Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

A pre order website just went live... The Demo shows some amazing integration...

>> http://europe.nokia.com/n97#/main/landing

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

It does seem well integrated, the Facebook widget looks very cool (for those who use Facebook). I fully intend to get this phone. I wish they had used omap3 and xenon flash. But then that would be making the perfect phone and Nokia never does that!

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

I'm excited about OVI and it's future on the next Maemo device.

While searching Maemo + OVI to see what the future may bring for development and whatnot I came across this by our friend LiquidCoooled over @ Slashdot >> HERE <<

It seems he has convinced Nokia to make even their buildings more finger friendly. :)

(lcuk, I'm hoping for your speedy and uneventful recovery dude.)

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

Ovi and Maemo is something that's likely to take shape in the Harmattan timeframe (when officially-supported Qt libraries are shipped). I'd expect some real discussion on this plan during the Summit.

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

@YoDude: Have you used Ovi? (ovi.com, that is, not the actual doors at Nokia's in Finland...)

I'm also excited about the idea, but the implementation is really bad so far. Some services don't work at all, others work somehow but have implementation bugs, others just are very, very restricted... there's little to no customer care.... And the whole thing started in 2007! I really don't know if they'll ever make it work. I hope so, though. It would be cool to at least have the option to use it (as long as we're not forced to).

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

That's not quite fair (services which don't work AT ALL? :p ) or accurate.

The Ovi BRAND was announced in late 2007, but none of its services were available then. It was purely an announcement of how Nokia wanted to develop in the coming years. There was no actual product attached to the announcement, it was just about the brand and the company's future.

Ovi as a single unified service is still mid-launch, it's still in the phase of bringing together many different elements which were launched indpendently.

The reason it's taking a long time is because Nokia are having to integrate a lot of baggage from many different services that were conceived totally separately, often in totally separate companies which Nokia didn't even own at the time. Google took just as long to integrate e.g. YouTube into its system for similar reasons.

The components of Ovi are:

Ovi Share - Renamed version of Twango.com which Nokia purchased, which carried on after purchase as basically the old site with its old accounts system. The unification with Nokia's accounts system (i.e. becoming a proper part of Ovi) only happened in the middle of last year.

Nokia/Ovi Maps - Originally an independent navigation software company called Gate 5, Nokia purchased it and used it in a standalone service based on data from Navteq (which Nokia also purchased some time ago, but they only got the purchase cleared by competition authorities last year).

Nokia Music - Originally a standalone music store.

Ovi Files - First made-for-ovi service, launched last year.

Ovi Sync (contacts and calendar online syncing service) - Another made-for-ovi service, launched late last year.

N-Gage - A standalone gaming service for Nokia smartphones, it has never been integrated into Ovi at all and perhaps it will just be rolled into Ovi Store (which is what is happening to MOSH, Download and Software Market).

Ovi Store - Made-for-ovi content download service, but hasn't launched yet (launching very very soon though).

Ovi Mail - On-phone e-mail service intended for developing countries and those with cheaper phones, but anyone can sign up if they want to. The webmail client is in very early public beta testing (mail.ovi.com).

Ovi as a single service is just being born now, basically. You've got to give it time to exist as an integrated service before judging its success.

The N97 is probably one of the first phones to be designed with Ovi in mind, so this is something of a first step into the mobile world for Ovi.



The upcoming Omnia HD uses the same Symbian S60 5th Edition platform but with OMAP3 hardware.

OTOH the Omnia HD lacks a hardware keyboard, and of course Nokia's online services won't be on it either.

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

I think Symbian and Maemo will become mostly Qt-based/fully supporting Qt at roughly the same time - as the Symbian release roadmap mentioned, Symbian is intended to fully switch to Qt by the end of 2010 (with the Symbian^4 release). I don't know when Harmattan is planned to be introduced, but I guess sometime during 2010?

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

:) thanks

it seems so strange to see my full nickname here
lcuk was never meant to be permanent ;)

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

Ooh la la... totally my IT replacement device. Makes me wonder what could have been Maemo 5 with this though... from the widgets to the hardware... (ok, so I say it all the time, but even the device's design language says IT to me).

