You could also use the word...

SAMSUNG.

http://www.yle.fi/uutiset/news/2011/03/samsung_looks_to_nokia_workforce_2423720.html

Incidentally, Andrew, excellent article. Thanks for that.

PS. Is it my eyesight failing (probably) or has El Reg's esteemed banner gone a bit darker?

I still apparently can "Withdraw", "Fail" "WTF" etc in the dark (mercifully) but "Post Your Own Message*" seem a shade or two less bright.

* I won't write it in capitals, like the script to the left of "House Rules" because I understand Ms. Bee doesn't like capitals, and likes everything "Shipshape and Bri..."

nope. Dun'go there..

Is the BOFH on O/T?

They had the future

I mean Maemo is probably the closest thing to an actually working mobile operating system.

While the other operating often don't even have a working network stack, Maemo was essentially Debian.

For me...

The terrible product (N97) was bad, but the after sales really nailed their coffin shut.

Obviously there were things the N97 could never do, so no firmware update would ever give it multitouch or anything like that, but basic faults like a GPS which couldn't hold a lock at more than walking speed when Nokia were giving away free turn by turn satnav was just ridiculous.

Delays in firmware updates as Nokia let carriers decide when/if their customers were allowed updates just left people stuck with old firmware, and old bugs that were fixed months ago. Not that Joe Public knew any of this, he just knew his Nokia was a lemon and bought something else next time round.

The latter issue could be worked round by changing the model ID of the phone to a generic Euro one, guess what, you couldn't mention this to anyone suffering a problem which was already fixed on the Nokia forums! If you did one of the pocket Hitler mods would pull the post and tell you off. I even tried to explain that if Joe Public thinks his Nokia is crap he won't buy one next time, and eventually you won't have anyone to moderate in the forum, but have to give up in the face stubborn stupidity.

After over 10 years of loyal Nokia (and Symbian) ownership I finally jumped last month. I was so fed up with my N97 which I'm still stuck in a contract for, I went out and paid real money for an Android based HTC Desire Z, and do you know what, it's fan-bloody-tastic! I've had it for a month and it's just worked, perfectly, no weird errors, loads of great free apps. I've even got round to starting to write some apps for it, something I did try to do with Symbian a couple of times, but on both occasions the development environment wouldn't even compile their own example code, so I gave up on that idea!

As you say, Nokia's navigation of their randomly changing road map would make for a good depressing film, but I doubt anyone would believe it!

Not just the UI

As has been said in the article and these comments, some of the UI was clunky and unintuitive such as the aforementioned tapping inside the text block which brings up a full-screen keyboard with small text input box when writing, erm, anything, for instance.

That said, as an owner of an N97 before the hardware died of fatal first-batch bugginess and now a 5230, I could have forgiven the UI foibles a lot more if the bloody touch screens had been responsive. I don't mind so much if I have to make an extra press somewhere if that press is handled quickly and accurately but it's the exception rather than the rule that this is the case and it is that lack of sensitivity and control, in my opinion, that does the most to ruin the UX by compounding the clunkiness of the UI.

I've played with a mate's N8 in the pub and, certainly, the screen feels a lot snappier so even the UI that's not been tweaked in S^3 seems so much better to use than the N97 or 5230 (and so likely the 5800, too). Ironically for a company that is described here many times over (and by other commentards) as a hardware specialist it seems to me to be the touchscreen handset hardware that caused the most user misery and this, surely, would have been a simpler quick fix that could have saved much of Nokia's touchscreen market-share.

Ah well. I get my Desire Z in a month or so.

Japanese?

"US and Japanese companies now dictate the market."

What Japanese companies? Apple, Google, Microsoft, HP/Palm and Motorola are American. HTC are Taiwanese. Samsung and LG are Korean.

The only Japanese company I can think of that has a presence in the market is Sony Ericsson, and a) it's a joint venture between Sony and Swedish Ericsson, and b) they hardly have the market penetration at the moment necessary for them to start 'dictating the market'.

Market leader

Nokia globally outsells all other mobile phones and only faces any real competition for the top slot from Samsung and LG. What the fuck does Elop think he is fixing?

