Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

I don't actually disagree with any of that. Like I said, the N8 was an excellent device, especially compared to the Galaxy (loads of people are still using the N8 today compared to the Galaxy which dated horribly). The problem Nokia had was perception and the legacy of selling some really awful phones previously (N97, I am looking at you).

When Ios and Android were released, they just looked so much more fresher than Symbian. What Nokia should have done was to ditch the Symbian name (and all its confusing variants). The next thing they should have done was completely reskin the OS. The default icons, fonts and menus looked terrible and dated, even if they were perfectly functional. Unfortunately, people were unable to look beyond this superficial detail, shame really :(

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

I think I said some more than just that.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

Symbian still is an "old school" smartphone OS. Powerful regarding HW, but weak in web/mail and apps.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

Wait... wait. Isn't that just a way of saying that Nokia didn't sell enough? A flat percentage of sales in a growing market is basically the same as not meeting demand and thus, losing sales. And that's what happened.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

C'mon dawg... you gotta have more than that to say.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

No no no! What happened was that the iPhone created a market for smartphones for "ordinary" people.Then Android came and strengthened and widened that market. Pre-iPhone, smartphones were toys for geeks and "advanced users" exclusively. In this new market the users went from using dumbphones (from Nokia) to using smartphones running iOS/Android. That new market grew way faster than the growth of Nokia smartphone sales, thus even though Nokia sold more smartphones than ever, they lost both total device market share and in particular - smartphone market share.

Now, you can argue that neither the iPhone or any Android phones are real smartphones, they are just more advanced dumphones with touch screens. That is correct IMO, but it is a moot point, because people wanted iPhones and Androids. (multitasking vs non-multitasking debate for instance). People (in Europe) threw away their old Nokias and got themselves an iPhone or an Android.

Nokias answer was the 8500. This phone was rather successful. They also had the N97, which was a disaster of unprecedented magnitude. But the clunkiness of the 8500, sent many people away, and when Symbian^3 came, the clunkyness was still there. Even today, Belle FP2 is laughable compared with iOS and Android UI,and in particular Metro. I like Belle, I personally don't mind some clunkiness, but the average person has no taste for this and the lack of apps and good games.

Elop had nothing to do with this. He wasn't even in the picture. The leaked memo, although foolish, didn't change a single thing of the basic facts.

Today we have very few real (old school) smartphones left. The 808 is for all practical purposes the only one. Do I want to dismiss a fluid UI, a lightening fast browser, totally integrated and a fluid mail/messaging/social network - for USB2go, FM TX and super camera? I'm not so sure. I would rather have it all - and with a qwerty HW keyboard. Problem is, that device does not exist. Android/iOS - been there, done that, utterly boring. So, Lumia 920 or the 808, that is the question.

That is why I like Nokia, that is why I like WP. In this world of advanced but utterly boring dumbphones (smartphones), Nokia is the only manufacturer that have something I want. Far from my personal dream device, but much closer than any competing device.

Maemo/Meego/N9 could have been cool, but realistically it would never succeed for anything but a niche. That niche would be my niche, but the N9 was a step in the wrong direction. The N9 is too clunky for the mainstream and too weak in features for me.

So people, get the device YOU want. Don't be stupid fanboys believing your choice of smartphone will change anything. Elop has not set out to kill Nokia, he has set out to rescue an (almost) sunken ship. MS will not eat Nokia for lunch, but if they do, get over it, and do it fast. Stop being cry babies.

The only thing that matters is do Nokia make devices YOU want. If the answer is NO, then get something else and stop crying about it.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

No, they did not have a 'flat percentage of sales', they had 36% growth year on year, they had a respectable gross margin and their smart devices division was making healthy profits. Obsessing over market share when you have very healthy growth and a rapidly expanding market is vanity and vanity makes fools of us all.

iOS' market share is now declining against Android, I don't hear many people talking of how badly Apple are doing and how they need to abandon iOS and start again from scratch.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

web/mail and apps are not part of Symbian, Symbian is an OS. You wouldn't say Mercedes-Benz are no good because of the Blaupunkt stereo would you?

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

I assume you really mean the 5800 which had a 434MHz processor, 128 MB of RAM, resistive touch screen and no GPU.

I have used Android on a device with twice this spec and it was CHUFFING TORTURE.

The 5800 was great budget device of course, full of functionality, but stop pretending this was ever an iPhone competitor. Again it is a testament to Symbian you can get acceptable performance from such extraordinarily modest hardware.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

I agree, Symbian definitely did look a bit fusty. Of course once NOKIA had got QtQuick on there the UI would only have been limited by the designers imagination. Hey ho... what could have been.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

What was the market growth during that same period?

