Back when mobile phones were all about hardware, radio technology, silicon chips and plastic casing design, Nokia kicked everyone’s ass and it was a proud time to be a Finn (also a Nokia employee for a while). That time period was around one decade ago. I guess you could compare it to the 80′s when personal computers were still a messy playground with tens of competing manufacturers pushing their hardware+software packages to consumers, and Commodore building a comfortable lead with their C64 killer product. We all know where Commodore is today, or more specifically, most of us have absolutely no idea of where they are. Since those early days we’ve moved on quite a bit and everyone’s using either Windows or Linux on very generic hardware (apart from the crowd who choose to pay for the Apple/OSX device lock-in). That, in my opinion, is where we have been moving towards im the mobile phone markets ever since 2007 and the release of the iPhone. Nowadays we carry just big screens with us, either with or without a slider qwerty keyboard, and that’s pretty much how exciting the hardware part gets. Take a look at the HTC product catalog if you don’t believe me.

How is Nokia doing in this brave new mobile world? Not too well. Sure, they’ve got as many devices on their product catalog as ever and they completely own the non-smartphone market in developing countries. But do they really live up to the promises of their product marketing department or, more importantly, the expectations of their most loyal customers, their advocates? Well, you be the judge. Here’s one example of how a N97 customer felt after his purchase:

Now here’s the piece of news that originally inspired my own blog post: Symbian-Guru.com is over. I strongly encourage you to read through what Ricky and Rita have written down as the epitaph of their site, as this reads much like an epitaph of Nokia and Symbian that wouldn’t of course be published like this. Some key points from their writing could be summarized as follows:

• The gap between promises/expectations and product reality has grown unacceptable
• Developers have abandoned the Nokia platform long ago and now all hope lies on Nokia’s internal software development efforts
• Nokia’s own services are all hype and no content, as not even the company’s employees are committed to using them
• “Open source” in the context of Symbian is a meaningless buzzword, when no one is interested in the source in the first place
• Waving the Nokia/Symbian flag has become too embarrassing in the US market due to lack of visible marketing support from Nokia

As a sort of a CRM practioneer with some little insight on what customer relationships mean to a company, I would now like to produce the following quote from my very own words:

When you betray your most loyal customers and they call it a day, the game is over.

The emotions described in the Symbian-Guru.com post are the cornerstones of a successful company, except that now the stones have been turned and there is nothing to build on anymore. It is no longer a case of doing minor adjustments to product offering or shifting the focus of marking communication – we’re far beyond that by now. Of course the biggest mobile device manufacturer in the world could never publicly admit such a deep crisis, but the most important customers know it already. From observing the market reactions of the early adopter crowd, everyone who is seriously looking for proper smartphone functionality from the handset that they carry around with themselves is going either for iPhone or Android. It’s hardly a secret to anyone, rather it’s plain and obvious. That’s what I’ve done and I’m sure many others will follow.

There will certainly be a big enough market outside the world of smartphones and “smart” (geek) users to ensure that Nokia can keep generating billions of € worth of sales, which the stock market analysts can delve into and speculate future revenue trends by analysing how much more the company can squeeze out of it’s superior supply chain. However, it will not be the market that will attract the interest of those people who are building the new application ecosystems on top of the device manufacturer’s offering. They will be following the iPhone crowd, where all the action is. Where new markets emerge.

If the old world of mobile phones was all about radio technology and hardware manufacturing, then the new world of mobile devices is focused around the services enabled by the hardware. This is of course not a surprise for Nokia, who have been continuously declaring their internal transformation to a service oriented company. Nokia have been making bold moves on the services front, by offering free navigation (after acquiring Navteq for $ 8 billion) and low cost packages for Comes With Music subscriptions to a semi-endless music catalog (something Spotify currently charges € 10 / month for mobile users) on their mid category products. Sure, these offerings do have lots of potential value to the customer, but upon a closer look they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the ability of building attractive mobile solutions that the users would like to use (as many Ovi users would probably agree). It is just built on external content, which Nokia is presumably using as a heavy loss leader product to get people hooked on buying the familiar hardware that the company actually physically develops and manufacures. There is basically nothing in this strategy that Microsoft, Google or Apple could not imitate if they wanted to. The difference is that neither Apple nor Google need to imitate it due to the success of their own unique strategies, and Microsoft can afford not to compete immediately but can rather attack a maturing market later on, since that is where they’ve always excelled at (and Windows Phone 7 looks to support this strategy).

