‘When it rains it pours,’ so the saying goes, but this is a particular problem Finnish mobile giant Nokia could have done without. It has emerged this past week that the Nokia N8 has been suffering power problems that have rendered the device virtually useless for a subset of its users.

Unspecified number of affected customers

Speaking to Reuters, Niklas Savander, who is Nokia’s sales chief, said the Nokia N8 power issue, where the phone would turn off by itself and not come back on, was experienced by ‘a limited number of N8 users’. A spokesperson later said the problem arose in production, and has since been fixed, so it is likely to affect early adopters only, with Savander reaffirming that ‘the total number of affected users was “a small number.”’

Troubled history

The Nokia N8, which was supposed to mark the Finnish mobile phones giant’s comeback, has been troubled since inception. Though it was scheduled to reach consumers as far back as June, Nokia only began a staggered rollout in November. These problems were attributed to Symbian^3 development timelines slipping, only to later have the mobile OS slated for not being up to modern standards.

Commonplace

Before appropriating excessive blame to Nokia for this manufacturing fault, one needs to be mindful that these types of issues accompany many high profile smartphones. Apple, for example, has had various issues, including antennagate and glassgate, with its iPhone 4, as have a number of high profile Google Android handsets.

The only difference – and perhaps why the media is paying excessive attention to Nokia’s woes – is that the Finnish mobile phones giant is clawing its way back to recovery after years of dominance was interrupted by a sharp decline in profits. It’s a classic ‘fall of the giants tale’, and watching Nokia recover will make for a great business case study one day.

In short, if you were intending on purchasing a Nokia N8, hold off your purchase for a few weeks, until the bad batch has been cleared from market.

Do you live in the UK? And did you order the Nokia N8 from Nokia’s online store? If you answered yes to both these questions, do a skip and click your heels together because the handsets are now shipping to users in the UK.

The long road travelled

The Nokia N8 release has been in and out of the news for months now. The supposed Nokia smartphone messiah, its release date was marred in secrecy, and it had a premature leak that resulted in legal action being taken against the man who wrote a very ho-hum early review about the handset. It was then delayed, and before even being released, it was overshadowed by the Nokia E7, the Finnish company’s next major handset. But it looks like the wait for the handset with the ridiculously amazing 12MP camera is done for.

Nearly arrived

But for those of you who’ve ordered the Nokia N8 online, elsewhere, or through a carrier, your wait continues. What’s worse, if you live outside the UK, Nokia has made it clear that the release will be staggered (read: sporadic at best) so there’s no point in holding your breath for its arriving soon. Honestly, it makes little sense, if this handset is so important to the company, to have such a haphazard release schedule.

A long road to travel, still

But, the reason we’re so excited about the Nokia N8 shipping is because it is the first major smartphone release under new CEO, Stephen Elop. Furthermore, it is supposed to represent the start of the Finnish giant’s fight back in the smartphone business. So, from a technology journalist’s perspective, this represents either the start of something of a Rocky-esque comeback or the complete nail in the coffin of Nokia’s ambitions of dominance in the smartphone business.

The world’s eyes are on the Finnish mobile phones manufacturer.

Struggling mobile phones maker Nokia has finally made its Nokia C6 slider phone available in the UK, providing buyers with the increasingly rare option of purchasing the phone SIM-free for a reasonable price.

Price and availability

The Nokia C6, which was actually revealed in the latter part of 2009, can be purchased from Nokia UK online store SIM-free for £289. This isn’t the cheapest you can get the phone for, though, with various outlets allowing you to buy the Nokia C6 for less than that.

Carriers Vodafone and T-Mobile as well as retailer Carphone Warehouse should get the phone before the end of this week, with Nokia promising a release before the end of July. Nokia has also indicated more carriers will be announced shortly.

Qwerty quirks

The phone sports an increasingly rare feature – a full Qwerty keyboard for rapid typing. Nokia is targeting the phone at people who are looking for a good, mobile email device. The handset promises simple access to multiple email accounts, with Nokia clearly targeting the long-term core user base of BlackBerry handsets.

Specs

The phone has a 3.2-inch TFT screen that has a 640×360 resolution. It also has A-GPS and built-in flash memory of 200MB, expandable to 16GB by using the microSD slot. In many ways, both in terms of aesthetics and feel, it reminds us of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, which isn’t at all a bad thing considering that that handset is one of the better phones the company has released in recent years.

