I have been an iPhone user for almost 10 months now and have been thinking about getting a new phone. So when I started looking around for new models, I was amazed to see how none of the available phones would satisfy my requirements. Not even the super Nokia N97.
I am not sure if my usage pattern is unique but I tend to use my iPhone as a music player (podcasts mostly) more than as a communication device. My other iPhone activities would include checking emails, using Google Reader and Twitter (Oh yeah, follow me @acmhatre).
Back in 2005, Sony was the first company to introduce the concept of a walkman phone. Nokia soon followed Sony but both these companies faltered on the software and that’s the secret of iPhone’s success. What makes the iPhone so unique and loveable is not the highly responsive touch screen interface or the good looks – it’s the backbone – the iTunes software.
Unlike the half-baked software developed by Nokia and Sony, iTunes can hold its ground to be used a primary music management software so anything one does in iTunes gets synced to their iPhone. Similarly, iPhoto a great photo management tool and synching with an iPhone is a breeze. Before iPhone was introduced, nobody even talked about updating the firmware on a cell phone because it was just too difficult to be done by an average user.
I am not sure if Sony has the energy to stage a come back but I can see Nokia competing with Apple/ I am not taking about the revenue numbers or number of handsets sold. We all know that Apple is far from even competing on those grounds. I am talking about mindshare and perception based competition.
So what should Nokia do? How about Nokia using SongBird, a free and open source music management software from the Mozilla foundation to do everything that iTunes does for iPhone. It’s being positioned as an iTunes killer anyway.
Nokia, at least for its high end phones, should look into developing plug-ins that’ll allow people to manage and synchronize not only music but videos, photos and as a platform to provide firmware updates to Nokia users. Nokia needs to give its users a single point of interaction with their devices. Nokia should do negative of iPhone and do just exactly opposite. The iPhone App store is a closed environment; Nokia should open up a Symbian Appstore on SongBird and integrate it with Ovi. The solution just seems so obvious but sometimes it just is that obvious!
The writer, Aditya Mhatre, is based in Mumbai and hosts Indicast, a popular audio-video podcast show from India.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/gadgets/how-nokia-can-trump-iphone/6144/
Reader Comments
I have been a long time Nokia user, my last one was the 6800 butterfly winged. Then I went O2 XdaII. I’ve just bought the Nokia E-71 instead of the iPhone. All companies are trying to do iPhone lookalike – the Touch system, the large screen, etc… I like a large screen as much as the next person, but having gone through Symbians that initially could not cut and paste and Windows Mobile that sucks CPU resources and gets slower and slower until next reboot, chunky phones that offer sizeable screens and drag down your trousers, I figure I want a phone that is a phone, not a multi-media device first. The Symbian on the Nokia E-71 is now a lot more mature – responsiveness is good, does not eat battery life, switching between 3G access point and free wifi is convenient, cut and paste. The keyboard on the E-71 is QWERTY and can be single handed and the shape and weight does not drag down your trousers. To me, that defines a phone bias more than a multi-media, portable web device and that’s what I want.
Written by AnandaSim on 12.19.08
I agree with your idea!
By the way, Songbird isn’t from the Mozilla Foundation, but from Pioneers Of The Inevitable — the application is based on Mozilla’s code, and some of the developers have been working on Firefox, but as far as I know they aren’t directly related. The name is similar to Sunbird (Mozilla’s calendar application), though. :)
Written by Zim on 12.20.08
All right…think you are looking at a music player..not a phone
Written by Krishna on 12.20.08
Interesting how you compare two phones, one of which is not even released yet!! {you must have a magic wand that brought you the N97 and it’s shortcomings} and you emphasize the music abilities of a PHONE!! lol.. How about comparing the iPhone to the Nokia N91 in terms of audio ?? If you know ANYTHING about SPL [ google it ] you would’ve known the N91 is, by far, leaps and bounds ahead of the iphone/ipod in terms of music!! And, it was released years before the iphone!
Also, funny how you forgot to compare the features of N97 with Iphone.. Oh wait, you probably have no clue about FP2 phones and it’s feature set.. All you care about is iToones!! Goodluck.. and great review!! [hah]
Written by Rahul on 12.21.08
I’ve been looking for a new smart phone as discussed on my blog.
The research I’ve done indicated that i-Tunes was due to be released for symbian early next year, in time with the N97 release in the UK.
I like Nokia, their menu systems are intuitive and their phones generally very reliable and well constructed. I would be using the phone for a lot of web connectivity rather than music and I have been very impressed when using iPhones their method of UI.
Lets when and see when the phone is released, I suspect we’ll see a whole plethora of new smart phones in the new year.
Written by Ed Richardson on 12.22.08
To All,
Thank you for the comments. The boundary between a cell phone and a music/gaming/web browsing device is blurring fast. The focus of the post was not the cell phone software but the process of exchanging information between your computer and cell phone which Apple has done seamlessly.
Written by Aditya on 01.02.09