That will answer if it were a loss or flat percentage of growth.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

The iPhone had a 412 MHz CPU. The HTC magic a 528 MHz.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

Separate GPU, no multitasking, no USB, no bluetooth and all apps had to be written in Objective-C. Not only that but it pre-dated the 5800 by 15 months. Thank you, you emphasise my point, NOKIA were trying to shoehorn a smartphone OS into hardware more appropriate to the previous years feature phones.


Android SUCKS on low grade hardware, it did then and it does now.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

Irrelevant, if you want to know if your sales have grown you compare them to your own sales of a previous period.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

Not really. If you grow 36%, yet the market grew 118%, then you've not kept pace.

That seems to be what happened in regards to the smartphone market.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

n8 was doing OK because they kept cutting prices and profits were going downwards. they knew they couldnt do this forever.....

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

:rolleyes:

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

I still have my Magic. It runs just fine, nice and fluid (1.6). At that time a 528 MHz CPU was top of the line. There were no other Androids around either, but they startet coming in hordes.

Symbian phones used to run 200MHz.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

anybody here use N8? it was the worst possible phone I got. I unearthed it 2 months ago and upgraded to newest Belle or whatever. Still horrible. crashed, rebooted, virtual keyboard absolutely sucks when compared to WP or iOS. Why would even folks in third world want this crap when they got better devices from competitors now?

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

REad this as on other post. Illustrates everything that went wrong:

http://taskumuro.com/artikkelit/the-...of-nokia-meego

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

Only had time to brows through it now, but very interesting. The complete mess at Nokia is very describing. It was the same at the Symbian camp. Only the S40 camp had some sort of order apparently.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

As we were saying all along.....Harmattan since 2008 and they couldnt get it right, swipe invented by ex Apple and ex Adobe employees, Elop was NOT the problem, NOKIA WAS the problem. This was a clearly rudderless company.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

And you haven't been banned yet? Shows the bias of moderators here

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

as long as you end your post with a token elop/ms/wp sucks - kind of comment, then everything goes. :rolleyes:

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

I for one hope either of you don't get banned, you're funny.

rgds

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

If anyone is looking to pick up a cheap Winphone thinking that they could make use of Microsofts new Xbox Music service, then don't bother because they are not going to support the Win7 devices...

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/...s-and-android/

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

Lumia fans... you've been shunned. Amazing omission for something they have said is rather important to them - music distribution.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

That's not right either, first off do you have all the market covered, secondly do you want to have all the market covered?

If most of the growth was in high glamour devices then NOKIA could not benefit from that growth as they had not produced such a device, just ugly, under-powered but functional ones. The N8 was the first attractive smartphone NOKIA had produced in a long while but that was scuppered within weeks of being released by the 'burning platforms' fiasco.

If most of the growth was amongst extremely cheap low margin devices you might well make a concious decision not to compete but instead to cherry pick the market segments with more attractive returns, no point in being a busy fool.

The fact is NOKIA had growing sales and decent margins, now they have neither.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

Huh? Either you have the ability to fulfill the demand of a growing market are you cannot. The factors around that ability boils down to pure sales. Either you have the sales or you do not. And within a growing market, you're to have growth.

It didn't happen for Nokia. It happened for Apple (newcomer) and Android (newcomer). It didn't also happen for BlackBerry (established player).

Have to ask if you mean high glamour means iPhone or Vertu.

The N8 depended upon the camera and not much else during a time where more was expected. Same for the 808.

Nokia was in all of those markets quite comfortably for ages. They were rendered old hat by the encroachment of Android and Apple into the lower end of that spectrum in most Euro markets due to pricing deals and perceived functionality at a lower price. In the North American markets, Nokia has been relegated to cheap flip phones or expensive gifts that you had to buy blindly online or travel 1000's of miles to pick one up.

Growing sales, that had either peaked, or were going to plateau. We'll never know now. But you are right about now... they have neither.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

It DID happen for NOKIA, they DID have growth. 36% year on year is very healthy growth, especially considering the enormity of NOKIA. I have not seen any evidence to suggest they would not have continued to enjoy growth if they hadn't exclusively adopted an OS that was a proven failure in the market place.


iPhone. It was pretty and slick (even if somewhat limited), NOKIA's devices on the other hand were utilitarian.


Quite so, and the N8 was a big improvement on what went before, at least it finally got a GPU. NOKIA's problem was hardware desirability not software capability.


Their margins tell a different story, they were not selling devices with razor thin margins until they adopted WP7. Last two quarters we've had gross margins of 1.7% and (3.5)% respectively, so they are now giving away handsets at less than the cost of components and assembly, never mind sales, administration and marketing expenses.


Where's the evidence they had peaked or plateaued? Seriously, I'd like to see it.

Re: Nokia Dumping Lumia 800's
 

I said we'd never know if it had, or hadn't.