Nokia come clean. Admit N97 and Symbian were failures
By Alexis • Mar 1st, 2010 • Category: Nokia
- Photo: Nokia
Nokia, the venerable cellphone giant that got its start making rubber boots, has come clean in admitting the N97 performed disappointingly and that they kept their mobile OS that is now Symbian open source on life-support for too long.
N97 a ‘huge disappointment’
- Photo: Nokia
In a move uncharacteristic of a formerly unchallenged incumbent – potentially indicative of the current Smartphone climate – an executive at Nokia, Anssi Vanjoki admitted to All About Symbian that in terms of build quality and user experience, the N97 was a huge disappointment to the customer base. Though quick to point out a moderate profit was made, he also admits lessons have been learned from this mistake.
Executive admittance
He also went on to admit that Nokia supported the first release of its mobile OS Symbian for far too long, but trusts the release of Symbian^3, in conjunction with the open source community, will be Symbian’s big comeback.
- Photo: Nokia
Previously it was documented how far ahead the current generation of mobile OS powered smartphones are in comparison to Symbian-powered phones. This was partly because Nokia did little to nothing to support what is now Symbian open source, and because the platform back then was closed. By closed it is meant that only select companies of a specific size who had a specific relationship with Nokia got access to the SDK (Standard Development Kit), which in turn limited just how many apps could be released.
Going open source to die?
To this extent, Nokia came clean by admitting its closed platform faults by releasing Symbian open source. The opinion many had, however, was that this was ‘too little too late’. Symbian had the biggest market share but was impossibly sluggish. And it going open source seemed more an admittance of defeat than it did acceptance of mistakes made. The N97 was rushed to market, and Symbian was too slow, but perhaps Nokia’s ability to admit its faults is tantamount to its willingness to launch a genuine offensive against Android and iPhone.
Tags for this article: mobile OS
