Qt support officially while works like a charm.

davidw 16y ago

Nokia is still pretty popular with the average person here in Italy, I think. The OVI store is a big ugly hairball though and unless they seriously fix things up, I've given up on trying to get my applications into it. The signing process is extremely bureaucratic.

nobody_nowhere 16y ago

Nokia has a pretty unparalleled manufacturing/delivery/logistics chain for low end phones. They like to claim they can put a phone on a shelf anywhere in africa for less than competitors' manufacturing costs. That's pretty impressive, if true. But we're talking about phones that retail for $35. The smartphones are a joke. But the software! I sure hope Qt is starting to pay some dividends for them. When i was dealing with native Symbian/S40/S60 development a few years ago, I wanted to stick a fork in my eye.

daliusd 16y ago
Just writing to agree. I have started learning native development at first. That was good experience from the point that you get some inner understanding how Symbian works but overall it is too hard to develop using native code. As well I am developing actively two Qt based Symbian applications during my free time currently. I really love it because I can in relatively small time develop nice and working applications. There are some problems still (e.g. kinetic scrolling, problems with QtMobility on some phones, like flagman N8, full screen issues and etc.) but it looks like those problems will be solved in the future. I love that development on Linux is possible as well.
- rue 16y ago
  Just yesterday I attended a presentation on the upcoming Qt Quick toolkit and QML, the language for defining UIs. Should have support for both Meego and whatever Symbians remain. QML looked quite nice in itself and a definite improvement but, in historical context, I'm not yet convinced…
  - daliusd 16y ago
    I have not considered using QML at all. At the moment samples were unusable or very slow on Nokia E51. Pure Qt from other side was faster than I have expected. Actually I do not feel difference from native applications.
  - Geee 16y ago
    TwimGo is a nice example of using QML: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak-Py3cf_Ac http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak-Py3cf_Ac

latch 16y ago

Isn't there quite a bit of data though to make this very static picture of the market somewhat irrelevant? I'm not trying to spread FUD. I would seriously like enlightenment if I'm wrong, but these are the conceptions that I have with respect to the more fluid nature of the market: -The trend, throughout the world, is going heavily against Nokia -Nokia's margins on each unit is a fraction of the competition -Nokia's relevance is largely in a market (phones) which is being overtaken, faster in some parts of the world than others, by SmartPhones -Profits for 3rd party developers of Nokia products are smaller than profits for 3rd party developers of the competition. I'm sure there was a point in history when horses were more popular than cars in most of the world and we all know how that turned out.

wvenable 16y ago
Nokia's quarterly profits have dropped 40 percent year-on-year. Symbian lost 10% of it's marketshare in one year and Android's worldwide marketshare is now quickly approaching that of Symbian. I think the future (and the profits) are undoubtedly in smartphones and that's an area where Nokia has, so far, been unable to compete and they don't seem to have a working strategy going forward.
greyman 16y ago
Yes the penetration of smartphones is increasing, but I personally know a lot of people who don't want smartphone. For example, 2 out of 3 of my friends who owns iPhone said to me that "...but my previous nokia [dumbphone] was better", and are not planing to buy another smartphone. So it's still an open question what the ratio between smartphone and dumbphone will be in the future. But Nokia's dumbphones are certainly not going away anytime soon.
- Joakal 16y ago
  Wait until the internet capabilities on smartphones get realised. On a bus for 30 minutes? Use the phone to browse HN. etc
  - rospaya 16y ago

leon_ 16y ago

Until I can get a proper asian localization (on a shoestring budget) Nokia can have 100% market shere over there. It won't be of any use to me :(

jamii 16y ago
I believe that Android does a pretty good job if you can find a good 3rd party soft keyboard. I havent used done much more than kick the tires in hangeul but Android seems to be pretty popular here in Korea.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

barredo 16y ago

It's not about the current data, it's about the trends. This is like saying that "90% of people still uses horse-powered vehicles to make their trips" five years after the invention of the steam engine.

jawee 16y ago
I don´t know if that´s fair, as the Nokia smartphones I´ve used are really quite nice. Their high-end options like the N8 and N900 are phones I would rather have than my Droid 2.
mrseb 16y ago
This is basically the default avid-tech-blog-reader response :) The only real trend is that Android is gaining ground -- which is no surprise, given that Android phones are the cheapest to make, and will only get cheaper! Nokia/Symbian phones have just as many 'rich' features as their iOS/Android cousins. They're just not marketed as well, and they don't have the orgiastic support of the tech blogs.

nolest 16y ago

I just got a Nokia N8. Installed Opera Mobile 10.1 immediately last night. Still, i cannot find any menu which allows me to access it. Not kidding you. But best built piece of cellular hardware i've had since the 80s. The camera sensor is better than most compacts, and how on earth do they make speakers in this thing which shame laptops? (only took an hour to find out how to launch the FM radio . . ) Yours, darned confused why i cannot even find a proper menu on my N8 . . . - j

subbu 16y ago

The article doesn't consider India where Nokia is the dominant player. But most of the phones they sell here are low-end to mid-range. They aren't that popular for smartphones. I don't have any statistics to show for this just my experiences.

ashutoshm 16y ago

nokia is ubiquitous in India.heck the subaltern has a song about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpKodZMQr8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpKodZMQr8

