As long as there is Ovi Store, Symbian is alive

As long as the owners of Nokia's Symbian devices can go to Ovi Store and download new applications for their devices and therefore make their devices feel fresh again, Symbian can stay alive.

As soon as Nokia pulls the plug off Ovi Store (shall it ever happen), Symbian is dead. After that, I'd imagine most Symbian users will abandon their devices and try something else.

Just my two cents.

For now, things are OK. Even for Qt developers.

If you are working on a Qt application for Symbian, there is no reason to give up. Finish your project. Put it in Ovi Store. See what happens.

Today there is as large a market for Symbian apps as there was before Nokia's announcement that they will move to Windows Phone platform. In the future there will be even more Symbian^3 devices out there. The market continues to grow.

Realistically of course, after a couple of years, the penetration of Symbian devices will not grow anymore as Nokia stops producing new devices. The penetration starts to decline, as people move to other devices. At that point every Symbian developer should have learned to develop for some other platform. Maybe Qt has been ported to Android by that time, or maybe Windows Phone proves to be an exciting platform to develop for.

Welcome to the New Nokia

Stephen Elop announced almost everything that I wrote in my prediction. I guess the signs were in the air so well that even an amateur blogger like myself could make a good guess.

Now, are these news good for Nokia (Nokia adopting Windows Phone 7, etc.)? In my opinion it depends on one thing: you guessed it, execution! If Nokia will be able to produce great Windows Phone devices, that people like and want to buy, relatively soon, then I think Nokia should be allright. However the longer it takes, the more difficult it will be to make a come back.

It looks like Meego is put on some sort of research project status. It would require another change in Nokia's strategy that we would see more Meego devices than the one Nokia has promised to ship this year. One question though, why to launch even one Meego device?

Touchdown!

The New Nokia: worst case scenario

On February 11th 2011 at 12.30pm London time Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop will announce that...

Meego

Meego becomes an OS only for tablets, for now. In 2013 Microsoft will have tablet-optimized Windows 8 running on ARM processors. Nokia starts to use that and Meego gets retired completely.

Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 becomes Nokia's OS for high end smartphones. However, Nokia's Windows Phone 7 devices will get lackluster reception: the devices will be buggy in Nokia's old fashion.

Symbian

From now on Symbian will be used only in low end smartphones whose price is $200 and below without subsidies. Symbian will be updated time to time and will continue to have moderate success.

Ovi Store

Without support for Ovi Store in Windows Phone 7, the Ovi Store will stagnate. In 2013 Nokia will replace Ovi Store with Microsoft's application store.

Qt

Microsoft promises that Nokia can port Qt to Windows Phone 7. However, the project gets late and the first version of Qt for Windows Phone 7 comes out only in 2013. At that time, it is already too late, and Microsoft's C# and Silverlight has become the standard language for application development for Nokia's devices.

Qt will stay as the preferred programming environment for Symbian.

Summary

In only 2-3 years Microsoft will gain control over Nokia. Nokia's smartphone market share will drop down to 20% as Nokia's Windows Phone 7 devices will not get good reception.

At that time, Stephen Elop will resign and move to some other company to do restructuring. Nokia has lost all their remaining significance in the smart phone race.

Or can we expect even more action, such as what Andrew Orlowski has heard? Wait and see.

Rich Green: Nokia embraces change. Elop: Sacks top execs

Is Rich Green telling us the truth about what is happening inside of Nokia, when he mentions in Venture Beat's article, that "he is very impressed with Nokia’s willingness to embrace change and turn the ship around". Because the very next day came out story, that next Friday February 11th during Nokia's Capital Market's Day, the CEO Stephen Elop is likely to sack most if not all Nokia's top executives.

That doesn't sound like the transition to "new Nokia" is going that smoothly.

However it has to be said that if the projects that Nokia's current top execs have been running for years will get canceled soon, those execs may not have motivation to continue anyway.

Is Nokia X7 coming to AT&T? Who knows but it should be free

If Nokia X7 or any other Symbian^3 handset would come to the catalog of AT&T operator in the USA, because Symbian^3 is not as attractive as iPhone or Android that AT&T sells too, AT&T should offer Nokia's handset for free for new customers. That's the only way to move any of these handsets in this market.

Nokia Music Unlimited / Comes With Music coming to an end

It looks like Nokia's unlimited music download service (that was available on specific phone models) is going to be discontinued this year. It is being discontinued as we speak in Finland, where the news come from: no new Comes With Music / Music Unlimited handsets are shipped to Finland after 12/31/2010 and the 1 year licence can not be renewed after 1/10/2011.

This probably means that the service will be discontinued in most markets in 2011 as well. The service could survive in some special markets, like India. There is no official announcements from Nokia yet.

Nokia's usual Music Store (where you can purchase songs one by one) continues to operate.

