Submitted by “Ailing Nokia on Thursday surrendered its lead in the global smartphone market to rival Apple and shed more market share as it reported a steep net loss for the second quarter. Nokia’s outloook for its handset business to be profitable in the current quarter brought some relief to its battered share price but analysts doubted it would dispel fears about the future of the onetime cellphone leviathan. Nokia, still the world’s largest phone maker by volume, has failed to come up with an attractive smartphone offering to compete with Apple’s iPhone, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry and a wide array of handsets using Google’s Android software. Nokia said it sold 16.7 million smartphones in the quarter, falling behind Apple’s 20.3 million iPhones.” Hard to believe Windows Phone 7 – as great and fresh product I find it – can turn the tide for Nokia. Still, every phone maker today owes pretty much its entire business to Nokia (and Motorola).
Windows Phone 7 has already been proving to be rather lame in it’s attempt to take over.
If they had stuck with their plans of MeeGo and Qt originally, and then also added the S40+Qt that they did later, then Nokia’s Stock wouldn’t have sunk, and people would be far more interested in buying their smart phones.
Nokia N9 is looking mighty!
I have to agree. WP7 is utterly dead. MS monopoly powers will keep it from dying but it will not succeed.
I don’t that much care for all those privacy invading apps and the swipe interface is simply the best smartphone interface there is.
I’d take a great UI for the basics of a smartphone over 100k+ application stores anyday.
Added bonus: A lot of FOSS apps where poeple make sure they don’t invade your privacy. I guess a popular Qt based phone with easy developer (root) access would have provided those.
Sadly the N9 won’t make it to my country ;,(
Think that’s what it’s called anyway. A worthy successor to the N910 and ships with Meego.
Sadly, only in limited supply for lone to developers. Booo.
You might still see your wish mostly come true in mass market devices. Maybe. Very maybe (considering how it went recently with Nokia & plans…)
There are some hints recently about Qt on S40. A fairly direct (but still avoiding open admission) talk about Qt on the devices “for the next billion” (the way Nokia seems to describe so called “feature phones”) who can access the internet. Claiming the concepts from N9 UI will live on. S40 devices supposedly getting a new common hardware platform which, as far as “classic” S40 goes, seems ridiculously overpowered; but it looks fine for devices in the class of Samsung Star or LG Cookie.
Together, it might fit what you want. Very, very maybe.
(if S40 goes forward as the basis for cheaper devices while Symbian gets dropped, it would probably also tell something about relative cleanliness of their codebases)
I wouldn’t say Nokia abdicated.
It was more like Nokia got drunk, tripped on the Queens poodle, fell down the steps, slammed into the court jesters, and wound up in the formulary covered in leeches.
Meanwhile, Prince Steve, all dressed in white, pranced up the steps to the throne, kissed the Queen, sat down, and instructed the jesters to sing some Feist songs.
I guess the end result is the same.
From the article…
Uhm, I’m not sure that RIM is doing much better. I’m also not sure that its really Apple that now has the smartphone crown.
Ok, they’re saying that Apple is the top manufacturer of smartphones. Measuring by manufacturer rather than OS. I understand why someone might think that’s important to them, but to me the real interesting battle is between the operating systems rather than manufacturers.
Apple isn’t even a manufacturer 😀 They are the designer and vendor.
The biggest manufacturer is probably Foxconn…
It’s too bad Apple can’t compete. I mean, they are only the biggest cell phone manufacturer in revenue and profits and the biggest smartphone manufacturer in units sold. What would it be like if they actually could compete!?!?!
Eric Schmidt in disguise
Nowhere did Schmidt reference competitiveness or single out Apple when he said: “because of our successes, competitors are responding with lawsuits as they cannot respond through innovations”(not paraphrased quote).
So maybe next time you at least try fact-checking, mkay?
Edited 2011-07-22 22:37 UTC
A) While their lawsuit against Samsung looks like it’s about competition, their battle with HTC is not as clear cut.
B) Who said Apple can’t compete?
Edited 2011-07-22 22:35 UTC
Wow, you really drank a lot of kool-aid. Actually if you go to the actual article, you will see that this is one quarters worth of data. Period. No more no less. Apple also has the problem that EVERY other phone maker is selling Android. Only Apple is selling iOS. So while they may be the biggest single phone maker, they will never control the market. Android, like Linux, will end up everywhere. iOS will be chained up in Apple’s walled garden, a nice garden it may be.
Nokia’s big mistake is not Windows Phone 7, but ditching Maemo in favor of the inferior Meego. The N9 clearly shows Maemo as a ready to use product, whereas the first proper Meego smartphone has yet to be released.
If only they had stuck with Maemo…
I think you are partly right. Meego´s advantage over Maemo is that it has the support of more vendors. Maemo is Nokia-only (there is a non-Nokia device:Optima OP5-E).
In my opinion their biggest mistake was to devote themselves completely to Meego. They should have released Maemo 6 and 7 slowly converging with Meego and making the big change when it was ready.
As far as the nice things about N9 go / its UI / as a ready to use product, N9 is more a Meego than Maemo device…
The underlying cogwheels, which weren’t swapped completely to not prolong development, don’t make that much of a difference for users.