Was N95 perhaps the last real flagship from Nokia? While there were many people willing to use it as the yardstick to play down the signifigance of Apple’s first iPhone offering, I think the underlying problems in the Nokia/Symbian camp were already building up at that time, regardless of the fact that N95 was a commercial success. A high number of complaints on software bugs and general lack of the kind of high-end feel expected from a flagship product could retrospectively be interpreted as signals that Nokia’s existing method of developing new high-end products was reaching the end of its lifecycle; a point where optimising the existing process no longer delivers significant improvements, but where you need to invent a whole new process instead.

How far do you then have to go to find a big flagship product from Nokia’s product catalog? Something that packed a true punch, like the iPhone did? Nokia 7650 from 2002 perhaps? The setting is of course completely different from Apple, who entered a new market, but the question still has to be valid. If you only deliver lots of good products but no single great one, then why should I buy from you? The picture below is a beautiful collage from the Nokia product catalog, featuring each and every mobile phone they have ever made between the years of 1982 and 2006. The number of new product innovations and dominant mobile phones of their time included in this serving is just awesome. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a system in place that would keep producing the same kind of “wow” results in the new world we are living. Nokia has become a victim of its past success.

Acknowledging that all the market share you’ve achieved and the great products you’ve delivered over the years is now worthless might surely feel like an act of pure insanity at first. But if you could get yourself to admit it, wouldn’t that be the exact moment when the climb back up starts? If the game is over, just reboot (heck, remove the battery if you must) and start all over. If you can’t do that, then you might as well consider it the end of your world. We don’t need an N8 from Nokia, or Symbian^4, or statements from Anssi Vanjoki about the company’s passion to reclaim smartphone leadership – we need a hard reset, and we need it yesterday.

Anyway, the packaged arrived to the local post office, I went to pick it up and started examining the contents at home. Alongside the new modem there were a couple of campaign flyers. Here’s the first one:

“The package does not contain the cable required for connecting the modem to the antenna network, nor the Y plug splitter for your TV. Please re-use the components from your old modem.”

Ok, makes perfect sense, I’m all for reducign the environment footprint of my various gadgets. Then there was the second flyer promoting another campaign:

“Recycle your old modem to your friend, ask him to plug it in and order a 10M subscription at welho.fi/ekoteko. You will both get free months as a reward.”

Well, that’s another nice idea for a “save the environment” themed campaign. Of course the only problem here is that my friend would not have the necessary cables for plugging in the modem, since you didn’t send me any. So he would have to jump in his car, drive to your store in downtown Helsinki and pick up the parts from there.

1997: Nokia 2110

The most lengendary mobile device of them all. Bought it when going to the army for one year and it happily survived even the worst conditions in the cold and wet forest camps. Later on I gave it to my mom, fitted with a brand new red colour cover and it again duly served as the first mobile phone for a new user. If you only need your mobile for phone calls and SMS’s, then this baby pretty much had it all already in 1995. Why didn’t we just stop right here?

1999: Ericsson GH-688

Even though the battle between Finns (Nokia) and Swedes (Ericsson) was fierce in mobile phone manufacturing back in the 90′s, I still had enough courage to take a step to the dark side and replace my trusty Nokia with a more compact device from Ericsson. In addition to the smaller size, it had support for dual-band GSM and, most importantly, custom ringtones! No, not the ones you would purchase online and get delivered through SMS. I’m talking about the possibility of composing your own ringtones by entering the notes of the tune into the phone with the keypad. Yes, you bet this was a painful experience, but boy was I proud to have my phone ringing in a public place and have the riff from Café Del Mar by Energy 52 played by the monotonic beeper of the GH-688.

