Comments on: Symbian: We have time to beat Apple's iPhone

Company has been slow to enter the race against Apple and RIM in the smartphone war, but its futurist David Wood thinks it has plenty of time. He might be right.

[Synthmeister]

Nokia is smokin' something good because while smartphone sales have been rising, its market share has been falling from around 50% to around 40% depending on which figures you believe. And I don't see any any reason that slide will continue. They just keep offering more phones with more gewgaws. They really can't take their time while Apple, Pre and RIM suck up all the high-margin, smart-phone customers and they have WAY too many models (over 200 by cnet's own count) and their various app store and music store initiatives have been mediocre at best.

I think they could solve half their problems by cutting the number of models from 200 to about 12. That must be a logistical, manufacturing, R&D, OS and inventory nightmare.

[professionaladventurer]

What does symbian do?

I was at a fair all weekend as a vendor and I saw a lot of iPhone's in normal non-business, non teen hands. stay at home moms (not the glamorous types), normal soccer dads, .....regular people. Evey one of them said something like: "I never really cared about what kind of phone I had before, but this one does so much stuff and it's really cool"

Tear it a part all you want, but the consumer who cars nothing of processor speeds and not having an app store fight's the battle. Pretty shiny things that work pretty good and cost a lot win. Otherwise more people would be driving Kia's

[Renegade Knight]

Shiney things win on Generation 1. When the users can't do what they want to do with the device though they will switch. The iPhone has holes. They can fill them, or lost out to others who do. Blackberry was never shiney but it worked well for what it did.

[Arthur Young]

And yet, at last week's Apple WWDC, Symbian was working the lines of developers (before the keynote), to try to get them to come to meetings about programming with Symbian. I even know one developer who went, and when he said he couldn't program effectively because he didn't have a phone running the system, they immediately gave him one.

There obviously is a battle for the hearts and minds of smart phone programmers. And right now Apple has captured the vast majority.

[Splashes]

Mr. Wood is doing a good impression of Nero, fiddling while Rome burns.

Two things come to mind, which Mr. Wood was not asked about:

1) The iPhone was a paradigm shift which caught Nokia & Symbian completely flat-footed. Just like Microsoft (Zune & WinMob), Symbian is now struggling to play catch-up, while Apple is still innovating. Is there anyone at MS or Symbian with the vision to one-up Apple? Smart money says no. When Microsoft finally shipped the Zune, it was already obsolete. They had aimed at Apple's 2-year-old product, and hit the target perfectly -- or would have, if the target hadn't been moved a half-mile down the road in the meantime. Is there any reason to believe Symbian won't fall into that same trap? If and when Symbian ships an OS that can compete with iPhone 1.0, Apple will have shipped iPhone 5.0.

2) It took Apple 2.5 years to conceive, design, engineer and deliver iPhone 1.0. Symbian (and MS) have had 2.5 years since the iPhone was introduced, to get off their hineys and invest in creating a modern mobile OS, yet all they've produced so far is hot air. Perhaps Mr. Wood and his colleages are too relaxed.

[Renegade Knight]

Apple did change the dynamic. However they are not innovating. They are trying to plug the holes in their phone before people who liked their initial glitz start switching to get the basics. Plugging holes is another way to say. "play catch up".

So there you go. Symbian has to catch up on the interface and Apple on the basics.

[giodelgado]

Ever since the iPhone came everyone expects that other will have the same UI and capacitive screen (Pre), yea I like it, it's the best available till date but the Symbian FP2 looks good and with a good processor and RAM runs smoothly, there's no need for pretty UI if you can't run multiple apps or use external devices at the same time be chained to what Apple approves for apps. N97 is like the E71, they need to get the feedback from consumers and improve on it.

On the other hand I'm eager to know what will the Symbian open os will look like and how they will market it.

Until now the best value for your $$$ is the upcoming E72 IMHO.

[John Elberling]

Apple successfully morphed its well established, proven design computer OSX into a phone + mini computer platform. whereas Nokia is trying to morph its Symbian phone platform into a mini computer as well. except the computer part is much harder to do ... we'll see if they can pull it off.

likewise, Nokia is trying to create with Ovi an "ecosystem" comparable to iTunes. but so is Microsoft and Android and Sony and everyone else. and with all their different models on different telcos, they just confuse everyone. only RIM has an equally focused user service - but for enterprise mainly.

this guy is talking brave and running scared.

[Splashes]

Yes, much harder to do. That's why Jobs, in his Jan 07 iPhone intro, claimed that the iPhone was "5 years ahead of everyone else." Anyone can copy hardware. It remains to be seen whether the current incarnations of Microsoft and Symbian are capable of producing an OS and ecosystem that can rival Apple's.

[CreativeMalcolm]

I recently attended some training for the E71, and I have to say the guy kept talking about how competitive it was with the iPhone and the BlackBerry Bold, I felt like asking him if he realized that it sounded kinda pathetic that he had to keep mentioning that? If his device was that competitive it should have been evident.

Symbian can do a LOT, but it suffers from being a million things stacked on a million other things. Not to mention the keyboard short cuts seem completely undocumented and unless you use those it seems to take forever to do just about anything. The E71 is a nice phone, but it's a lousy smart phone. The hardware is really solid and I can't knock that. Well actually I think the keyboard sucks compared to a BlackBerry. But the problem is, that people don't want smart phones to be REALLY good phones, they want them to be REALLY SMART phones and Nokia's offerings are pretty dumb.

