Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

Just wondering the reason.

N900 (Maemo 5) had great UI.

Not worse than iPhone/Android, IMO.

So, why the sales data looks so disappointing...



Just because Maemo 5 is not a phone OS and the consumer cannot accept such a big progress ?

I can only see this reason.

Because both iOS and Android are phone OS,
And, MeeGo, what Nokia is working hard on, is also going to be a phone OS, so my conclusion is phone OS with great UI and many good Apps will succeed.

Symbian is not that successful because the UI of Symbian is far more old-fashioned comparing to iOS/Android.

Is that right ?

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

And,

Symbian^3 cannot provide great UI because of the limitation of the system.

But MeeGo can do this.

if MeeGo is going to be a Phone OS for N9,

then it is trying to imitate iOS/Android.

iOS/Android is 3 years ahead,

If MeeGo is just a duplication of Android, and 3 years behind,

I can barely see the chance that Nokia will finally win the market back.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I am always thinking that Android/iOS is one step ahead Symbian,

and Maemo is one step ahead iOS/Android (thus, Maemo is 2 steps ahead Symbian).

Most consumers can only accept the one step ahead, not 2 steps.

Maybe they will accept Maemo 5 several years later, but not now.

(Just like Microsoft Vista, people do not accept at first, but they can accept Windows 7 several years later)

So what Nokia is doing now is just one step backward, and trying to do what Apple and Google did 3 years ago.

Is it right ?

I think Nokia should optimize the Maemo 5 and wait the customer to accept this ''2 steps ahead'', not trying to copy Android / iPhone.

Anyone has the same idea ?

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

who said it failed? its a geek toy and was never intended for the masses.

ps, you will go insane if you keep talking to yourself

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

just separated my thread into 3 ... LOL

You mean N900 did not get a good sales number just because NOKIA did not want to ?

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

What sales data?

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

On of the biggest reasons why some potential geeks didnt buy N900 was the lack of applications.
So the biggest reason to buy N900 back then was the hardware that was way ahead of all Androids and compairable with Iphone 3GS.
But if you didnt have need for a desent camera, 32gb and FM transmitter then there was no reason to buy N900, due to the unknown future for N900.
And as to day, we can see that the application explosion didnt happen for N900 as it did for Android.
N900 is still a geek phone, and it the geekphone above all. I like it!

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

Personally, I don't give a monkeys if it's "failed in the consumer market" or not.

I've got a great phone/mobile computer and a great community here, so what's the problem?

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

The problem is if it wasn't a success, they'll try and change it for the next time round and screw it up :( Can you imagine the next step being an onscreen keyboard, no FM transmitter, capacitive screen and all about form factor like the crappy N8?

I can't and refuse to =/

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I'm not a phone expert.

When did Nokia successfully market a high-end, premium-priced cult phone?

I think they don't know how to do it.

Nokia abandoned the tablet/reader market just as it was getting hot.

What if they had released something like the iPad before Apple? Then, after the iPad, released NTablet Two?

I think they would have had a significant success.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

The reason the n900 failed and by the way all nokia handhelds fail, is the lack of nokia listening to the people that are using it.

How many people allready asked about mms on the n900. how many people asked for flash 10 support on the n900?

yet still they dont give a ****. and are to busy building the shitty meego wich will go the same drain as maemo 5 does now.

We finaly have Ovi support after a year.... what the hell is that! Most consumers dont know how to go to root and install $hit to be able to do more. for these people there are 20 apps in the catalogue and a few more in the ovi store. wich cant be paid by telephone bill on the n900. so everyone who cant pay for it is downloading it from torrent. and i cant disagree with them!

Besides that the n900 has a terrible buggy alarm, and phone app. (still after PR1.3) and the media player widget (its really sad after so much updates) still doesnt work how it should!

Im not finished yet, the virtual keyboard doesnt work like it should. messing up text when editing.

Im not saying i hate my n900, im just saying that if we didn't had a community like this, the n900 would have really been a very sad device...

