Will Symbian and MeeGo be Nokia's saviour?

Following Nokia World 2010, we take a look at whether Nokia’s new launches could ensure the leading manufacturer can stay at the forefront of the smartphone market.

By Clare Hopping, 22 Sep 2010 at 17:54

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Nokia hasn’t been the most innovative company out there of late, sticking by the Symbian operating system while other leading manufacturers have spread their horizons across multiple platforms.

According to Gartner, Symbian still held 41 per cent of the smartphone market share in Q2 2010, with Android and RIM way behind at 17 and 18 per cent respectively.

While all seems good with Nokia’s popularity rating in terms of shipments, this is predicted to drop in the future as Android grows in popularity as a mobile platform.

IDC predicted the Symbian market share would drop to 32.9 per cent by 2014, while Android will shoot out in front.

Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's mobile devices technology and trends team told us earlier in the year that "Android is the wild card, deserving close observation for the rest of this year and the years to come.”

Not is all rosy within the Nokia corporation either, with two key executives leaving the Finnish company in quick succession and a third announcing he would ‘stay until 2012’.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was the first to leave Nokia. He'll be replaced by Stephen Elop, former president of Microsoft's business division.

In a statement, Nokia justified the replacement of Kallasvuo by announcing it needs to promote a fresher image.

“The time is right to accelerate the company's renewal; to bring in new executive leadership with different skills and strengths in order to drive company success,” it said.

Mobile solutions chief Anssi Vanjoki was next to announce he was leaving, although Nokia issued an official statement, emphasising he had resigned rather than been replaced.

The day before Nokia World, Vanjki defended his position, saying in a statement: “I felt the time has come to seek new opportunities in my life At the same time, I am one hundred per cent committed to doing my best for Nokia until my very last working day.”

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2 comments

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Wish the author was more clued up

Clare Hopping, much like your other Nokia/Symbian related articles (like the N8 review) this piece also features inaccuracies and misunderstandings.

Here's on glaring error in this piece: "However, 10 million applications have been downloaded from the Ovi Store, which isn’t a bad statistic."

Really? I'd love to know how a single developer has had over 50 million downloads of their apps from Ovi Store, over 50 developers have had over 1 million downloads of their apps, and Ovi Store has been doing around 2 million downloads a day for some time now...

Your articles on Nokia, the N8, Symbian and MeeGo all bear all the hallmarks of someone who is completely unfamiliar with these platforms, and who has not done their research. Your articles read well and you're a good journalist, but please - no more Nokia related articles until you're REALLY done your research.

By alexkerr on Friday Sep 24

More major factual errors

The article contains many more factual errors than merely undercounting Ovi downloads. Here are a few of the more glaring.

(1) "However, all of these features are already available on newer operating systems including Android, Symbian’s biggest threat in the smartphone world, and have been for some two years." Actually, Google enabled Android multitouch on 2 February 2010 as part of a Nexus One upgrade.

(2) "MeeGo is actually an operating system that can be used across a range of devices, although the first devices will be launched as smartphones by Nokia." Actually, the first MeeGo device launched on 24 September 2010, and it was the WeTab tablet in Germany.

(3) "Nokia argues that the reason it decided to develop MeeGo with Intel was to offer an alternative to its customers, although it tried this with Maemo and, after producing one device, the platform was abandoned." Actually, Nokia produced four Maemo devices - N770, N800, N810, and N900 (I'm not counting the WiMax version of the N810 here, that would be five if counted). Nor was Maemo "abandoned" - Maemo apps run unmodified on MeeGo with the smartphone UX, and MeeGo apps run unmodified on the N900. Nor is it fair to claim the N900 was "abandoned" because it won't receive an official MeeGo upgrade - almost half of existing Android phones won't be upgraded to 2.x, and the original iPhones won't receive iOS 4. SOP.

(4) "Nokia has just released the Qt SDK to developers." Actually, the QT (not Qt) SDK shipped in 1991 (!). The author probably meant that QT 4.7 shipped in September, and while it adds some exciting and very unique new technology such as QML, it's fully compatible with apps written for earlier versions as well.

I accept that these are honest mistakes, but so many glaring errors in a single article indicates a need for a bit of remedial reading, especially since every error reflected more poorly on Nokia than the truth justifies.

By Ip_itproc07081b6 on Thursday Sep 30