2000: Nokia 3210

The new millenium had dawned and it had started to look more and more obvious that Nokia was pulling away from the competition. Sleek and simple phones like the 3210 had pretty much perfected the usability and user experience that was to be expected from a traditional GSM phone, plus they were being offered to the mass market with highly attractive price tags. The external antenna had already been eliminated, making 3210 a real easy object to just slip into your pocket, while T9 made writing SMS’s a joy for sore thumbs.

2001: Nokia 7110

Behold, the mobile interet was here! Well, not quite in the way that you would interpret the term nowadays. The first WAP phone from Nokia did its best to open a tiny little window into the world of online content, but with the lack of useful WAP content or even GPRS rate data transfer, it was always going to be a tough sell. Luckily the 7110 had other nice features to make up for the dissapointment of WAP. Similar to the “banana” phone 8110, there was a spring-loaded sliding cover for the keyboard, which made answering to an incoming phone call great fun by allowing you to “pull the trigger” and watch the slider unfold. Another cool innovation was the roller wheel, which had replaced the up/down buttons. Can’t imagine why it wasn’t adopted to more models, but it sure made playing the built-in table tennis game a real mobile gaming treat á la early 00′s.

2003: Sony Ericsson T300

Monochrome is no longer enough, now it’s all about colour displays. Sadly the Nokia 3510i misses its availability target and I have to go for a model from the Ericsson camp, nowadays already a joint venture with the Japanese after a steep decline of market share. There’s one more gimmick to the T300 that makes it stand out from the competition: a camera. Yes, in the year 2010 you can hardly imagine a handset without some form of camera for capturing a blurry image of the priceless moment that sneaks up on you while your EOS 5D is in your other bag. Back in 2003 it was still all about capturing pictures for sending them through MMS messages (before we had Facebook), thus creating a demand for the huge 65k colour screens found in the high-end models. SE T300 was not an expensive phone, yet it came equipped with a VGA camera. So what’s the catch? Well, it came with a camera, meaning this was an external unit that you had to attach to the bottom of the phone. Oh dear…

2004: Nokia N-Gage

After colour displays and detachable cameras, things just kept on getting more obscure. Although only a brief encounter, I’m proud to say that Nokia N-Gage was my first smartphone. Yes, the machine was aimed to be a full-blown games console, but what it actually turned out to be eventually was a very affordable entry level version of a Symbian Series 60 phone, thanks to the massive flop of the mid-00′s mobile gaming concept and the steep discounts applied to the remaining units. If it wasn’t for the incomprehensible product design known as sidetalkin’, this phone could have proved to be a great vehicle for delivering mobile apps to the masses. But it wasn’t, and N-Gage was written off as Nokia’s first major failure in trying to extend its dominance beyond “just mobile phones”.

2005: Nokia 6670

Unlike you might think today, Symbian wasn’t always the ugly, older cousin of the iPhone OS. In fact, it used to be the coolest kid on the block, showing you the way how mobile phones would eventually grow up to be the platforms for social network extension that they are today. The 6670 was a more modestly clothed variant of the design-ish 7610, aimed at the business productivity oriented crowd. What it ended up being in my daily use was a hugely captivating toy for a 5-year old boy, who just couldn’t get enough of all the great action games I purchased from the appstores of mid 00′s. Ok, so maybe I did occasionally enjoy a few rounds of the shoot’em up’s myself. After all, how many impressive productivity apps were there back in 2005 anyway?

2006: Nokia 9310

Communicators have always meant Business with a capital B. Ever since the first 9000 model released in 1996, owning a black brick with a QWERTY keyboard and a GSM chip meant you were someone significant (in Finland, that is). By the time of the 4th generation of Communicators, Nokia had decided to release two alternative versions of the product: the real man’s heavy duty Nokia 9500 Communicator and the slimmed down ladies version Nokia 9300 (not even labelled as Communicator anymore). Despite of the obviously sexist product positioning, I ended up taking the slim route and learning to type with the compact N9310 keyboard. I must say the form factor in this smartphone was spot on, allowing it to easily fit in your pocket while still catering to the most hardcore PDA style note takers and PIM’ers. An important milestone was also the fact that this was the very first phone that provided me push email from the Exchange server back at the office, thanks to the Seven/SmartMail service I purchased for the whole office. Say goodbye to lazy evenings with no connection to your work commitments and deadlines filling up your inbox all day round (*sigh*).

