How Nokia Lost It

The recent news of the new CEO at Nokia deciding that Nokia would need to go in a different direction and jump off the "burning platform" did not surprise me at all. As a consumer of their Internet Tablet product I completely understand why Nokia is in the bind that it is in. Let me explain.

Nokia had the jump on touchscreen and wifi enabled devices when it released the Internet Tablet 770. I did not have one of these largely because I had never heard of it. Don't be surprised if you had never heard of it either. Nokia did a shit job of marketing the device. The excuse given for this "nit marketing" was that it was an "experimental device" and some sort of step one in five or so steps.

Seriously.

When the buzz about the upcoming IPhone was around Nokia released the N800 Internet tablet as an update to the 770. I bought one of these and still use it. Like the 770 it had a touchscreen, full web browsing featuring flash lite but also had a swiveling camera and an upgraded processor. It did not have a cell radio nor built in GPS but it could tether to a phone via DUN and to a GPS receiver via Bluetooth. Believe me when I say that the tablet was at its best when connected to the net at all times. It was arguably technically superior to the iPhone in many ways. However; the problem was this: Every time someone saw the Tablet the first question they asked was "what kind of phone is that?" and once I said that it was not a phone, all interest was lost. If you have to explain what your product is and more than one sentence, it's likely to fail. With the IPhone entering the market this was especially true for Nokia. But it gets worse.

Nokia still insisted that the n800 was stage 2 of whatever and not for "consumers". This line of "thinking" was very prominent in discussion boards such as Internet Tablet Talk (now talk.maemo.org) where many of the board members dismissed the IPhone as a toy for people who were suckers to the Jobs Reality Distortion Field. Many of these persons have since left for Android devices.

Ahem.

Many of these individuals would discuss the finer points of phone data plans for tethering. Which GPS receiver was best. What other OS's they could install, installing replacement browsers, e-mail clients and the REAL problem: What OS bug they found (and there were plenty).

Many bugs simply went unfixed by Nokia. The phrase we learned was "fixed in Freemantle" meaning the current OS at the time, Diablo, was not going to get any more updates and that device we had was now obsolete. As a matter of fact there was a group of members who created an update to deal with many known issues. Nice of them but really, that should have come from Nokia.

Thanks.

Of course the owners of the IT 770 knew that planned quick obsolescence was coming because their device had been abandoned by Nokia son after the N800 was released. So we knew it was coming. Having customers who know their stuff is going to be dumped soon is also a shit move. Many were in denial and merely did not want to believe this would happen to us so soon. Oh and did I mention that any OS update required complete wipe of the OS and applications? Oh fun. To Nokia's credit they fixed that particularly bad process...right before abandoning the platform and moving to the N900.

The N900 was an actual phone. Of course they shrunk the screen. Older developers soon dropped app compatibility with the previous systems. New ones would say they didn't have the time to code their
Product for the obsolete N8xx series or wimpy had no interest.

Small note I skipped the n810 which is was merely a cosmetic update to e n800 with the major changes being a slide out keyboard, onboard GPS and a better screen. They did remove the full SD slot for a micro SD slot rendering many of our SD cards....you know. It you had an 800 the incentive to upgrade depended largely on whether you wanted onboard GPS and/or the keyboard.

Sucks to be us.

The N900 was released about a year ago and was actually a tempting buy aside from it's tendency to eject it's USB port which also serves as the power port. It too was under marketed by Nokia. sorry I was too generous. not marketed at all in the US. Why?

1) It was step3 or 4 of step whatever.
2) not a consumer device.

And my favorite:
3) obsolete 'cause Meego was going to eat Maemo and well, see what happened to the N8xx series.

Oh did I mention that it only worked on T-mobile's 3G band? Seriously. I am not making this up. Six bills and 2G throughput for non t-mobile customers, which would be most of us in the US.

So in essence the whole Internet Tablet thing that Nokia was doing was adjust a bunch of "history repeating". Where we the so called geek consumer was asked to pay $400 to $600 to beta test their product which should have been their future but were just steps of some process. To nowhere apparently.

So what really doomed Nokia?

1) they treated their Internet tablets like some back lot paper airplane experiment which it charged it's customers for.

2) No US advertising to speak of. If I hadn't seen a report about the N800 in Arstechnica.com I would have never even known the thing existed. I still have not seen a single advertisement for the current IT. Of course that is due to item 1 above.

3) listening to it's geek base internal and/or external who said they would not want. Cell radio in it. Tech savvy geek are not the mass market. If you're seeking mass market appeal, they are the wrong demographic to listen to. Had I been able to say "yes this is a phone" there is no number of sales that I think I could have made of my current device.

4) lack of OS updates and applications. Nothing says "we don't give a damn" more than a lack of fixes and improvements on a regular basis for a product. That the mail app hangs regularly and chews battery in the process is something that ought to have been fixed. The fact that the browser Daemon will sit and chew battery after the browser quits ought to have been fixed. The fact that the swivel camera would not re-orientate whe the camera was facing away from the user ought go have been fixed. I should not have to shell out 4 to 6 hundred bucks for basic fixes to software.

So yeah, Nokia's on a burning platform and they're the one that set fire to it, fed it fuel and air while creating "bubble notifications" for Symbian.

Nokia is going to have to do that thing called advertising. You know, print, web and TV adverts. Their geek base is gone with a move to Windows phone OS deal with it. Whatever Nokia puts out it needs to be supported and targeted at consumers which means regular OS updates to fix issues and create more value as the product ages. Abandoning a product a year or less after it comes to market is simply not acceptable for a product that runs 600 bucks. Nokia needs to learn from the dumb stuff it did with what should have been a successful product, the Internet Tablet, and not repeat those errors.


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