I just dont understand why nokia doesnt make wishes of consumers come true. I also dont understand why they are making a new system while the old one (maemo 5) wasnt even finished. If you ask me, it would be far better to optimize maemo 5 then starting from scratch, doing all these mistakes all over again.

Whats nokia doing...?

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

would be interesting to see how many they sold so far

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I think that sums it up pretty well.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I guess one of the reasons is lack of good design: the iphones are simply well made in this regard. The other, and that might even be more important: for many, and to simply slip the fone into your pocket, it is just too heavy/clunky. I know this from personal conversation: someone wanting a fone like this, not mainstream, open and versatile, but the size/weight is the showstopper. I find this rather sad, cause at current prices the N900 are a great bargain.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

no its not correct ,People did not accept Vista because it was total pants, not because it was one or two steps ahead

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I am not sure what you are talking about, i have various repetitive alarms set on my N900 and it hasnt failed me even once. I dont think i can say that about my blackberry which has missed atleast 3 alarms, and certainly not comparable to the iPhone alarm which went t1t5 up at DST switchover...

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I've been really impressed by it.
I was completely shocked when it powered on to wake me up after i'd forgotten to plug it in and let the battery drain overnight. Outstanding! Thanks to this, I still have a job!

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

Give them a break, they were just selling tyres to start with, and by chance they made *then* high-end, premium-priced cult phones loaded with symbian that no one else being proud of but themselves. Okay, they got some luck dominating the smartphone martket with this cult OS that nobody here gives a darn of, but still they were *just* making tyres so give them some chance to work things out right okay?
http://www.about-nokia.com/images/tyres.jpg

(joke intended *wink wink*)

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

sales data looks disappointing?Right.
http://captionsearch.com/image.php?id=296

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

linux on a phone is a huge step to make. so i am glad nokia tried it. nevertheless i think thats a step you have to do completly or not. halfways is imo hard.

what do i mean with that: what they do is take a unix and change half of the os to behave different. if you do that you get into the situation that all the software provided by others expecting the "normal" behavior gets broken. additionally devs of such software will not fix such problems for they go for standard behavior. so you don't have(or few) the devs that just port their app for the phone and the other way round the stuff created for the phone(even more so if it is propretary) will not get into a state to be used as a base for develepement.
and they did neither: create everything(which would be realy a lot to do) nor left the possibility to use somthing others created. and that leaves a gap.

i think they learned a little from their mistakes as i see quite a change in the behaviour now with meego. its a lot better. but still has the issue. its not a customization but a whole os. and if you do a whole os you are again bound to do that: the whole thing.

otherwise you had by now a lot of operating systems working on the phone for the user with all the software that comes with it. you had a customizable desktop and user who would use the look and feel they like by just installing it and would love it.
users could use just the application they wanted and would not require devs to rewrite sofware for a single phone, which they won't do not even support for its non standard. with all that you would see a phone which would beat every other phone in usability.

hardware: its a highend phone with highend core. but that stuff is put together in realy bad quality. the result is a device which is potentioally capable of a lot more than it is. result is a device that has issues in many usecases.

also it feels like they got into timepressure in the end and instead of postponing the release to finish it up, they just released a product with workarounds. at least it feels like that: started and planned great but in the end failed to really do it right(at first i thought: they replaced the capable folks who started it with incapable folks at some time - thats how it feels.).

sure it's a big step to make and well don't mourn: it's at least a start.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

the n900 is the only electronically device, that i bought 2 times just to be sure that if it will disappear from the market one day, i still have another one.

the fact that nokia didnt advertise it probably, is one big part of "why it failed" in your eyes. in my opinion, it was more like a test device and its much more than any other phone so people didnt want it maybe. also it had some problems at the beginning and not everybody likes the landscape view all the time. (i actually didnt like it as well at the first time)

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

Android is linux. It was done before Nokia did the N900. Nokia were copying to try and grab market %

I think the issue is, if it failed then support dries up and Nokia move on. Like anything that doesn't sell you ignore it and move on.