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

Their choice of CPU and the fact they're having to optimize their own OS to keep it snappy disappoints.

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

Since when is optimization a bad thing? Symbian is said to run very well on it, regardless of what CPU they're using, so I really don't many customers think twice about the CPU.

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

Optimization is not bad - not entirely sure where you deduced that from my prior statement.

Anyway, the fact they had to optimize the OS in order to keep the performance acceptable is not exactly a good thing though. Read the boards, you got people talking about OMAP3 like it's the second-coming.

And for the record, the CPU for the non-mainstream crowd makes a difference.

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

correct. ;)
of course i only refer to services i tried to use. sync (never worked at all, nokia customer care being unfriendly and not helpful at all, designed not to sync with anything but selected nokia phones, which means i can sync from my phone to my phone), share (incompatible file type error on my videos, didn't recognise meta tags on my images, page rendering issues), chat (incompatible location sharing mechanism, too restricted client). - i'm very much looking fwd to store. music, ngage etc are just not what i'm interested in atm. maybe they are ok. mail i just don't understand. too complicated for me obviously.

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

Yup, from yours and others anecdotes and my experience with the N800 part of me thinks Nokia doesn't have a clue regarding this whole new fangled internet thing. :confused:

Another part of me hopes that this is all a big mistake and that Nokia has some of the best and brightest minds working on something that will blow us all away. :eek:

...it seams though, hope is all I got. http://www.clicksmilies.com/s1106/tr...smiley-068.gif

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

The more things change...
:)

On a side note. That dang Google AdSense is good!

I went back to re-read your journal entry and this is what they placed at the top of that page:

Personal Injury Lawyer PA
Need a Personal Injury Lawyer? Contact one of our Expert Attorneys

http://www.clicksmilies.com/s1106/gr...smiley-014.gif

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

you may even be right. Tero Ojanperä of nokia recently said that they must prevent the "internet culture" from entering the mobile market. their true enemy challenge, he continued, isn't one of apple or RIM, but a customer who doesn't pay for mobile services because he's used to free services on the net.

(i needn't say how this interview was received... after all, it was published on the internet. for free.)

they still don't get it. as a company, they work not only against their consumers (which every company has to do in one way or another), but against their own products (which they don't understand) and against the reality of our time.

EDIT: i quoted from my memory when i wrote this; now that i re-read the original german article, i notice he said "challenge", not enemy. well... makes you wonder why i thought he'd said enemy. ;)

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

Man, I was hoping they were going the OTHER direction especially after having used the n810 and the included apps. It seemed as if it was going to be possible to just get a dumb mobile pipe and do everything necessary through internet services(third party or your own) like SIP, xmpp, etc.

Oh well.

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

I don't have any inside tracks with Nokia or the like, but my bet would be that they're one of the better placed ones to evolve as required into the future. Yes, on one side, you've always got the big corporate culture trying to stick to the existing profit models (they make money after all, why give up on them); on the other hand I think it's pretty obvious that there is a huge "think ahead to cool new possibilities" group/component that's also helping to keep Nokia in the right ball park going forwards. The NITs and even things like N97 are clear cut examples of this.

And while you can interpret that quote various ways I think it does actually show a very clear and modern understanding of the challenges of trying to be a profitable device creator in a changing market space. It's akin to Apple saying years ago "Okay guys, we fought the home computer battle, it was good and all, but we need to refocus on recurring revenue and alternative devices to continue to try and grow"; keep the same corporate "Apple will solve all of your problems as long as you only want to do what Apple deems possible" approach, and things work out. I think the Nokia guys have a very good point which is a lot of people do have that "internet = free" mentality, which especially from a mobile device vendor is the complete opposite of what they want; however I'd also point out that the fact that Nokia is recognizing the point and trying to work towards making a viable business plan around dealing with it is a very positive sign; there are a lot of big businesses out there that just try to ignore changing trends and "milk the existing markets" for as long as possible (thank you wireless carriers!) in my mind Nokia's proven that they have enough forward sight to be able to keep up.