The time I got alerted

As Nokia E71 owner, I spoke with a leading KDE developer who really cares about UI. I told him about Qt switch, why wouldn't he ship his app to Nokia and so on.

Guy told me there isn't a single UI for Qt on Symbian/Maemo and gave the list of mess on the article. That was before Elop and we Symbian users didn't have a clue about it. As he gave the list, I really lost 80% of hope in future of Symbian.

Sigh

Yah, I'll second the contention that Nokia had the best voice-quality coupled with crappy User Interfaces that were a nightmare to use. My experiences with them go back to before there were smart phones.

One Nokia I had couldn't display my own number without me burrowing down into the "reconfigure the phone" basement. Another (different carrier) required seven key operations in order to select a built-in ringtone. So non-intuitive was the process I used to bet people actual money they couldn't do it. The only good thing to come of that phone UI was the few quid I won from it.

Motorola, on the other hand, had an very usable UI, a delight to use, but Hayzoos what crappy reception! 5 bars meant nothing on every Motorola I ever owned.

I used to wonder why no-one in either organization ever used their own products, or asked their family members to do so, so they could "sanity check" the bloody things.

Now I have a Samsung Smartphone (AT&T contract) and once again it is proving to be sub-optimal, from the slide out texting keyboard that stopped working reliably after a month and stopped working completely after two (with less than 40 text messages composed), to the crappy voice quality kneecapped even further by an automatic gain control that makes me feel seasick when listening to people speak to me over the bloody thing, to the GUI that immediately upon my accepting a call covers fully half the screen with a message instructing me to press a button on the side of the case to make the screen display useful in-call things like - oooh I dunno - A KEYPAD so I can navigate a voicemail system or reorder my Lipitor from the pharmacy. By the time I've figured out what needs doing the phonebot at the other end has either hung up on me or started speaking Spanish.

No designer could possibly have used this effing thing to make a call in a realistic situation. The only explanation is they gave the entire QA department two weeks notice a fortnight before the product launch.

Comments from the past...

...are always interesting later: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tys4cG-tbpsJ:blog.symbian.org/2009/08/14/what-does-the-nokia-microsoft-deal-say-about-symbian/+Mark+Wilcox&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&lr=lang_hu|lang_en&source=www.google.com

S90 & S80

You should use the S80 and S90 devices (Nokia 9500, 9300 & 7710) to see what Nokia achieved in 2004/5. It was remarkable, especially the Nokia 7710 (high res and fast). Nokia has lacked vision and strong management since the great period to 2005 and this has allowed it to make a series of poor decisions. And now with Win Phone 7 it will die. So sad.

Qt must be saved from Nokia.

FSF to the rescue, I really think open source community and even companies like Skype and Google earth team should enter "panic mode" and save qt from Nokia.

Seriously, it is a big deal, even if you are a wlndows user/developer who doesn't give a damn to open source.

Pardon the American reference...

...but around here, the size of the nail in question is 9 inches.

Rich Green as CTO ! LOL

Well that explains some things.

Where is the "RIP N95" icon ?? It remains the last great Nokia phone. I never understood how they turned out the seemingly similar N96 & N76 as such unreliable POS by comparison. Looking back its clear something had already gone very wrong.

So how long has Microsoft got?

Nokia obviously aren't stopping their internal development efforts. They must have had an option to see the QT licences to Digia, yet they didn't. As of QT 4.7.0, released September 2010, QML is a stable API ready for prime time. MeeGo hasn't been canned, Symbian development continues. These aren't the acts of a company that has decided to abandon its burning platforms just yet.

If I were MS, I'd be nervous. How long have they got to pull Nokia out of the shit, I wonder? I'm guessing it will be set by rate of progress of Nokia's "not yet canned" software projects. If WinPhone 7 isn't outselling Symbian in 2 years, my guess is Nokia's next U-Turn will be just as fast as this last one.

