Nokia, Apple and Sudden Extinction Events

Copy the addressbook to a SIM? You gotta be kidding

SIM as data storage is dead. Nobody in his sane mind keeps any contacts on the SIM any more.

There will be less than 10% of the information left when copying a phone addressbook to a SIM. Secondary phones, addresses, notes, labels, etc are all going to bite the bullet in the process.

Copying to a PC (or online service like scheduleworld) and back is a usually more successful, but even in that case some data will be lost. Add to that map coordinates, routes, bookmarks, etc and the picture becomes very similar to Apple vs MSFT around the end of the nineties and beginning of the naughties.

Hurray for bogus numbers.

Every 27,000,000 years? Is someone somewhere timing asteroid trajectories to reboot the planet?

No, it's just an average with a huge variance.

It's not all about the phones

Nokia, don't just make phones you know. Yes, that is probably their best consumer device, but they also make a lot of other electronic devices, but you'd be hard pushed to find any information on their corporate website.

Back in the late 90's early 2000's, I remember when Nokia was THE default choice for a phone for me and many others.

Back then it was either Nokia or Eriksson (pre Sony)

For me, it was a no brainer, especially with the metal 8850 and the small, but perfectly formed 8230? I owned both and the 8850 was very good. Eriksson were still producing mobiles with one or two line displays. No good for playing snake on. :-)

The last Nokia I owned was a N82 back in 2007/2008. I just couldn't get on with the interface at all. It's the same for my work phone a E71. The interface is slow and clunky and very un-intuative.

I haven't seen anything of their new OS, but it's got to be an improvement on what they currently have.

Beer, because it's Friday.

There's a flaw in your logic...

Your logic that there's a sudden death is flawed.

You state that Palm died. If anything Palm is in Limbo until we know what HP plans to do.

(Palm is Schrödinger's cat)

Apple enjoys a much higher Q rating globally than Nokia. Apple also has a diverse product line while Nokia is strictly a telecommunications company.

You're right that there is less of a barrier to competition... just buy a new phone and swap out the SIM card. Apple? Not so easy.

Nokia needs to definitely improve upon their phones and I believe that their partnership with Intel (Meego) will help create a noteworthy phone OS and then app.

The only thing that Apple has is Jobs. I don't believe that Nokia has anyone who can fulfill the role Jobs has.

If anything Apple is emulating Nokia with their latest acquisition. ;-)

Not that I'm a Nokia or an Apple Fanboi.

There will be no sudden extinction. Just look at Sybase. ;-)

Apple never gambled, they took their users through well charted compatible waters.

Andrew Orlowski writes, "Apple could afford to annoy partners and customers as it fought its way back to profitability. It did so again with the move to Mac OS X, before it was ready. Each time Apple gambled that customers could endure a bit of temporary pain. That's not the Finnish way"

Temporary pain, are you kidding me?

The movement that Apple did from M68K to PowerPC was seamless... the old software ran and the new machines were faster with the native software. There was no pain.

The movement that Apple did from MacOS9 to MacOSX was seamless... the old software ran and the new platform was more stable, offering many more features. There was no pain.

The move from PowerPC to Intel was seamless... the old software ran and and the new machines were about the same speed. Once again, there was no pain.

Apple's way had been to make it seamless for it's user community. All of the other system vendor ever took their user communities through such courses, survived, and grew.

One of Sun's greatest mistakes when migrating from 68K to SPARC and then toying with x86 to bring it back full force. Software compatibility between architectures was lacking, limiting software for the user community, so Sun tried to concentrate on binary compatibility within SPARC family. Sun tried to do an "Apple" by moving all of their software to Java, to give them cross-compatibility between Intel & SPARC (and other RISC architectures) - but the complexity was not as seamless to the user community as Apple's was.