Vista died because of IBM not buying into it, when the worlds largest company says no you need to think why. Other large scale business' followed suit. There was device driver issues from all sectors because it didn't have the hardware tech checks prior to launch (MS announced this after launch), lack of MS understanding of the market, the hardware requirements being a big step up and too big for most people (even law suits in california because MS lied). Nothing to do with end users hating it as well. Even a MS director refused to upgrade his company laptop to Vista, his email explaining this was leaked.

Windows 7 is actually windows 6.1, (If you look at the source code) so it really is Vista with add ons. Most of those add ons were nicked from Linux (snap is from mandriva 2008 etc) And people accepted it because hardware cycles across the globe skipped Vista, so large scale business's were left with a choice, stay on XP and have MS cut support, continue the buggy and crap Vista or make the upgrade.

I am interested though, Maemo is 2 steps ahead???

It is a basic linux distro on a phone. It is the same as Android but you can jail break it and use it, something Google locked down to reduce the amount of messing that goes on inside. The kernel is the same as every other linux kernel, it is still just Linux and that puts it right back to the same basic logic as Android (upto 2.1 when they split off the kernel tree), Ubuntu, mandriva etc. What Nokia did was code it to a small black box, nothing more, and they didn't do that very well. Android is in version 2.2 now and still only Android. Maemo is on version 1.3 and now there is Meego 1.1. Google stuck it out and worked well to get it out there, even with their decision to split from the linux tree (which might be reversed.)Nokia failed at the first hurdle because the N900 did pants in the markets and then changed their minds to try another linux distro.

It isn't two steps, it is another direction from the same starting point.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

because vista sucked hard compared to 7.

not that maemo5 sucks, but maybe meego is going to be what maemo5 tried to.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I don't think you quite understand what Nokia are trying to do with Meego/symbian now.

The big focus is on Qt! By using Qt what they have basically done is make it easier to port applications from symbian to meego and vice versa but ALSO port applications from Linux apps using Qt to Meego/symbian.

So you may think that Nokia are behind the game - but in actual fact the will be far ahead of the game in around 1-2 years time.

You just have to look at the number of (useful) apps in repos to understand the power of the N900 and the direction Nokia is headed!

Just a few days ago I received an email with a docx attachment on my phone - if I had an android/iphone I would be screwed - but my N900 has open office 3, so I just fired it up and was able to view it!

(After extracting it using xarchiver!).

That kind of power is not available with ANY phone! So you can say the N900 was a failure - but I don't see that!

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

it wasn't meant to consumer market in the first place. satisfied?

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

o'rly?

http://telecomblog.lv/wp-content/upl...okia-770-3.jpg

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I really am glad that I have a N900. But then I have almost 20 years Linux experience and I was able to fit the N900 to my tastes.

The problem with the N900 is that out of the box it is a load of crap. Email client, Calendar, syncing, contacts and todo's are horrible. If Nokia had taken the trouble to ship decent applications with the N900, things may well have been different. And they have themselves to blame, because there are many excellent Open Source solutions for all those services, that they could have adapted without too much difficulties.

My experience with large corporations like Nokia is, that bad decisions generally do not 'just happen'. Someone, somewhere earns a lot of money.

Paai

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

It's the marketing!

iPhone and Androids are pushed out in the consumer market with strong marketing hype. Not many people know about the N900 because there's little/no marketing activity (compared with what Apple did for iPhone). Or at least in Nokia's perspective (justification), the N900 was meant for niche market.

Remember what Sony Ericsson did for one of it's model with James Bond (I can't recall which was it)? The only place people will hear about the N900 is from this forum.

Marketing strategy! That's how you effectively sell your products :cool:

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

sorry but this is complete nonesense. maemo has turned everything upside down, and for the kernel: no, it is really not standard linux kernel. it differs significantly or why do you think is it still a 2.6.28 derivative? we are heading towards a 2.6.37.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

i think, problem, that the n900 wasn't promoted (in germany)
there were no ads like for the other phones.
and there was a long time, when tho n900 could only be bought in online shops.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I personally think it's because

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

:confused::confused::confused: uhhhm, can you elaborate?

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

Not hard to figure out why the N900 was not a commercial success. And no it is not that Nokia did not intend it to be a commercial success. I am sure Nokia would have loved to sell 10 million of these things.

