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A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

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Re: A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

#41

Post by aes »

Nokia is also finally about to catch up on the developer side, which might prove to be a big advantage. If ease of development is in any way correlated with application quality, we might see some action in the Nokia world soon.

For the little glimpses that I've seen, UI development using Qt Quick and QML and is actually pretty nice. Nothing like the Symbian hell, and seemed a good deal more fun than developing for Android. (Can't say it's on par with iOS though, at least not yet.)

This is the first time I'm actually _excited_ by a Nokia technology.

Now is a good time to check it out, since the first phones supporting 4.7 are supposed to come out "soon" (my source at Nokia was reluctant at naming a specific date). And they just put out a new technology preview:

http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-pr...

If Qt / QML Quick seems a bit barebones, there's a library called Qt Components which adds things like checkboxes, progress bars etc.:

http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components

Re: A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

#42

Post by teamonkey »

MrScruff wrote: post #29
ashutoshm wrote: post #24

nokia is ubiquitous in India.heck the subaltern has a song about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpKodZMQr8

About 3 years ago in the UK, business people had Blackberrys and everyone else had Nokia or Sony Ericsson phones. Fast forward to now and business people have iPhones or Blackberrys while teenagers tend to use Blackberrys (they're cheap and good at messaging). Others have iPhones or Androids with the exception of people who haven't upgraded their phone in a while who still have Nokia or Sony Ericsson devices.

Nokia has very little presence here in North America for reasons I haven't been able to fathom.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that most people in the UK will have have owned a Nokia at some point in the last 10-15 years. The brand really is that common. It's the cheap first phone you get, or a fast replacement if your smartphone dies and you still have a contract to uphold, or the phones parents buy their kids 'for emergencies'.

Re: A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

#43

Post by bergie »

tdoggette wrote: post #32
rospaya wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost any phone can browse the web today.

Yeah, but not in a way that approaches the usefulness of a desktop browser.

Yep, Nokia N900 is the only phone accomplishing that :-)

For example, Android and iOS browsers skipped the rather useful contentEditable functionality. On my N900 I have it.

Re: A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

#44

Post by angstrom »

nobody_nowhere wrote: post #5

Nokia has a pretty unparalleled manufacturing/delivery/logistics chain for low end phones. They like to claim they can put a phone on a shelf anywhere in africa for less than competitors' manufacturing costs. That's pretty impressive, if true. But we're talking about phones that retail for $35. The smartphones are a joke. But the software! I sure hope Qt is starting to pay some dividends for them. When i was dealing…

That was my thought as well. Anyone have a chart of the margins? Is the 60/40 split inverted?.

Re: A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

#45

Post by rimantas »

rospaya wrote: post #23
Joakal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until the internet capabilities on smartphones get realised. On a bus for 30 minutes? Use the phone to browse HN. etc

Almost any phone can browse the web today.

There are many things you can do on the phone. Not that many you want to do, given the experience.

Re: A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

#46

Post by ugh »

rospaya wrote: post #23
Joakal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until the internet capabilities on smartphones get realised. On a bus for 30 minutes? Use the phone to browse HN. etc

Almost any phone can browse the web today.

If browsing the web on the phone is as easy as on iOS or Android it’s not a dumb phone, it’s a smart phone.

Re: A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

#47

Post by Tichy »

notahacker wrote: post #17
alxp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Betting against high-selling low-margin products would be like betting against Wal-Mart. You can co-exist with them but you can't beat them at their own game, and their game is around to stay.

Betting that learning an app development framework plus Mandarin to sell apps on $35 phones probably isn't the best strategy for developers is more reasonable though.

Why not? Long before the iPhone, several people got rich by selling J2ME apps to low end phones.

Re: A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

#48

Post by blub »

brudgers wrote: post #35
pavlov wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way to do productive Symbian development in a non-deprecated environment is to use Qt. Run away from anything that says "Symbian" but isn't Qt. The latest Symbian ships with a version of Qt (4.6.3) that isn't the cutting edge, but is good enough. In typical Nokia manner, they've managed to make a dog's dinner of the SDK options: there's a regular Qt SDK, a Nokia-branded Qt SDK, a Symbian^3 SDK, a technology…

Easier of cross platform development is a good reason to use JavaMe in lieu of Qt when developing for Symbian because Android does not fully support C++ development. [edit] eSWT provides access the GPU under Java.

JavaMe is not that cross-platform from what I've been told. Qt runs on Linux (including embedded), Mac, Windows, BeOS and Symbian/Maemo.

Re: A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

#49

Post by blub »

pavlov wrote: post #7
iwwr wrote: post #3

Any tales of HN-ers experience with Symbian?

The only way to do productive Symbian development in a non-deprecated environment is to use Qt. Run away from anything that says "Symbian" but isn't Qt. The latest Symbian ships with a version of Qt (4.6.3) that isn't the cutting edge, but is good enough. In typical Nokia manner, they've managed to make a dog's dinner of the SDK options: there's a regular Qt SDK, a Nokia-branded Qt SDK, a Symbian^3 SDK, a technology…

The smart installer is like the .NET or Java runtime installers. It works in practice.

Preloading the framework in the firmware works even better though...

Re: A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world

#50

Post by blub »

latch wrote: post #6

Isn't there quite a bit of data though to make this very static picture of the market somewhat irrelevant? I'm not trying to spread FUD. I would seriously like enlightenment if I'm wrong, but these are the conceptions that I have with respect to the more fluid nature of the market: -The trend, throughout the world, is going heavily against Nokia -Nokia's margins on each unit is a fraction of the competition -Nokia's…

- The trend is against Nokia when it comes to US tech-blogs and web sites or US analysts.

- Nokia's margins vary depending on the model. I would expect margins on the N8 to be entirely different from margins on 5230 and both of them are smart phones.

- Nokia has been making smart phones since before Android or iPhone were invented, their relevance is in communication technology.

- iPhone is the king here. I've heard of success stories both from Android and Ovi.

Horses vs cars has nothing to do with iPhone/Android vs Nokia. Nokia high-end devices might not have the nice iPhone UX/UI, but they compete more than adequately on other features. And that's just Symbian, the OS that is "supposedly" dying. I'm curious to see what happens when/if MeeGo is done.

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