I guess it all hinges on whether QML is as good as it appears to be. I am hoping it will be showcased on the N950. They didn't meet their Q4 2010 deadline with the N9, so they have plenty of time to polish it now. If they end up with underlying graphics engine that is a smooth as the N900's, but with a user friendly shell, and a nice QT Declarative SDK we will have something that is incomplete but looks promising. Right now that is about where WinPhone 7 is too. If WinPhone 7 doesn't mature fast things could get real interesting real quickly.

Nokia simply couldn't do smartphones

Nokia, along with quite a few other companies, simply did not have the skill set to produce a decent smartphone on their own. It is *entirely* about the GUI and the user experience.

I tried an N97 Mini and on a lot of occasions I felt like throwing it against a brick wall. It was unintuitive, confusing, unreliable and extremely prone to crashing/freezing or behaving oddly.

The touch screen was totally insensitive to touch and required endless fiddling to get it to work and it was just dated and generally not pleasant to use.

Back in the days when phones were still "stupid"phones and before the iPhone, Motorola was having the floor wiped with itself by Nokia and Sony Ericsson as they were producing very intuitive basic 2G/3G phones with nice menu systems. While Motorola's menu systems often felt like you were trying to interact with a 1970s mainframe with a teletype keyboard.

However, when the iPhone and then Android came along, Nokia was simply unable to come up with anything competitive at that end of the market.

Remember, Nokia's smartphone business is only a small % of it's overall business. Apple on the other hand only has 1 current model of phone at anytime i.e. the iPhone and the android manufacturers have a major focus on smartphones i.e. HTC.

The developer community and the IT media all salavate over smartphones, but Nokia's bread and butter is still 'dumbphones' and it churns out a vast amount of these.

It also holds vast numbers of patents on networking technologies and churns out a huge amount of network equipment through Nokia-Siemens Networks, it's joint venture company.

So, I wouldn't write Nokia off completely.

Also, they may occupy a certain niche with their smart phone windows phone offering i.e. dull business people who will see Nokia and Microsoft as two sensible trusted brands.

That being said, it could equally be a marriage made in hell with two slow corporate giants who can't innovate.

Symbian

Using Symbian was like trying to draw a picture with an Etch-a-sketch. Possible, but takes a lot of patience. Lots of moving up a bit, down, left and right. Cursor keys and menus are rather annoying to say the least.

Compare music keyboards from the 1980s to those now and you'll see much better user interfaces, 80s keyboards were largely all buttons and one slider. Keyboards now have touch screens, sliders, wheels, XY controllers and lots of knobs. Nokia was comparable to those clunky 80s keyboards, lots of potential but you were trying to access it through a very narrow letterbox of an interface.

Modern touch screen OSes are like using a pen, your hand is in full control and you can instantly touch or select something on the screen.

Nokia failed to grasp touch screens until it was too late. I seem to remember them announcing S60 touch and it still had support for a stylus, they completely blew it!

@Nokia simply couldn't do smartphones

Spot on - I seem to remember that my Moto StarTAC didn't allow an SMS to be sent to an address book entry (you had to key in the phone number!). In many ways I still miss my Nokia 6310i now - great sound quality, good size and weight, easy to use and had some great features that they later inexplicably dropped (timed profiles - how useful was the ability to set your phone to silent for 60 minutes and then switch back to loud?).

They never equalled the ease of use of that age of phone - the N95 was awkward and even later candybars were poor.

There's no way they could get a 'good' smartphone OS of their own in time to be competitive so taking the M$ dollar makes some sense. They're still going to run their own OS's for not so smart phones so still UI work to do in house.

Lack of available competitive investment is the underlying cause

"Europe lost its last global technology platform. "

Perhaps it will take the endgame of the long term demise of NOKIA to bring everyone to recognise; that the real failure in Europe, is the idea that all long term development, (and by association, government grant support), for new technology; must always be into existing large companies.

This saga is a classic demonstration of what you get, in the end, from a lack of competition. Instead of many new, small businesses, snapping at the heels of the likes of NOKIA, (and, moreover, in the right place to immediately take up the running as a market leader), you get stagnated management, unable to see the potential from their magnificent gold plated "offices".

