Nokia prepares to fiddle with Symbian

ok, ok blah blah...

But when can I get hold of the N97?

Tell me Nokia! TELL ME NOW!

Why indeed?

" .... a bunch of Americans were lecturing Europeans on mobile phones and treating the iPhone, with its tiny installed base, as being significant."

Why indeed? Well, perhaps it is because this tiny outrageous upstart of an iPhone has single-handedly shaken up the entire group of mobile manufacturers who are all trying to get a similar touchscreen handset out to market. It has been a disruptor and caused a fairly significant shift in a number of areas, not the least being in developing the notion of using the mobile handset for that Internet experience more than any other handset before it.

Yes, Nokia has supremacy in sheer numbers, but that is not the point at all.

Of course, the other American mobile manufacturers are, frankly, pathetic - with Motorola leading the pack.

Can Nokia, with Symbian, out iPhone the iPhone? I doubt it given Symbian's built-in constraints. Putting a pretty front end on it is unlikely to help that much. I agree with others that the Google Android OS is likely to be a much bigger threat than Apple's OS X iPhone, but only once the other manufacturers embrace Android and get product out to market. Right now that is HTC's playing field all to itself.

The audience member called John Strand

If this person is, who I believe it is, then he is a danish self proclaimed expert on telecommunication. He posses some rather polarized opinions on the telecommunication industry. He uses every possibility to denounce the iPhone, regardless of what effect it might have had on the market.

He also quite often bashes the different danish electrical power utility companies for having an interest in laying a brand new tele-infrastructure with fiber to the home, even thou it actually increases competetion here in Danmark, because the primary operator, TDC, was formally a state-run business that was later sold to the private market, and the whole infrastructure went along in the sale, so we basically got one operator that controls the baseprice of ADSL connections and so forth, because all the other operators have to lease the line to peoples homes.

Even if his comment on Americans telling Europeans about mobile communication is rather correct, he still comes off as rather pompous arse.

(I am danish, and I am quite fed up with all the danish TV-stations and newspapers using him as an expert)

The next Motorola

It's interesting that anyone here is commenting about the demise of Motorola. While Nokia may be number 1 in the world, they've completely pissed away their market share in the U.S. Going from 78% to 6% (may be lower now) market share is not an easy thing. Their Henry Ford mentality, "You can have any color, as long as it's black", has translated into we will tell you what kind of a phone you want. This arrogance in telling the carriers and public here what will be the next trend has not worked. They completely missed the boat on flip phones, and were late with OLED, FM transmitters, and many other features. They are now only a low-end brand here because that's all they've sold in years. Now they think themselves a services company, but the only thing they've ever done well is hardware. Hardware still seems to be their selling point since a video from the World Congress show made the major selling point for an E-series phone of 28 days standby. I easily see them becoming the next Motorola-type failure within 5 years.

P.S. Their failure to back up Ovi for over 3 weeks was inexcusable for a commercial site and probably indicative of their future success in providing services.