[Constable Odo]

Of course they have time. Apple is just going to be sitting still in one spot waiting for them to catch up... NOT!

I always love to hear that WinMo devices have way more features than an iPhone. I'm sure there is some truth to that since WinMo has been around for many years, but soccer moms and non-techies just can't easily figure out how to use them. That's why people like iPhones. Even if iPhones do have ultimately less features than a WinMo device, most people just can't spend the time trying to figure out how to use them. I don't care what type of hardware you put on a handset, if it's too difficult to use, it will bring high customer dissatisfaction, end of story.

And even though Steve Ballmer laughed at the iPhone as being a toy, he sure hustled out the Windows App Store (Windows Marketplace?) at breakneck speed. But then again, so did all the other handset competitors.

[Splashes]

Good point, and that's why Nokia apologists are so irritating. Yes, Nokia hardware is impressive, and their software feature lists as well. But if a user can't figure out how to use all those impressive features, or doesn't use them regularly because the interface is atrocious, what's the point?

Steve Jobs referred to this problem during his Jan '07 iPhone introduction, saying that so-called smartphones definitely had more features than regular ol' cellphones, but were actually harder to use. For instance, many users couldn't figure out how to use the address book, so they just used their Recents as their address book.

[seven7dust]

if Nokia and Symbian want to be taken seriously
get with the program and switch to capacitive touch screens
resistive screens are crap

[ahickey]

It will be interesting to see what happens with smartphone sales over the next 12 months.
Now the iPhone is out for a while, the initial buzz is gone I am hearing more people complain about them.

A figure i would love to see is if the annual iPhone sales are based on net new customers or is it people upgrading to the latest version. Effectively, how many iPhones are in use against how many have been sold.

I believe all the platforms have a chance for major success. How most people use their phones now against how they will use them in 2 years time will be very different and when a product/service goees mainstream then price becomes a bigger factor - this is an area where Apple never plays. So, the other manufacturers can soak up profitable marketshare while Apple stick with its traditional makretplace.

[dw2-0]

Matt - Many thanks for the restaurant recommendation!

Some of the comments here deserve an answer.

I try to be calm but that doesn't mean I'm complacent. I believe the same goes for very many of my colleagues inside the Symbian Foundation and in companies in the Symbian community. Goodness knows, the mobile industry is fast-changing and challenging. In order to survive (let alone prosper) is going to require a superb level of performance. There's not the slightest room for complacency.

As it happens, my <a href="http://www.dw2-0.com/2008/06/it-was-twenty-years-ago-today.html">21 year history</a> (at Psion / Symbian v1 / Symbian v2) has been filled with times of great uncertainty and trauma. Every year, it seemed there were new mighty competitors or industry-reshaping alliances that commentators thought would herald the death-knell for EPOC/Symbian software. (Anyone remember Windows CE v2? That was described to me a dozen times over as being poised, without any shadow of doubt, to steamroller all competition.) These 21 years were, therefore, full of angst - and huge amounts of hard work. So the angst of the present day challenges are not entirely new to me. That's one reason I can be somewhat philosophical about them.

Nevertheless, it's clear to me that these challenges come at a higher-level of seriousness and intensity than any I've experienced before. So in the Symbian world, we recognise that we need to up our game. (I've written more about this at the end of <a href="http://blog.symbian.org/2009/06/17/riding-the-transition-urgently">this recent blog posting</a>.)

I don't buy into the stark "black and white" worldviews that are sometimes expressed: "all Nokia products are inferior to all products from XX or YY", etc. I see plenty of real value in the new products such as the N86, E72, N97... Equally, I see plenty of room for improvement in these products. But I also see the means emerging (in the open source Symbian innovation engine) to make these improvements both quickly and decisively.

// David Wood, Symbian

[dzankizakon]

Everyone who I have ever spoken agrees that Symbian phones are slow and have a crappy, flickering, complex, annoying and buggy UI. I owned Nokia 5800 for about a month or so, and I have to agree. I am sure millions of hours of hard work has gone into it, but the UI still feels like unfinished product. Unless you do something to quicky change this, I am definitely never going to own or recommend a Symbian phone, nor will I ever want to develop for it.

The hardware is very good but the user experience is just mediocre and nowadays that is what we users care for the most. If I were you, I would take it easy on open-sourcing, Ovi Store or whatever other "features" you're planning to add, and concentrate on making UI the best in the world, better than iPhone and Pre.

[littleM]

Look, just because Apple has the hottest selling smartphone and a developer community with 30,000 applications, it doesn't mean that Nokia can't just go on doing what they've been doing at still take over the world. Just look at what happened to IBM and Microsoft 30 years ago. Well, maybe that's not a good example. Uh, how about GM and Toyota? Maybe not. Uh, perhaps Nokia should consider buying Apple. Yeah, that's the ticket!

[timlayton]

If you look at the current market numbers comparing symbian, WebOS, windows mobile and iPhone I think it is clear that symbian has their work cut out for them at best. Success in this space about presenting clear and compelling choices. So let me break this down for you. As a random exercise I just called 5 of my friends, 3 of which are IT managers and the other 2 work with technology on a daily basis. All 5 of them are heavy smart-phone users. All 5 of them had never even heard the word "symbian" and asked me what I was talking about. If I stopped 5 random people on the street and just said the words "windows" or "iPhone" they would all know what I was talking about. Understand?