MrScruff 16y ago
About 3 years ago in the UK, business people had Blackberrys and everyone else had Nokia or Sony Ericsson phones. Fast forward to now and business people have iPhones or Blackberrys while teenagers tend to use Blackberrys (they're cheap and good at messaging). Others have iPhones or Androids with the exception of people who haven't upgraded their phone in a while who still have Nokia or Sony Ericsson devices.
- teamonkey 16y ago
  Nokia has very little presence here in North America for reasons I haven't been able to fathom. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that most people in the UK will have have owned a Nokia at some point in the last 10-15 years. The brand really is that common. It's the cheap first phone you get, or a fast replacement if your smartphone dies and you still have a contract to uphold, or the phones parents buy their kids 'for emergencies'.
  - Tuna-Fish 16y ago
    Nokia owns much of the GSM standard, and thus dislikes making CDMA phones. This limits their major models to the AT&T network in the USA. Nokia also dislikes selling phones trough carriers -- they prefer marketing directly to consumers, not tying their phones to carrier-specific plans. Together, this means that in the US there is only one carrier where their major model phones work, and that carrier considers Nokia's strategy to be openly hostile to them. So no wonder they don't sell much.
    - huertanix 16y ago
      Nokia also doesn't cut deals with carriers to subsidize the cost of their phones like many Android phone manufacturers do. "$520 for a phone? I can almost buy a laptop for that!"

memr 16y ago

Nokia sells alot of dumbphones right? Nokia sells more smartphones than dumbphones. Oh, and they've also been the most successful in transitioning customers to smartphones (60-70% of nokia dumbphone users become nokia smartphone users). Reading the US-centric blogs and tech-sites makes it seem like only the US companies are in the smartphone market (Google with Android, Apple with iOS, etc)

aes 16y ago

Nokia is also finally about to catch up on the developer side, which might prove to be a big advantage. If ease of development is in any way correlated with application quality, we might see some action in the Nokia world soon. For the little glimpses that I've seen, UI development using Qt Quick and QML and is actually pretty nice. Nothing like the Symbian hell, and seemed a good deal more fun than developing for Android. (Can't say it's on par with iOS though, at least not yet.) This is the first time I'm actually _excited_ by a Nokia technology. Now is a good time to check it out, since the first phones supporting 4.7 are supposed to come out "soon" (my source at Nokia was reluctant at naming a specific date). And they just put out a new technology preview: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-preview-released/ http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-pr... If Qt / QML Quick seems a bit barebones, there's a library called Qt Components which adds things like checkboxes, progress bars etc.: http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components

ernestipark 16y ago

I was in Rwanda last summer teaching a class on programming/entrepreneurship centered on mobile devices. The ubiquity and penetration of Nokia phones there is pretty incredible. Even some of the poorest of people have cell phones. Essentially, they are the only form of computing device for many of them, so it IS their smartphone. There are many services and businesses centered around SMS applications that are very useful. Rather than expensive plans, there are people lining the streets selling prepaid "airtime". Their 3G network is also just as fast as any I've had in the US despite not being connected to SEACOM (although this may be due to lack of traffic on the 3G network, I had a Nexus One Google provided while I was there). Nokia was one of the sponsors of my program because they see how valuable the African market is with their explosion of cell phone growth in the past few years.

gacba 16y ago

Maybe Nokia has 41% of the market today, but back in 2006 they had 76% of it (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian). They're losing ground like an avalanche, Symbian is quickly becoming irrelevant in this world.

TylerBrock 16y ago

Nokia has always made great hardware so they should have bought Palm. Would have been a match made in heaven.

maguay 16y ago

Hey, we still keep a prepaid Nokia around for basic phone calls. If you're just needing to call someone, they still get the job done, and oddly enough, the calling experience is often better (better sound) than on a smartphone. Plus, it has a built in flashlight. Who can argue with that? ;)

S_A_P 16y ago

While I understand the need for a metric to see where you should allocate R&D resources, most of these types of articles(as in not just this one, most of the iOS or Android as well) seem to be more interested in a branding popularity contest than providing any sort of useful info. Personally I dont care if swarms of people love or hate the device I use as long as it serves my needs. It just seems sorta tabloid-y to me.

jessriedel 16y ago

Are those percentages of users? How about market share of revenue?

gyardley 16y ago

Whenever I read an article like this, I wonder what exactly they'd like me to do. Build software for customers whose markets I'm not familiar with, languages I don't speak, and customs and tastes I'm ignorant of? Sounds like a recipe for failure to me.

borism 16y ago
they want you to have a perspective

stcredzero 16y ago

While Americans carry dogs around in handbags, Koreans eat them. This is racist shock-talk aimed at Americans. Yes, this happens in Korea. My understanding is that some older people believe that by eating a dog, you gain the creature's vitality. I know that the majority of Koreans who live in the United States do not do this and their only involvement with the practice is to find such talk embarrassing. In many european countries, people also eat horses, which many Americans would find just as shocking. In parts of Louisiana, a lot of people will happily cook and eat just about any mammal. Personally, I find this hypocritical, as many Americans happily (likely unknowingly) feed their family dog the processed meat of other dogs. http://www.bukisa.com/articles/294021_is-there-dog-meat-in-dog-food http://www.bukisa.com/articles/294021_is-there-dog-meat-in-d...