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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

#4

Post by davidw »

Nokia is still pretty popular with the average person here in Italy, I think. The OVI store is a big ugly hairball though and unless they seriously fix things up, I've given up on trying to get my applications into it. The signing process is extremely bureaucratic.

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

#5

Post by nobody_nowhere »

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 with native Symbian/S40/S60 development a few years ago, I wanted to stick a fork in my eye.

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

#6

Post by latch »

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 relevance is largely in a market (phones) which is being overtaken, faster in some parts of the world than others, by SmartPhones

-Profits for 3rd party developers of Nokia products are smaller than profits for 3rd party developers of the competition.

I'm sure there was a point in history when horses were more popular than cars in most of the world and we all know how that turned out.

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

#7

Post by pavlov »

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 preview of Qt 4.7 for Symbian, etcetera ad absurdum.

AFAIK, the "Nokia Qt SDK" is the one you want. (If you make the mistake of choosing the wrong download and ask about it in the forums, prepare for condescending replies from Nokia employees who seemingly can't come to grips with the idea that they should provide a service to developers. I hope the new management will be able to do something about the innovation-hostile, inbred, not-invented-here cultural factions at Nokia.)

- -

Despite the confusing options and cultural issues, the Nokia QT SDK is really quite nice. There are a few other very good things about the new Symbian^3 platform:

- It has GPU acceleration as a standard, so you can rely on advanced features like OpenGL ES 2.0.

- The platform is more than merely a single high-end device. There's a very nice mid-range option available already (the C6-01). The total sales of this platform should turn out quite impressive over its lifetime.

- Nokia has promised to ship new features as free updates to Symbian^3, rather than baking them into firmware on new devices only as they used to do. AFAIK, these updates will include Qt 4.7 and a rewritten browser.

- -

Unfortunately, Nokia is also shipping devices with the older Symbian versions. Qt is also the best way to write software for these platforms.

There's a "Qt Smart Installer" that is sort of a package manager. It's supposed to ensure that 3rd party applications can easily depend on Qt by simply packaging the Smart Installer with their apps. I don't know how well it works in practice, but if the alternative is to write to the crusty old Symbian C++ API, I'd take my chances with Smart Installer any day...

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