All the other major UNIX workstation and midrange system vendors who tried migrating from M68K to a RISC architecture (from Motorola 68K) are pretty much dead or mitigated as a minor player. Apple's desktop workstation market seems to have survived as unique entity on Intel with MacOSX (migrating to a UNIX system based upon NextSTEP.) The only two big RISC's left are Oracle/Sun/Fujitsu SPARC and IBM POWER. Sun's Java helps make software compatible for both vendors, the unintended consequences of Java everywhere also made software available on clone platforms (clone x86 and clone linux) that the surviving RISC UNIX vendor have no control over.

Apple did not make the Java mistake, either. (This could be the factor involved with Flash under iPhone that Steve Jobs is trying to navigate around.)

David Webb posts, "the yanks just don't get it, Nokia phones are better than Apple phones, but the yanks would rather have an inferior phone than an European one."

Ummm... no...

I tried an American phone, but web access was horrible. I tried an Asian phone, but web access was horrible. I tried an iPhone, and the web experience was WONDERFUL. At the time, there was no European phone with great internet experience.

I have owned the same old iPhone for over 2 years and now, I am interested in compatibility with my contacts, mapping, recorded movies, recorded tv shows, photos, notes, personal email, exchange email, music, television connection cable while traveling, and calendaring.

Will a European phone sync to a home Macintosh as well as to a work PC for all of these items?

I kind of like the applications on the iPhone, I have over 100 on there, and most of them get use (I only removed 4 or so.) It is not perfect. (I want my bluetooth keyboard, bluetooth stereo headphones with microphone, bluetooth printer, and bluetooth mouse!)

At this point, I don't see another option. I need something compatible with home, work, and hotel. Apple seems to be the only game in town.

Unless Apple really screws up, I don't see anyone else coming close for awhile. Google Android has the potential to come close... let's see how the MacOSX compatibility comes along!

Compatibility with what the user community is expecting is the key...

"They copy the address book to a SIM, and off they go"

If they want to mangle their contacts and lose their messages/MMS/e-mail/notes/calendar/todo list/photos/videos, they do.

Ye gods, how can someone write what is supposedly a serious comment piece about a mobile phone manufacturer with something like that in the same article...

The problem is basically Nokias aren't trendy and if that weren't enough their US marketing division couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery. From the US point of view, Nokia has been dying for years, much like BSD.

"Nokias aren't trendy"

Indeed. The 6310 was *the* business class phone of its era, but to call it "trendy" would be wrong.

My other half still has my old 6310, even though we get offered a new phone every couple of years, she prefers the 6310. It's a phone, it works, it isn't fragile.

Currently I have an E65. Maybe it's not trendy, but it does pretty much everything I want it to, and unlike the WindowsCE kit I have experienced from HPC2000 through PocketPC to Windows Mobile, its implementation of Series 60 is stable in normal (and occasional abnormal) usage. I was a bit disappointed with the backup/restore utility which (after a firmware update) refused to restore anything, but Nokia's PC software has always been a bit off, ever since my first 6150.

My next phone, maybe later this year, may be a Linux thing. Maybe. But it'll primarily have to be a decent phone, unlike (say) the Judas phone.

And a +1 to all the folks who said what kind of idiot uses a SIM for address book (and PIM in general) info these days. uSD card maybe, but then there are (I assume) compatibility or transportability issues to address? [Maybe the yanks still don't really know what a SIM card is yet? ;)]

Customers

Nokia has spent far too long building products for their customers to the detriment of everything else.

The problem is that their customers are/were the Telco's and not Joe Public.

Their low end phones these days are utterly cheap and plasticky. I have no idea what their supposed high end products are like because there is no way in gods green earth that I would ever buy one.

I could never understand what people saw in Nokia's products. I've never seen one that wasn't 'orrible, but of course this is just IMHO & YMMV

There are still many many Nokia fanbois

I'm one of them and was chuffed to win an X6 with a years Comes With Music at the beginning of the month and should also be getting one of the Booklet 3G's from WOM World on a trial basis. They seem to be throwing money at new media at the moment along with everyone else. As you said they are still making BILLIONS! Sorry for the caps there, got a bit excited butyeah , billions is not small fry in this economy. Big up Nokia BOOYAH.