One can only guess why the service is being discontinued. It probably didn't gather enough interest and drive enough handset sales.

Via e's Phone Blog

Is Windows Phone 7 the only way to get a decent UI to Nokia phones?

There has been rumors out there that Nokia would have held discussions with Microsoft about using Windows Phone 7 OS in Nokia devices in the future.

Given how slowly Symbian's UI has developed (two years between 5th Edition in 2008 and Symbian^3 in 2010), I think it is fair to say, that Symbian UI may never be able to compete with iPhone and Android, especially in the smoothness of transitions and ease of use. Nokia has said that Symbian is supposed to compete with these two platforms, but that may not be very successful.

Then of course there is Meego, which will probably be OK. However, it is also unclear how easy the UI is to use, when you compare it to iPhone and Android.

At the moment I don't have a strong confidence that Nokia can write a UI that works.

That said using Windows Phone 7 OS in Nokia devices can be the only chance Nokia has to bring a fresh, modern and easy to use UI to their devices.

We will see if that will happen in 2011. In any case, it will be an interesting year to watch. There has been rumors of Nokia using WP7 and even Android Honeycomb. That rumor may not be true. Meego phones will come out hopefully, and there are also the Symbian UI improvements Nokia has been promising.

CES is around the corner, will we see the first announcements there? Steve Ballmer coming to stage with Stephen Elop?

Happy New Year to all readers!

Symbian's UI vision dies - the second time

Andrew Orlowski has written a very interesting two part history of Symbian, from the start until today. In the second part there is talk about UI. Around 2000 Symbian was an independent company, based in England. It had just announced the new OS and had many influental customers for it, such as Nokia, Motorola and Ericksson. They were all very excited by the new OS and were eager to put it in their devices.

Symbian's goal was to develop a bunch of UI reference designs that their customers could use. However, only over few years, the progress on UI reference designs slowed down and ceased to exist because of fighting between the before mentioned influential big companies. They didn't like the reference desings, or they didn't want that Symbian would develop reference designs altogether. Finally Nokia introduced it's own Series60 UI (that it had developed in secret) and practically killed Symbian's own reference UI designs. Another one to survive was UIQ on Ericksson.

Fast forward to 2010. Symbian was open source and Symbian^4 was under preparation. It was supposed to have a completely redesigned UI, designed by the open source project. Symbian owned the UI again. Although Nokia was financing most of the development, in theory other Symbian OS customers could influence the design. Yet before the year became to end, Nokia announced that Symbian OS becomes closed source, and that the development of Symbian^4 stops.

Instead, the current Symbian^3 UI, that is based on Nokia's old Series60 UI, will receive incremental updates over coming years. Nokia could not take a risk abandoning it's 10 year old Series60 UI. On the other hand, Symbian^4 UI may not have made any difference in market place anyway (it would have been less attractive than Android, iOS and others), and just caused a lot of pain to Symbian application developers.

At the moment, the UI future of Symbian is murky at best. It is completely in Nokia's hands when they improve the UI and how. There is no public roadmap for it. You just have to have trust in Nokia that they can make Symbian user experience great. Do you have that trust?

This all is completely opposite to Android, where Google has a strong vision to Android UI and all the customers seem to accept it. They are allowed to tweak the UI if they wish, but so far it has been minimal. It shows that Google knows what they are doing. They have a bunch of talented programmers that can improve the Android UI in fast pace, and re-resign it if needed.

Android UI becoming more like Symbian?

Some people have noticed that the latest Google Maps application on Android might be using new "Gingerbread" UI style that is coming out later this year. The post mentions "squared-off" look. The buttons also look more flat than before.

Well, that's pretty much how the new Symbian^3 UI (softkeys, menus) look like. Maybe Google is now looking for design direction from Symbian for the new Android OS version.

Google's Froyo UI on left and Gingerbread on right.

Nokia N8 menu buttons.

Symbian website shuts down - last chance to download the source!

As announced, Nokia will take down Symbian Foundation's website December 17th. After that lots of interesting information about Symbian and also the source code disappears form being available for everyone. As mostly Nokia is developing Symbian further, they don't want to keep the open source project running.

It has been really interesting to read Symbian Foundation's roadmaps, specifications, meeting notes, and even bug notes. I have written many blog posts simply by finding something interesting on their website. It means that after a while some of my posts will have dead links. Here are some of the posts:

http://www.nokiaviews.com/2010/06/symbian3-screen-resolution-capped-to.html
http://www.nokiaviews.com/2010/06/nokia-planning-flashlite-widgets-for.html
http://www.nokiaviews.com/2010/07/symbian-and-multicore-processing.html
http://www.nokiaviews.com/2010/06/nokia-plans-to-renew-internet-radio-app.html
http://www.nokiaviews.com/2010/06/flash-widgets-more-efficient-than-web.html