Notes

The Evolution of Nokia's Smartphones and a Preview of the brand new Nokia N97
Nokia, whilst having 38% market global market share, has never truly been a presence in the world's two largest economies, America and Japan. We can speculate as to the reasons this is, however the significant reasons behind it are insufficient support from providers, and products that weren't just what consumers in these markets were searching for at certain points in time.

Certainly, Nokia can be an innovator in the market, their Series 40 operating-system was regarded by many Europeans and Asians as the benchmark. However, what happened from then on? Why were other newcomers such as for example Samsung and Sony Ericsson in a position to gain so much, so fast? My opinion is that Nokia stopped thinking out of the box, and tried to use the Kaizen (continuous improvement) philosophy to a thing that required constant innovation and reinvention instead. You see, mobile phones aren't perfect devices. There are devices we have that serve their purposes singularly well, almost to the point of perfection. Take a Japanese knife, for instance. It has been engineered and refined as time passes, to a point where the balance is as perfect as possible, the blade is really as sharp as possible and the aesthetics have reached their height as well. There isn't a lot more that we will likely do with such a knife. This evolutionary approach is okay for things such as Japanese knives, but not for new technology that hasn't quite found a permanent footing.

We are just starting to explore what a personal handheld device can do for us, and in the last couple of years, what have we seen? The single biggest leap was the iPhone. Not because of any features mind you, but because of the way we interact with these devices. It, single-handedly, has changed how we will connect to devices forever. Microsoft has had a page from the iPhone book, and has talked of the thought of a large pane of glass with multi-touch inputs. Apple has had iPhone-style input and added it to the trackpads in their latest laptops, and almost every manufacturer has, or in the near future, will come out with a phone having an immense touch input on the front.

Forward thinking check here is what makes the iPhone so unique, also it continues to this day. Google for instance, takes benefit of the GPS, proximity sensor, microphone and 3G connection to provide a very usable search program that can find results catered to your surroundings faster than a similar text entry could be input. Has Nokia innovated in this manner? Arguably, in the cellular phone world, few have, but expectations of the marketplace leader are high.

Nokia took the proper decision to decrease the smartphone road in the past with the 7650. That was a very innovative phone, a good little ahead of its time. Running an open operating-system, integrated camera, sliding design, the 7650 could have stormed THE UNITED STATES and Japan. It had been easily with the capacity of MP3 and video playback, custom ringtunes, and a bunch of other features that are popular with today's phones. Nokia really did not market the device and also it will have, especially in the markets that matter probably the most.

From the 7650, Nokia moved to devices just like the 6600 and 3650. What sort of progress did Nokia make with this step? Next to nothing. The 7650 had an operating system, Symbian, that allowed for applications to be installed. European and Asian developers started making a myriad of programs for the telephone, from frontends to Office document viewers, to file explorers, MP3 players, video players and many more. The phone was built with a camera, and the fairly open operating-system allowed for a quite a lot of development.

The supposedly next-generation 6600 offered little in the way of improvement. Another form factor, candybar, instead of slider, however the same screen with exactly the same resolution and size, no major differences to the OS and the same battery meant that it was an aesthetic makeover more than anything. The 6600 became popular in popularity in the European and Asian markets, and in 2005, made its solution to North America as well, where it missed the sort of success it did abroad. Another phone was released around the same time, the 3650, which was largely the same as the 6600, but was aimed at the youth markets with its funky styling.

After these came the 7610, which followed Nokia's now-common practice of aesthetic changes combined with a higher pricetag. It offered a marginally better 1-megapixel camera, but by now, the Symbian OS had third-party software upconversion of photos that interpolated 1 megapixel images out of your VGA camera in the 6600 and 3650. These interpolated images that looked almost the same as those from the true 1-megapixel 7610.

The "next-gen" 6630 was the first 3G smartphone from Nokia, and that, combined with the stereo headphone output was all that has been new. It didn't quite make full use of the 3G, because 2-way video calls were something that was considered part and parcel of 3G phones, and the 6630 didn't have a front-facing camera.

Nokia did, however, sell a dock having an integrated camera separately, so that 2-way calls could possibly be made. The dock had to be plugged in though, so functioning, it wasn't much different from utilizing a computer with a webcam, and wasn't very "mobile." Even though most of Nokia's smartphones were a lot more than with the capacity of MP3 playback, none had stereo audio output (smart, Nokia), even though the iPod's popularity could clearly be observed at that time. Users were restricted to monaural audio playing back through the loudspeaker, through the wired monaural headset, or by way of a low-quality monaural Bluetooth headset. Yes, each of them had Bluetooth, right away! When we got to the 6680, Nokia added a slightly better camera in the trunk, and a front-facing VGA camera for 3G video calls, after learning their lesson with the 6630.

Curiously, there have been no other changes. By now, Nokia's innovation had slowed to a standstill. In contrast, Apple released a product that didn't do this a lot more technically, but really stood behind the program and continually pushed its development with each firmware update, a thing that Nokia may have done, getting the most superior hardware and software at that time.

At this point, Nokia decided it needed to rejuvenate its image through the marketing department, and came the N-series phones. These were again, not fundamentally not the same as the preceding phones, but were marketed as being better, to be "multimedia computers." They started adding more features these times, such as better cameras, Carl Zeiss lenses, optical zoom on a model or two, and finally Wi-Fi. Some models were just rehashes of existing models; browse the similarities between the 6680 and the N70.

With the N-series came a more recent version of Symbian, one which would not run the majority of the existing applications. As consumers, we realize the stigma of failing to have backwards compatibility (cough, MS Vista, cough PS3, cough), so the development cycle began anew. What's interesting to notice is that despite the fact that the Symbian platform got an update, it didn't look or feel any different. It never had the animated menus and ease of use that Sony Ericsson's phones had, but with the fancy OS, there must have been more changes.