For all of us that love the N900 we just need to consider why we love it and realise they are the very reasons the N900 could never have been a commercial success. They are also the very reasons the HTC Desires and iphones and now the Samsung Galaxies have been so successful.

1. Form Factor: For us we may love having a butch device and having a hardware keyboard but for girls and for many guys it is just too thick and ugly. I would guess close to half of buyers of smartphones are female. If on form factor alone you rule out half the market then you are bound to have limited success.

2. Bugginness: There are tons of bugs and missing features. Some bugs have been fixed (usually not by Nokias) and missing features implemented by others. These things require visiting this site very often to find solutions (e.g. swappolube). Most people do not have time for this. They just want to tap an icon and it opens up immediately. They want to press send on an email and it sends immediately, not have a rotating loading icon for 20 seconds (well done Nokia Messaging). To really get the best out of the N900 you need a significant investment of time with the device and time on this website. Well most people are not interested. They want to spend their free time watching Big Brother, watching football, reading OK Magazine. Not spend it trying to get a phone to run smoothly.

3. Apps: Apps are clearly the way forward now whether we like it or not. The N900 has very few apps and most of them are in Testing or Developers.

4. Resistive Screen: The general public do not want this. They do not want to have to use a stylus. They want the most responsive screen possible. They do not want to have to use their nails and bend their finger to get full responsiveness. Yes bla bla China market and cold countries. Truth is insist on resistive screen and just as with form factor you are reducing a big chunk of the market and those you bring in from having a resistive do not come anywhere close to making up for those you lose.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

Android is _not_ linux. Google had re-written almost every core library in their OS. Last I checked they have not released the modifications as they must do so. The statement Android is Linux is almost like iOS/MacOS is Unix.

PLEASE give us the source code of Windows 7 and Windows 6.1:D

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I think the biggest reason was that shortly after it came out, it was revealed that the OS (Maemo) was being abandoned for a new OS (Meego). It gave me a lot of reservations about buying an N900, & it was the reason a couple of engineers I know did not by an N900.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

Too fat, too buggy, too underdeveloped, too abandoned (for meego)...too bad, it coulda been a contenda...Nokia went into the proverbial gun fight vs android/ios with a knife not a gun. And they never even bothered to sharpen the knife. I love the device for what it can do (bash in my pocket) but it is unimaginable how poor the device would be if not for this community. Shame on Nokia.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I disagree. We, the smart, charming and adorable bunch of people bought it right? It's definitely for a niche market. Nokia is competing with the other slim smartphones (form and function) with the N8 or E7. Anyway, remember the N900 is the decendent of the 'tablet' mobile internet device(MID) range which has always been for niche market.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

So earlier Maemo machines were copying Android before it was released. And the Dalvik copy on the N900 is just hiding somewhere...

Suppport has dried up, which is why it's almost a month since the latest major firmware release...

I'm fairly sure Micrfosoft are bigger than IBM and that IBM had already sold their desktop and laptop business to Lenovo by the time Vista came out. But let's not le inconvenient facts get in the way of anything.

The same other than that VM that everything on Amdroid runs in. Identical. And you can't jailbreak Maemo, as it isn't jailled to start with.

Other than Dal... oh, what's the point?

[QUOTE=twigleaf1976;881002]What Nokia did was code it to a small black box, nothing more, and they didn't do that very well. Android is in version 2.2 now and still only Android. Maemo is on version 1.3 [QUOTE]

Maemo 5 is on release 1.3.

Tying up with Intel and getting their technology (esp Qt) spread into a wide variety of platforms had nowt to do with Nokia's Meego decision then? Well, now we know.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

why they still use linux versioning? Because they use vanilia kernel with lot of own patches.

Re: Why N900 failed on consumer market ?
 

I disagree with your disagree. No company puts out products hoping they will have limited appeal/sales, if the tablets are niche, they became niche when they never took off, not because nokia wanted a niche product. Evidently they were not made or marketed right, as look what certain tablets are doing now. In 20/20 hindsight its is easy to just say stuff was meant to be niche, but I doubt that was how the devices were pitched internally within Nokia.