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

jolouis: Of course Tero Ojanperä's statement can be interpreted in various ways. And, yes, there is all this business model, revenue,... stuff behind it. And he made it at an event that was full of developers who are eager to make money together with Nokia at Ovi.com.

But:

I believe the underlying truth is that they do not have a strategy to deal with the "internet=free" attitude a lot of consumers have. They're saying it's dangerous and must not enter their market. They're doing what the content industry has been trying for years now: fight reality.

Even more off topic:

I'm always suprised at how bad Nokia's PR is. Reader comments below the article about this interview cited Bochum, in another place I read about lex Nokia again in this context, and I bet that "We must prevent the 'internet culture' from entering the mobile market." will be another classic that'll show up in reader comments below future news about Nokia.

Recently, Nokia here in Vienna presented the Nokia E75 and a cooperation with my countries leading carrier concerning Nokia Messaging.
The only thing they got across was: "Nokia brings killer application: mail on cell phone" (that was a headline! Can you imagine the reactions?)

How on earth do they do that? Not even Microsoft is that bad at doing PR.

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

Well, we're doing our best to try to get the "internet culture" to the mobile device.

Then, a mobile market means something quite different. Mobile markets, let's say the Apple App. store - or whatever - are successful because there is some money involved, i.e. financial incentive for developers to create good applications and to compete against other developers by building better apps. It is not to say that open source wouldn't also work for some cases, but that supporting also the commercial route isn't a bad thing.

Anyway, taking that isolated comment from Tero further isn't imho particularly constructive. :)

Btw, for the original topic. The N97 is indeed shaping up to be a really nice device, I've had some chance to play around with it.

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

While I agree with the Nokia PR department does a lot of really stupid stuff (isn't that true of every big business though? Especially one that's as diverse in their day to day operations), I would point out that despite what the "top brass" are touting I think there's quite a bit of real world evidence to say that whoever's really pulling the strings at Nokia has a pretty darn good idea of what they're trying to do; whether it ends up working out for them or not has yet to be seen, but the fact that we've had 3 different NIT devices, a WHOLE whack of software development, a much more open and involved Maemo community experience... and look at all the behind the scenes stuff Nokia is doing to try to continue to grow in this direction. If they really didn't have any strategy at all to try to work with the "internet=free" mindset, they A) wouldn't have built tablet/"market testing devices" built around an open source model B) Wouldn't be continuing to try and develop and open up the rest of their software stacks C) wouldn't be acquiring so many complimentary technologies and turning them to a more open model (QT anyone?).

At the end of the day it always comes down to who's making the final call... you'll always get the "stick to what works and makes the most money" business supporters, and you'll (hopefully in a good business) have the "innovate and develop new ideas and products that reflect those to make a better world (and hopefully continue to have jobs and make money while we're at it)" people; keeping the balance right between those two is what matters. If Nokia was truly in a "we don't have an answer for internet=free, let's stick to shoving closed devices and content at people" organization then the NITs would have been dropped 2 years ago as unprofitable wastes of capital; instead you're seeing the opposite where far more resources and understanding are being directed this way...

Anyways, very far off topic here, but yea the N97 demo looks cool, hope the next NIT will be as cool but with a slightly more reasonable price tag ;-)

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

let's happily agree that we agree on this one and stop the off topic stuff in time before the authorities show up. ;)

(is it only me or has being on/off topic only become that much of an issue recently?)

Re: Wow! Nokia N97 Demo
 

I'm thinkin' Apple makes money the same way they did with the iPod... (another "free" market others couldn't figure out.) They make hardware that works very well doing what most new users expect.

The functions of most of the "App's" in the Apple store appear to me to be just recycled J2ME. (tasks not code)
Some of these J2ME concepts have been around for over 10 years.

Manufacturers and US carriers could have sold tons of these apps if the were not so focused on controlling the connection through pay per bit billing schemes, proprietary cables, and check summed loaders.

BTW, if benny1967's posted quote is any indication of Nokia Executives current mind set, I have a much greater appreciation of how tough qgil's day job must really be. :eek: