@Gerbick "And here... we agree 100%. Mind you, I'm not the target for the N8, as shown by my disregard for Symbian over Maemo (the little Linux lover in me likes Maemo/MeeGo better)... but I know a multi-media phone that will sell well when I see it.

And it's the N8. Priced right too? Nokia's got a hit on their hands. "

Couldn't you have said the same thing about the n85 or the n86?

I just picked up a load but not for this reason, I expect the stock to pop 10 percent when they announce the CEO is being kicked out..

the only real immediate downside might be huge if N8 is a disaster. the video sample looked good but a sample posted by an enduser on you tube looked pretty choppy and bad.

I could... but I wouldn't.

I had played/used those phones and won't lie... I walked away unimpressed. I've yet to use the N8, however the optics alone surpass what's out there in terms of quality.

The N95 and then the N97 got my attention. But the prior N8* series didn't quite get my attention outside of form factor. The new N8* series can't even say that - I dislike the tapered look. And if anything, neither of them made any splashes in the blogosphere. The N8 has.

In my opinion, OPK is a ballsy, astute leader. He took the ultimate gamble, trusted his department heads knowledge and vision, and hedged his bets on his massive lead, big warchest of cash and IP, and the analysis of the future in mobile, and has taken advantage of the results to set Nokia up to dominate and become one of the largest companies in the world for years to come.

GROWTH

The global converged device market in developed countries, save the sliver still left in the US, is mostly mature with little prospects for massive growth rates. However, the "Next Billion" mobile tech users will mostly come from the BRIC markets of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Nokia is currently the leading device seller in each of these markets, and has the most solid and affordable device lineup in the industry, with absolutely no competitor at many low price points. Their prospects on the low to midrange is excellent.

The US market hasn't slowed yet, and is actually driving the industry at the mid to high end. Nokia has gotten both major GSM carriers in the US to adopt Ovi Store billing, both now carry Symbian devices, and they just announced the first 5 band 3G world phone with the most advance camera hardware ever seen on a mobile device. It is possibly the best specced mobile on the planet, priced 20-35% lower than devices in its performance bracket.

It is assumed at least one of the US carriers will subsidize the N8, as two of its colors are not available at launch. I am assuming the blue one will be an at&t exclusive, and the orange one for Orange. Just a guess. Either way, progress in the US is right on schedule. In just 6-8 months, Nokia should announce even more advanced hardware, ushering in the launch of their MeeGo and Symbian^4 unified software ecosystems and devices. With one universal model for the entire world, production costs will be lower, as well as software support.

SERVICES

Say what you will about Ovi, but in the BRIC markets, they are eating massive chunks of the market. It also protects Nokia from flagging hardware sales, and gives the devices longer profitability from time of sale. They are entering a fresh US market and have carrier support.

Aside from Google and Microsoft, only Nokia has a compelling service portfolio. Apple's is not as robust and mature, though it is different, and focused on media sales. The fact Nokia has a hat in the game at all is great, as they already control a decent part of the market, and can address other parts with its Qt cross platform software.

They also have the best map data on earth in Navteq. So they have been solidified for revenue streams in every device made by anyone if they desire to address their market, with services, maps, and a cross platform app ecosystem they can proliferate upon the market whenever they wish.

Seriously, stock price can be manipulated. But results can not. All of their losses can be recovered easily with the tools they have acquired, whether they sell devices ever again or not. THAT is the magic of it all. The fact that they will, and will sell more than anyone else, and embed their services at a platform level, without having to spend all of the money making Symbian anymore, is a comfortable position to be in.

Just saying. I would love to hold onto some Nokia stock for the next 5 years.

It was a phone that gave you Linux. While I don't gauge that as success as future Linux phones, I do gauge it as the response one gets from selling a Linux pocket tablet with bad other functionality.

I believe that if right now I build a Windows box that runs Hildon over it and make the platform run all N900 app base via recompiling with target=NdiOS, 90% of the users wouldn't even notice, let alone be bothered by it, let alone sway them into purchasing an HTC.

My point being, in a phone/tablet/whatever, it's more important to have a nice feature list, apps and whatnot than the OS in itself. While a few want a phone that has a true-debian CLI to it, that is NOT the bulk of the users, that stuff Nokia's pockets.

As for the x86 phone, they all fail because it's not yet possible. Battery to power such a device needs to be large, and that means more miniaturization in the components, which isn't available right now. That doesn't stop it from becoming the Holy Grail of mobile computing.

This far, phones have going forward, and have done so by embedding more and more of the functionality a user needs. First calls, the text, then chat, internet, alarm. Then organizer, and so on. Now they embedded the PDA functionality and the PNA functionality. The more they do, the more valuable they become to the user because we no longer need to carry an internet tablet, a video camera, a picture camera and so on.

Right now what we miss is being able to do basic tasks a laptop does. And by that I mean office functionality and running apps we run at work. Since those aren't going to be ported to ARM any time soon, we need to bring phones to netbooks.

Either that or netbooks will be so small you can carry in pocket and hold to ear, same deal.

Finally, XP might not be the ideal setup for a portable. However, by the time this all goes portable, W7 or W8 or whatever will be optimized or portable to the extent where this becomes realistic.

A small laptop in high energy efficiency mode (minimal screen, no gaming, SSD, scheduling), goes as long as 4 hours online. Yes the battery is as big as N900 if not bigger, but I don't think this is unachievable, especially since I don't see myself upgrading the N900 any time soon. Also, since it's going to be portable, limited motherboard and CPU features will be made available. Just as now you can't compare 10W peak consumption from a netbook to my 200W idle consumption on my desktop, things will be more efficient as we go along.

Tech is already going well. E.g. a memory chip dedicated to hibernation for 256M isn't huge and could restore an OS in 1-2 seconds. N900 takes that long to ring now.

Plus, N900 isn't exactly large. I could live with even bigger.

Also, if it gets enough fine tuning that it gets 4 hours of usage and 12 hours standby, that's enough to hit the market.

I guess I want a small laptop. Don't you?

Ok, I'm wading in here, because this has been troubling me for several years already. I think Nokia has made some serious blunders in the past few years. I think they have time to turn things around, but they've already fallen behind, and it is going to be harder now.

I think Linux (POSIX-compliant GNU/Linux like Maemo / MeeGo, not Linux-kernel Android or BSD-kernel iPhone OS) is the future of mobile computing. I think a lot of people inside Nokia have believed that too for quite a while. But I think Nokia hasn't been investing in the future properly.

PAST:

The 770 was a revolutionary concept device (a handheld Linux computer!). The N800 took those concepts and promised us a game-changer around the corner (pop out swivel camera capable of streaming video to the net! Two SD card slots! USB host!). Nokia was poised to change the industry. But the N810 was ... lacking. It was surprisingly uninteresting. Very little innovation. Same chipset as the N800. Still no 3D acceleration. Mini SD? It was a dead-end format when the N810 was released! And then the N810W ... whatever. It was like someone said, "Mass market? What's that? Let's waste time making this niche product even more niche!"

It wasn't much better in terms of software. The OS was Linux, yes, but it was using so much proprietary and/or closed stuff interwoven with the OSS, that it was nearly impossible to run Maemo on any other device, it was nearly impossible to run any other Linux variant on the tablets, and existing Linux applications couldn't just be recompiled, they had to be laboriously ported to the OS.

Every iteration of the Maemo OS took much longer than the competition was taking to get bugfixes and features out the door.

PRESENT:

The N900 / Maemo 5 was really something special. But again, all the same problems dogged them from the first announcements in 2008. The devices were really at least 6 months late into peoples' hands and even then, it feels like they shipped because they had to, not because they were finished. The software again was tangled up with lots of closed bits. Despite all of the public repositories and the SDK, there was still a great deal of "throwing it over the wall".

And PR1.2? Well, that's partly an historical re-enactment of the N900 release for those who missed it the first time. It is also partly the Final Farewell to Maemo for Nokia. They're tying up as many loose ends as possible with this release, because they all know that's it for this operating system.

I honestly think that Nokia's biggest mistake with Maemo has been that they didn't put enough resources into it, early enough. Sure, they've had a great team, but it has been too small for too long. They've been making many of the right choices, but a year or two late. For instance, Maemo became Maemo Devices in the summer of 2009. They should have become Maemo Devices in the summer of 2007. They should have been aiming to have the best team in Nokia by early 2008. They should have been hiring community members to build their software. Instead of letting Google poach Gnuite (Maemo Mapper), they should have gotten him to build a kickass Ovi maps implementation for Maemo 5.

I have really only been talking about Maemo here. But Nokia's had this problem all over the place.

Nokia bought Trolltech in January 2008. A brilliant move. But like every other brilliant move by Nokia, they've been slow and clumsy to implement it. They are only now pushing the cross-platform Qt-everywhere idea in 2010.

Honestly, the N900 should have been running on Qt.

I've heard a lot of noise about Nokia transitioning to a services-based company. I don't know a lot about this area of Nokia, but... Again, the idea is great, but all I know is that I still can't buy the Angry Birds level packs from the Ovi store, and Ovi maps is no better (I would argue that it is worse) on my N900 than the several open source mapping apps I have on the N900.

FUTURE:

Come on, Nokia. You've still got some money in the bank and a good chunk of market share. You've got the best-looking strategy out there right now -- a completely open OS, a very respected cross-platform framework, and lots of potential to make some amazing devices for us all.

Oh and Nokia: If you are having difficulty beefing up your teams with good people, it is probably because you need to get a better HR department first. Stop hiring with a shopping list of buzzwords. You need to be hiring smart, very flexible people who can figure out how to do new stuff, rather than people with experience doing what you're already doing. If you hire experienced people, then you can't be at the cutting edge.

(I know you're doing it wrong, because you haven't contacted me yet... But your competitor did! )

Qole, that was absolutely beautiful.

And as to your last part: there are several of us (yes, I'll selfishly include myself) that should have been snagged by Maemo Devices. I know I'd be busting my @$$ in any capacity I could if I was still in Nokia directly supporting this effort. Why Nokia doesn't capitalize more on that (hiring VDVsx was great, but letting Gnuite get away as you say was nuts) I have no idea.

Odds are my next job will be with a Nokia competitor since Nokia couldn't find a place for me. Many former colleagues have already done it.

Nokia needs to work harder on keeping passionate people if they want to succeed.

Engadget and Gizmodo aside, I was quite suprised to see how many 'real professional finance analysts' have directly or inderectly mentioned the mobile-review's preview of N8 in their Nokia outlook. I mean people working at really fancy institutions.

Not that the recent Goldman/Iceland/Lehman news have left me high regard for those institutions, but seeing them use same sources as teeanged fanbois...well puts their profession in perspective.

You're wrong on this one. It's not like someone said that. Someone said it! Maemo, from 770 to N900, was and is a niche product. And: There's nothing wrong with niche products as long as they're in my niche.

I normally wouldn't have said that (because I assume you know), but it maybe healthy to write it down. I read recently in a German language article that Nokia "failed" with the Internet Tablets, their first attempt on the tablet market, because it never sold well. People seem to be obsessed with hero-devices and sales charts only. I think it's up to Nokia - and only to Nokia - to judge the success of a product, and the only benchmark is their own business plan. If they sell more than expected, it's a success - an we'll never know because we don't know how much they thought they'd sell.

I'll accept that with caveats. The N800 sold more than expected, but that made it a failure in some contexts. I won't mention return rate stats but suffice to say they indicated problems with the out-of-box experience.

Regardless of intended product scope, the support infrastructure should match it. To date it has not with these devices. I find that unacceptable-- especially since I worked so hard (and in futility) in the company to champion improvement.