Thoughts

Limited early use shows that the Nokia C6 has a lot going for it if you take it for what it is. It is not intended for the high-end smartphone market, and while the Qwerty keyboard took some getting used to, we found it to be highly responsive once adjusted. It was jarring coming from non-stop smartphone usage to something a level down, but the C6 did show why Nokia dominates everything but the lucrative smartphone sector in ways its high-end competitors could only wish they did.

With the app store, Apple all but introduced an entirely new marketplace for developers to sell their wares. An early gold rush set in with some developers raking in millions of dollars from single apps that often cost a mere $2 and even $0.99 in the most extreme cases.

These developers helped fortify the iPhone’s dominance in the high-end smartphone category and every other mobile OS has now realised they need a similar bustling industry.

The developer’s conundrum

The developer’s conundrum is quite simple: devs want a platform with mass scale to build for that is not saturated by other developers, so as to ‘guarantee’ the mega returns that were experienced in the early days of the iPhone. But the paradox is this – consumers are becoming savvy to the need for a bustling app developer community around a mobile OS platform, but app developers want consumers to be there before they commit – a classic chicken and egg scenario.

The incentive

As such, the onus falls on the platform provider to entice developers to jump onto the bandwagon if they want to stand a chance of even competing in the smartphone market. Here we’re talking specifically Nokia, webOS and Windows Phone 7 Series, since iOS (Apple’s mobile OS) and Google Android are now proven entities.

Photo: Nokia

Microsoft has tried this recently by waving money in mobile games developers’ faces so that they port their popular iPhone games over to Windows Phone 7 Series. This, from early reports, has seen moderate success, since the incentive doesn’t necessarily exceed the effort to do this porting. And Windows Phone 7 Series is still unproven.

Our recommended solution

Another solution, one we haven’t seen practiced but could work, is a riff on Microsoft’s solution. Instead of getting developers to port their games for money, give an incentive to developers to develop original content by having a competition of sorts wherein each device shipped ships with those apps already on it. Bake the price of the game into the wholesale price of Windows Phone 7 Series device so that each game shipped earns each developer a dollar. The prospect of 10-50 million dollars from one remarkable game will incentivise the very best the industry has to offer. And the green lining? Well, those mobile apps and mobile games that don’t ship stock standard with the phone will be available on your market place day one, too.

How’s that for some early momentum? Think about it: team Windows Phone 7 Series, webOS and Nokia Ovi. It could work. 100,000 plus apps on Apple’s app store is a lot to compete with, but a small fraction are any good. If you had a bunch of very good apps early on for your mobile OS platform, perhaps people will take note.

A very tasty rumour indicates that Finnish mobile phones giant Nokia could be working on their very first MeeGo-powered phone. It’s a slider phone and is likely to be called the Nokia N9.

Disclaimer: This is pure rumour

Engadget broke the story based on what might be an ahead of schedule teaser leak for the Nokia N9. While this may be well fake, the production qualities in the video suggest otherwise, as does the look – in terms of design – resemble the Nokia N8 enough for this as-yet unreleased handset to be the successor of the Nokia N8.

Nice base to work off, if real

If the Nokia N9 is the real deal, and it is heavily modeled on the Nokia N8, just from a technical specifications perspective, this would be a great base to work from.

It looks well real, but still, we place this squarely in the ‘rumours’ category and suggest you think of it the same, too.

How not to blow this

Photo: Nokia

We recently wrote a post on what Nokia needs to do to become genuinely competitive in the smartphone market again. We had many suggestions, but the two that resonate deepest with this potential Nokia N9 are hardware fatigue and mobile OS decisions.

Basically, Nokia should strongly consider dialing back the number of smartphones it releases per year so as to give the right amount of attention to each release. This will curb the occasionally poor execution that goes with quality handset design, as evidenced in the Nokia N900.

Our second concern with Nokia’s strategy was the company’s indecision in opting for one mobile OS and developing on that platform aggressively. Symbian^3 vs. MeeGo vs. other proprietary software makes decision-making very difficult for developers in terms of supporting the platform as well as confuses the customers about what Nokia is actually about.

Nokia has an opportunity to redeem its many recent missteps, but the company needs to execute well if they are to keep up with RIM, Apple and Google Android.

The Nokia N8, the Finnish company’s next roll of the smartphone dice, has had its Vodafone UK pricing unveiled, coming in slightly cheaper than expected.

Surprisingly affordable

Vodafone’s pre-release page pegs the Nokia N8 at just £320 SIM free. For that price you’re getting what is arguably Nokia’s most heavily specced phone of all time.

Look what it can do!