Europe desperately needs a functioning system to feed new, free enterprise based, equity capital; into new small businesses, right at the grass roots of every nation. Until the EU recognises that need, all we are going to see is the same story, again and again.........

eltiT

I have always bought Nokia handsets because of the UI. The others were much worse, especially Motorola and Samsung.

My e71 was poor though. I currently have a Nokia 2000-something (built-in navigation) and it works fine, not amazing but not disappointing. A perfectly good utility.

'Honed' or 'homed in'

You can 'hone' something, and you can 'home in' or 'home in on' something.

But you can't 'hone in'. That's nonsense.

Backwards compatibility

The distinct impression I got about the touchscreen S60 devices that came as a kind of Cargo Cult to the iPhone was that they were hamstrung by a need to be backwards / cross-compatible with non-touch S60. I imagined a conversation in Espoo between product management wonks:

"look at the iPhone! We have to build a touchscreen UI" <murmurs of agreement>

"but what about the S60 developer ecosystem and the applications they've built?"

"Good point. Make the new UI work with all the old non-touch applications"

The disastrous result is a touchscreen UI with softkeys! Softkeys are a brilliant solution to non-touch hardware but wholly unsuited to touchscreen. All the benefits of a screen full of possible controls, all immediately visible and quickly accessed, are thrown away. I'm certain Nokia's army of UI designers complained vocally about this but were shouted down by the product wonks.

The problem with this recent news is that we get two types of people:

* Those who like Nokia and Symbian, but are now sad that Symbian is to be replaced with Windows, and fear undue influence of Microsoft on a company that has been doing fine.

* Those who hate Nokia, and use this as another opportunity to bash them.

The result is, it looks like a whole load of people criticising Nokia, but it's important to note that these two camps are arguing from entirely opposite viewpoints. (I seem to fall into a small category of liking Nokia and Symbian, but being openmided to see what Windows brings them.)

Then we have people like Stevie above, who reel out their story about how their 5+ year old Nokia phone was a nightmare, as if that has any relevance today, or is fair to compare against much newer phones. (My old Motorola phone had an awful UI.)

Ilgaz: A good thing too they ignored him, since Ovi is doing just fine. Why on earth would they listen to someone who clearly has an agenda against their products?

(I don't like the Iphones, but if I wrote an article claiming "Iphone 5 is doomed", I wouldn't expect Apple to go "Oh look, someone says it's doomed - good point, let's scrap the product".)

"Guy told me there isn't a single UI for Qt on Symbian/Maemo and gave the list of mess on the article."

As a Qt developer, your "guy" is talking rubbish. There is one Qt UI. I'm not even sure what he could possibly be talking about.

"As he gave the list, I really lost 80% of hope in future of Symbian."

So you're fully supporting of Nokia moving to Windows, right? You can't have it both ways.

Steve Evans: My 5800 is the lower model of the N97, but it has no trouble with GPS lock.

"If you did one of the pocket Hitler mods would pull the post and tell you off."

I think this is more a trouble of "forum mods are idiots", than a problem with Nokia. The same is true of any product/forum.

"Android based HTC Desire Z, and do you know what, it's fan-bloody-tastic!"

A much newer phone is better than your several year-old phone? Well, amazing.

My Nokia 5800 is better than the original Iphone; and it beats my old Motorola hands down. But that's progress.

"As you say, Nokia's navigation of their randomly changing road map would make for a good depressing film, but I doubt anyone would believe it!"

Hardly - Apple would be a far better example of a randomly changing road map.

Dazzz: So Symbian has "quirks", while you acknowledge that Android has "bugs", but this is a reason to move to the latter, on the assumption that they'll be fixed? Why won't the quirks be fixed, also?

Giles Jones: "Nokia failed to grasp touch screens until it was too late. I seem to remember them announcing S60 touch and it still had support for a stylus, they completely blew it!"

This makes no sense. Firstly, stylus isn't a question of OS support, it's simply whether you have resistive or capacitive. Secondly, being able to use a stylus is a good thing - I like the option. But there is no requirement to use one.

And too late for what? They're still the market leader. They had touch screens for years before Apple. It was odd that they went through a phase of dropping them with the likes of the N95, but they've been back for years now. Apple were late to grasp all kinds of features, until it was too late.