Applications will always be lacking memory on the Symbian platform, and with the exorbitant prices that Nokia has always charged, more memory wouldn't have hurt. Even yet in its latest iteration, the Symbian platform is not what you'd call smooth, in accordance with the iPhone OS or Blackberry OS. Apps don't co-operate the way they should. If you receive a Word document in your e-mail, it will not necessarily open up with the correct viewer, and in the rare event that it tries, crashes and slow speeds certainly are a surity. Nokia came out with a good browser on the N80, and has used it since, but its welcome has worn off. It was great when it first arrived, miles beyond everyone else's browser. Since that time, apparently, little development has been made. It's still a royal pain in the butt to surf, and even more so on flash-heavy sites. Flash needless to say, doesn't work fully. Imagine should they made it work... it'd function as first phone capable of browsing the full internet, something even the iPhone struggles with. The N90 and N93 were certainly interesting, but were plagued with exactly the same issues. The N93 had a flip-open mode, just as this new N97 does, but it wouldn't always register the flip and go into landscape mode, or, would do it very slowly.

While the N95 has been Nokia's magnum opus for quite a while now, its software is eons behind iPhone and even Blackberry in its reliability. Crashes and slow boot times don't make for a good user experience, and consequently unhappy customers.

Another problem has been that the truth of the features hasn't lived up to the hype. Integrated GPS was a good idea in the N95, but Nokia didn't include any usable turn-by-turn navigation software, and instead, wanted to charge for it. Slow to lock on and frequently inaccurate, the GPS was largely a waste. The N95 featured a 5-megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens, but took fairly mediocre pictures which were easily beat by a cheap handheld camera. Enough time needed to go from application start to picture taken was unbelievably long too. Meanwhile, Samsung's phones in Korea and the Japan-only phones had excellent cameras.

Smartphones need good screens. Plus, consumers love big screens. Sounds like a no-brainer... have an excellent screen, right? Nokia went from using lowish resolution 2.23 screens to a brilliant 352�406 screen in the N90 and N80 that had pixels so tight, they couldn't be observed with the naked eye.

Granted, the screen size was small, but this attempt was in the right direction. Unbelievably, following the N80, Nokia went back to using low resolution screens, exclusively. Until now, they increased size, however, not resolution. Given all that, I think you can observe why Nokia hasn't fared all that well in North America and Japan. For several their flaws, each new phone cost the number of a complete blown laptop, something that doesn't settle all that well with value-centric North Americans (we save money than anyone else on earth, but need to get our money's worth!).

And now we reach Nokia's newborn. The N97. Clearly, Nokia wants to play off the popularity of the N95 by following its alphanumeric pattern, but oddly, this appears to make light of the fact that the N96 was quite the dud. Basically the exact same as the N95 (what is with that?) with 16 GB vs. 8, we hardly ever really saw it take off... It made the blogs, people reported buying them in Singapore and wherever, and now... Nokia has shifted. Anyways, best for them they did, because the N97 is clearly the first big step since that classic 7650.

Nokia finally seems to have understood that finger-based touch input is here to stay, and contains included one hell of a screen to quiet my complaining. 640 x 360 resolution, which makes it a 16:9 display, perfectly friendly with oh, modern TV and movies, something that 20 and 30somethings would love. Incidentally, they are the people who'd spend on such a device... good Nokia, good! You're finally starting to understand your target market! They've gone a step ahead and included tactile feedback. This is more software than hardware, because the iPhone is technically capable of this too, but I'm curious to observe how well-implemented it is. There have been mice with tactile feedback time ago, where you'd roll the cursor over a link and you'd "feel" the link there. I'm not sure if that helps at all, but hey, if Nokia found ways to make it useful... awesome.

Also, Nokia apparently realizes that the internet is important, and so, a complete tactile QWERTY keyboard flips out. This is a great feature, which will certainly find favour here. It's interesting to observe how much Nokia has borrowed from the iPhone with regard to style... it is usually seen the most once the screen is off.

HSDPA and WiFi radios were a must, and they are there, but hopefully the WiFi is N-grade this time around and contains decent range. 32 GB of onboard storage AND a microSD slot shows they are listening to what folks want, and this feature solidly trumps the iPhones unexpandable memory. They state the camera is 5 megapixel, Carl Zeiss lens, and may shoot VGA video at 30 fps. Well, just what exactly? My 2.5-year old N93 could do that. In 2009 2009, the telephone should have been able to do at least 720p video with sound equal to the N93. I believe this is the weakest the main phone, frankly.

Finally, one of the most important pieces of the puzzle, the OS, gets a real upgrade. From the pictures, it looks like Nokia has taken its previous ideas, and elevated them to a new level. The "today" screen, present on the last few generations, would present calendar appointments, to-do notes, e-mail and text messages on the primary screen, helping you discover what you need to instantly. They've given it the glossy Apple treatment these times, and the today screen, thanks to the large resolution and size, now includes Facebook, Myspace, weather and a great many other alerts. This too, for me, trumps the iPhone with regard to real usability, as you can get a great deal of useful information at a glance, rather than needing to go into individual applications. Clear big buttons (in the pictures) indicate that version might be easier to use, something Symbian desperately needed. If the program is as good as it looks, and the touchscreen works as well or much better than the iPhone's, it appears like we have a real winner on our hands. The pricing because of this will be well into the $800s unlocked, but if UNITED STATES carriers pick it up and offer it at a decent price, this phone could do well if Nokia markets it right. I'm looking towards testing it!

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by Loy Bond
Read More: https://www.instapaper.com/p/12312195