2007: HTC S710

“What’s that phone you’re carrying around? H T what??? Some new model from Nokia?” Previously known as Qtek, it’s been a long road for HTC to become a mobile phone brand recognized by the masses, and I think there’s still some miles to travel. In 2007 their offering was firmly built around the ever powerful Windows Mobile platform, which had shown it’s strength in battling with Palm for the touch screen PDA market. The S710 however was a traditional phone with no screen to tap, which meant that the biggest strength lied in the highly compact but surprisingly usable slider QWERTY. Once again a perfect device for the occasional email replies, but lacking a decent browser (Opera Mini couldn’t quite make up for the sorry excuse that WinMo IE is to mobile browsing) and 3G connectivity meant it was not going to reach a classic status. A solid tool but nothing more.

2009: HTC Touch Pro2

Still standing on the Windows Mobile soil, but this time with a whole new bag of tricks. Looking almost like an iPhone with a QWERTY, this baby was clearly trying to reach across the age old divide between business and pleasure in mobile device target groups. The results were quite impressive in many ways, with the Youtube player pumping out tracks through the conference speaker and a WVGA display, while Opera Mobile rendered almost any website into an accessible format on a device that fits your pocket. The only major gripe with Touch Pro2 really was the operating system it’s built on. No matter how you mask the default UI with TouchFlo, there will still be plenty of traditional WinMo menus that are simply not meant to be operated with your finger but a stylus. So close, but no cigar.

2010: Samsung Galaxy Spica

Hello Android, hello Google. Our journey has just begun, so I’ll refrain from making any statements yet. Let’s at least wait until I manage to install that Android 2.1 firmware update (if Samsung ever sort out their issues with the sad New PC Suite and Kies applications, that is).

Recently I haven’t been touching iTunes much at all, since my online music consumpion has transformed from files to streaming, thanks to Spotify. Many times there are still tracks that are not available through the Spotify subscription service, which is when I turn to see if iTunes is providing them available for purchase. Much to my surprise, I’ve started to increasingly dislike the iTunes experience. Looking at the results from the new 2010 Customer Experience Index by Forrester, it looks like I’m not the only one.

Let’s compare what happens when I search for an artists in both services. iTunes goes first:

With the current version of iTunes 9, there’s just too much going on in the user interface. Even with the UI chrome excluded from the picture, there’s still way too many items fighting over my attention. Furthermore, I don’t get the immediate Google Experience ™, where the first search result is big and bold, waiting to be clicked. In iTunes the items are too small and don’t appear clickable, maybe because there’s just so much I could click on. Overall, the navigation just feels like too much work, not enough fun.

What about in Spotify then:

Lots of small text here as well, but it’s a lot more bearable, since the structure is so clear. I know the purpose of each UI element and they are grouped in a logical manner, so that none of the information I’m not interested in feels like any kind of distraction. Even without any previous experience of using the application, I think I would be quite at home in navigating in Spotify, since it follows the univesal language of audio library software. What’s funny is that I think much of that language has evolved from the most popular audio library out there: iTunes.

Why is iTunes starting to become more cluttered? Why is it going down the path of Altavista, which used to be the top search engine of its time, before transforming into a messy portal with too much ads and features going on, then consequently losign the game to Google? My theory is that both iTunes and Altavista have (or had, in the case of AV) the same problem, which is the need to be constantly selling to the user. iTunes Store does not make any money until the user clicks “buy”, and it needs to achieve this same behaviour time and time again. In a similar fashion, the portal fever that Altavista was infected with consisted of presenting as many ad banners to the visitor as possible, whereas Google cleared away the clutter and developed a way to show only relevant text ads in predetermined sections.

