Symbian Sells Millions, Despite Nokia Pushing Windows Phone 218
Nerval's Lobster writes "During the fourth quarter of 2012, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones—a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices. The Lumia line runs Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system, which largely replaced Symbian as Nokia's smartphone software of choice. Despite that shift and Nokia's emphasis on Windows Phone, however, the company still sold 2.2 million Symbian smartphones during the quarter. The question remains whether Nokia should have gone with Windows Phone in the first place, or embraced an alternate platform such as Android; an anti-Elop camp has emerged in recent months, arguing that Symbian was still a viable platform before Elop consigned it to the dustbin of tech history. For now at least, both sides seem to be right: Symbian still sells despite Nokia's attempts to take it increasingly offline, and Lumia phones are selling well. It'll take more time—perhaps a lot more time—before the ramifications of Elop's bet become clear."
Re:is symbian still viable? (Score:3, Insightful)
More likely, they're consumers that just want a phone that can do calls and send and receive texts. Dumbphones are still pretty popular, and they've got to run on something.
no way (Score:5, Insightful)
Symbian was popular, but it was a disaster in terms of technology: hard to program with one of the worst mobile user interfaces ever conceived. Nokia needed to change to something else. Windows 8 is actually not that bad in principle, but it was too little too late, and Microsoft has failed to establish it as a viable and popular platform for app developers.
Nokia should have gone with a dual Android (cash cow) and Meego (risky bet, high payoff) strategy. Nokia could have made fantastic Android phones. By now, they have lost their sales channels and their brand name, and lots of other companies have figured out how to make good hardware, so they are basically toast.
Re:Look, Elop can't have non-WP7 success (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not boss ego, it's downright fraud: he did it for Microsoft's benefit, not Nokia's.
Re:Astroturfing (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not a good comparison. The smartphone market exploded. Nokia sold 30 million Symbian smartphones in the quarter before the platform was declared dead. The declared plan was to replace the Symbian smartphones with Windows Phone smartphones in two years. The two years are almost over, the smartphone market doubled (or so), and Nokia sells only 4.4 million Lumia phones. This is a complete failure.
Re:Oner must be pretty high to be in doubt (Score:5, Insightful)
He killed the existing OSes, and bet it all on windows phone. Which was a losing proposition, apparently. He was of microsoft stock, which leads people to believe it was malice causing this decision.
Prior to that there were two 'smart' platforms:
Maemo - Linux based, still fairly infantile but showed a lot of promise.
S60 (symbian) - kind of long in the tooth, long lineage. Designed ground up for phones.. great battery life.
Nokia had recently opened most of it up, and was moving to to support Qt applications, which was going to make things easier.
The most recent release was supposed to be quite decent, from what I've heard.
Anyway, then elop announced they're both dead, and no one develops for dead platforms...
Re:Silly Slashdot post (Score:2, Insightful)
One small problem: GP never mentioned any such thing, and never performed any "frothing at the mouth". The anomaly is that Symbian was (according to Elop) supposed to be dead by now, yet it sees increasing sales.
It's people like you that necessitate a "-1 Miserable Astroturfing Shill" mod so, so badly.
WP 8 and "usability in the same sentence? Honkey please...
Re:Astroturfing (Score:5, Insightful)
The key numbers you have to know are that
150% of nothing is still nothing. A "significant rise" would behave been an increase of 15 to 30 million. That would still not put Nokia near the big league, but would suggest that they have a real chance of getting back.
If you take into account the fact that a huge proportion of these phones were bought by Nokia and Microsoft employees and partners for testing, what you come up with is an App market which has no prospect of expanding to become something close to an "eco system" within the next two to five years.
Re:Good bye (Score:3, Insightful)
I still have a symbian phone. It works fine.
Of course I'm a bit old school, I prefer my phone to be functional rather then stylish.
Re:Do consumers care about the OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't care about "the OS" per se, but they care about several things which are related to the OS:
- They care about the GUI. iOS devices have a certain GUI. Android devices all have GUIs with highly shared characteristics. Windows Phone devices have that tile-based GUI. If you don't like the tiles, you could describe that as "not liking Windows Phone".
- They care about the apps and hardware accessories. iOS is the king of both- hugely well populated App Store, colossal range of accessories. Android phones have a great range of apps, and a smaller but varied accessory range. Windows Phones currently have few apps, and almost no dedicated hardware accessories.
- They care about branding. iPhones are extremely fashionable. Android Phones have built up a great reputation as almost the "standard smartphone"; plus the Google and green android branding is well loved. Microsoft Windows still makes most people think of offices, spreadsheets and beige boxes. For better or worse, those annoying "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" Apple adverts did hit the nail on the head.
People don't care about NT kernels and Unix-like file systems and Java Machines, no. But the OS doesn't stop with those bits.
Re:Lumias don't sell well (Score:5, Insightful)
Recently (Score:5, Insightful)
Recently my samsung galaxy note had some accident, so until it was repaired i was forced back to use my old nokia e63. Funny story: for email and podcasts (which is what matters to me on a mobile) i found that actually more productive, even after 2 years of using android phones/tablets, especially taking into account the battery life. I then checked in a store for the current symbian phone models, and i can honestly say: There is nothing in the smartphone world which matches the price/performance ratio of these.
They are cheap, well designed, have an os where the bugs have been fixed. The UI is sensible, i can take one in my hand and still use it without thinking.
I would rather buy a new symbian phone as a second cheap reliabe outdoor phone for sports etc. than a nokia lumia (even if these are no bad either).
If nokia would not have bragged so much about changing the platforms, the best thing they could have done would have been to put a decent kernel below and keep the API stable.