This latest Nokia smartphone comes with a 12MP(!) camera that can also do HD video recording. Being a legitimate HD device, it also packs an HDMI out slot for viewing your video content on high definition televisions. Internal memory is a very generous (though increasingly standardised) 16GB.

The really big deal for this touch-based phone loving generation is the display on this smartphone. The Nokia N8 has a gorgeous, large (though actual dimensions are still uncomfirmed) and bright OLED, capacitive touch display.

Hail Mary number 3!

With every new Nokia smartphone, we’ve developed a bit of a tradition of referring to them as Hail Maries. You see, with the N97 before this and the N900, somewhat, it always seems as if Nokia will finally get the formula of developing a compelling, game-changing, smartphone right. But they keep missing. The N97 was very disappointing, Nokia admit themselves, and the N900, as phenomenal a handset as it is, had one too many software bugs to go on our ‘no-brainer’ purchase list.

This time, the Nokia N8 comes packed with the new Symbian^3 OS, Nokia’s latest attempt at building an operating system on par a pr with (or superior to) iPhone OS and Android and, who knows, maybe the Finnish mobile giants will get it right this time

Release scheduled

This Nokia smartphone is said to be releasing in Q3, though evidence indicates otherwise. It appears the folks at Vodafone UK think it may come up for air a little early, sometime in July or so. Which is both good news and bad news. It’s good news in the sense that we get to play with it sooner. And it is potentially bad news, in the sense that that will be around the expected release window for the iPhone 3GS successor, which may not be all so healthy, all things considered.

Nokia, once seen as a very insular and guarded company, is doing everything it can to shake this legacy. Not only has the phone manufacturer embraced the developer community by making Symbian open sourced and forged partnerships with other great companies like Intel, it is now crowdsourcing its next Nokia smartphone on a website where users can specify what they want.

The crowdsourcing experiment

Photo: Symbian

The initiative, called Design By Community, has users switching sliders according to their preference and wants in a Nokia smartphone. The Finnish company has put in place mechanisms that would prevent users from selecting conflicting designs, as well as parameters to force them to choose more ambitious designs if their initial choice set is underwhelming, and, on the flip side, slightly more realistic designs if the choice set is too outlandish.

The Nokia smartphone experiment is happening over phases, with different selection options available in future. This current round focuses on the inputs on the device and its displays, with the next round of Design By Community scheduled to kick off on 22 March with shape and size taking centre stage.

Listening to users

Photo: Nokia

This new openness and willingness to listen to their user base can serve Nokia in one of two ways – it can guide its engineers who merely sample what users say they want coupled with what the team believes users actually want. On the other hand, it could lead Nokia down a road where it is trying to please too many people at once and end up satisfying nobody. And, since Nokia is in such a giving mood, perhaps the company will cave in to the fan demands for MeeGo on the N900.

The consumer feedback Nokia gets from crowdsourcing and Design By Community will most probably be positive, but what that feedback yields in terms of build quality will be seen when only once this lengthy, albeit fun, process is over.

The camera that has been used in the Nokia E75 is a 3.2 Mega Pixel auto focus camera which has a dedicated shutter key. The Wi Fi facility is 802.11b/g and has UPnP technology. The mobile phone has a GPS receiver that is built in along with Nokia maps that have voice assisted navigation. This voice service can be used for the first three months. Connectivity is enhanced with the presence of the USB port. The Nokia E75’s battery cover is made up of steel and software like the office document editor give the phone cutting edge. The user can listen to FM radio just in case he gets bored with listening to songs. Go and get your Nokia E75 right away and experience all these features.

As soon as the users connect to the Internet they start paying for the service and for the data which they may download or upload. Thus, it is very important to judiciously plan the data usage to ensure a cost effective Internet usage. Before subscribing for a long term plan or signing a contract with the mobile Internet service provider, one should analyse whether he is a regular Internet user or just a casual one. Another important point is to determine the type of applications that are to be used or accessed via Internet as this directly determines the amount of data usage by smartphones. Besides this, the type of smartphone you have also affects the data usage. For example, the Apple iPhone, in addition to other advaned models like a Nokia smartphone, offers a rich web browsing experience and therefore follows a large data usage pattern as compared to other smartphones.

Below are some tips that can help you to get the maximum out of your smartphone

• Make use of LAN, office network or any other network available using Wi-Fi if it offers you free data downloads.

• Make sure that you end the session after you are done. Most of users do not confirm this and their mobile web browser keeps running in the background and the data download continues.

• Get a smartphone that suits to your data consumption pattern.

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