The Spotify model doesn’t have the hard sell built into it. Its model lures in new users with free accounts, to explore the simple functionaliy built over the vast library of music available for streaming by just clicking on it, building up an engaging first experience of the service. Sure, the users are greeted with audio ads between tracks, unless they purchase the premium account. However, that’s a handicap that you can disable with giving them money, and I’m betting people can easily understand the trade-off there. In iTunes Store there is no subscription service that would make the catalog browsing free from the hard sell. Not until Apple starts offering the similar streaming scheme as Spotify, that is.

Let’s take one final look at another UI for searching a particular artist. With the introduction of Google Music giving some glimpse of things to come, I’m betting that the future UI design patterns for audio libraries will most likely be coming from the masters of search.

I had been gradually upgrading my home PC for many years, replacing parts here and there, which meant that there was hardly any original part left in the configuration. Luckily there was never any problem in getting the same old Windows XP activated, regardless of its draconian WPA hardware checks that had caused quite a stir when introduced back in 2001.

Last year I ran into a hardware issue that I was unable to pinpoint. I burned through a new PSU, new motherboard, new HDD, new graphics card, without finding a combination that would have booted reliably. Although I had never purchased a brand name PC during my 18 years of Wintel computing, I felt that I was just getting too old for this.

I’ve got a laptop from work, so at home I hardly need portability. However, with such low prices for supermarket laptops, it really turns the question around: do you really need a big PC under your desk? If I was tired of replacing components myself, then having a big case with free expansion slots does not actually provide a benefit but rather an aesthetic handicap. So, I grabbed a budget laptop from Acer, hooked it to my screen & keyboard and was happy as ever. Painless, easy to purchase IT gadgets for the home user, which I ultimately am. Sure, the hardware was not state of the art, but Vista ran as good as you can in general expect from it (not too well then).

Roughly a year later I found myself buying another PC for my home: Asus EeeBox EB1012. This was not even the size of a laptop, nor nearly as powerful as my Acer. It is in fact a miniature HTPC built out of the netbook level hardware of Intel Atom CPU and Nvidia Ion chipset. It runs Windows 7, which should be easier on the system requirements as its older brother Vista. The main point is that this little box can disappear behind your flat screen TV and sit there quietly, providing media library and web access in the living room. Forget about gaming, that’s what the Xbox 360 is for (and what a huge box it is next to the tiny EeeBox).

With this trend, I may soon be buying my next PC that will again be cheaper and less powerful than the one before. If I take a closer look, I actually already had purchased a Synology DS209j NAS station, which really is just a low spec PC built for one purpose: serving data from the 2 terabyte HDDs sitting inside the box. It does of course allow streaming the content or even acting as a web server with PHP & MySQL, but really it’s just a HDD with more accessibility features than a plain USB drive.

I haven’t got a netbook yet, but it looks like there isn’t a need for one in my hardware catalogue, regardless of all the hype. I’m writing this blog post while on the road, using my HTC Touch Pro 2 as the mobile typewriter. Packed with a touch UI, full keyboard, 3G/Wifi and the Opera browser, the “phone” ends up delivering me basically all the functionality I’d need from a netbook. It is almost hilarious that the device is pretty usable for all the basic tasks, except for making phone calls, which really is a lot more complicated than on my first Nokia phone in 1997. Maybe the Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM upgrade would help, maybe not.

At a time when applications are moving from the hard drive to the web, when the media is increasingly being streamed from some cloud (either your own private one or some published service), it is finally starting to feel like we have reached a point where the Moore’s law is no longer relevant to the consumer (or even for the manufacturer). Yes, there will be a need for the data centers to purchase more efficient servers for their racks, to accommodate the rising demand for the many freemium services operating with thin marginals. For the end user, the magic of a new CPU upgrade is just not what it used to be. We may finally be able to stop looking at the GHz’s or GB’s, and start to focus on the items higher up in the IT food chain: applications, usability and design.

Still, the geek in me is of course just waiting for the moment when I can start to compare chipset specs when purchasing a new washing machine or a toaster. That’s just some of the joys promised by ubiquitous computing where we seem to be heading.