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Nokia admits that they don’t have a “Plan B”, if Windows Phone fails then so shall they

Stefan Constantinescu — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:16:31 +0000

Victor Saeijs (pictured above, center), Senior Vice President at Nokia Europe, told Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri that Nokia doesn’t have a backup plan should their marriage with Microsoft fall to produce any meaningful results. His exact quote: “Plan B is for Plan A is to succeed.” Victor goes on to say that the recently launched Lumia 800 is the second best selling smartphone in Denmark, and the third best selling smartphone in Sweden, but even he admits that “we must succeed in the U.S. if we are to succeed in the world.” Understatement of the century! Now this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of Victor Saeijs. In June of last year he famously said that Nokia would make only 125,000 Windows Phones by the end of the year and that said phones would launch in just six European countries. Now he said that five months before the Lumia 800 hit the market, so at the time, with the knowledge he had, he probably wasn’t lying when he suggested it would take a while to ramp up their Windows Phone shipments.

Looking ahead, there’s only so much we can say about Nokia. The real people in charge now are the folks sitting in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft needs to deliver a compelling user experience and complimentary suite of services if they want their operating system to take off. Windows Phone Mango doesn’t cut it, but from what we’ve heard about Windows Phone 8, codename Apollo, that looks to be the version that starts making people pay attention. One slight problem though, Apollo doesn’t come out until the fourth quarter of 2012. There’s a reason Nokia didn’t provide any guidance when they posted their Q4 2011 financial results, they haven’t got the slightest clue how bad things are going to get.

Anyway, all we know is that if Windows Phone doesn’t take off then Elop is going to be put between a rock and a hard place. What then? Revive Maemo? Call up the Google brothers?

[Via: SlashGear]

Update: One of our readers (@chilko) pointed out that Stephen Elop said the exact same thing in June 2011!

Outrageous: T-Mobile USA will not upgrade the Nokia Astound (rebranded C7) to Symbian Belle

Stefan Constantinescu — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:04:50 +0000

Back in September 2010 Nokia announced a Symbian^3 smartphone called the C7. It can best be thought of as a Nokia N8, but without the fancy high end camera, and in a body that’s much more fashionable. Half a year later (April 2011) it hit American shores courtesy of T-Mobile for just $80 with a two year contract; they rebranded it as the Nokia Astound (see video below). When Nokia started pushing out Symbian Anna, an update to Symbian^3, many people rightly assumed that the Astound would also get the update. It did, but whereas most of Nokia’s devices got Anna in August, owners of the Astound had to wait until November. Better late than never, right? Well now it’s 2012 and ~~Symbian~~ Nokia Belle is the talk of the town. Earlier this week Nokia started pushing the update out to nearly everyone with a smartphone running Symbian Anna, and again, people started asking when would the Nokia Astound get the Belle? We have some bad news. According to Nokia’s Twitter account the Nokia Astound will not be getting Belle.

Thanks for your patience @bittersw8regene. Unfortunately the Nokia Astound on T-Mobile will not be updated to Nokia Belle.

— Nokia US (@NokiaUS) February 8, 2012

It would be easy to slam Nokia right now over this, but we know better. It’s not their fault, it’s T-Mobile’s. When Symbian Anna came out it was nothing more than an over the air update that weighed in at around 10 MB. Belle on the other hand requires that you connect your phone to your PC and download a 250 MB software update. We can imagine the thinking within T-Mobile’s office went something like this: “Do you have any idea how much money it’s going to cost to not only tell people about Belle, but also the support costs in case people screw the update up?”

It’s a shame really, and we hope T-Mobile changes their mind.

[Via: Unleash The Phones]

Concept design shows us what a Nokia Lumia tablet could be

Charles West — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:28:56 +0000

Some enthusiastic Nokia fan out there put together a pretty incredible concept design of what a Lumia tablet would look like. The mock-up incorporates elements from both the Lumia 800 and N8, as the camera isn’t in the middle but in the top left corner which is a unique place to put a camera on a slate. If you think about it, maybe all tablet cameras should be in the left corner, as it wouldn’t just use video playback for portrait mode only.

What you also see in the concept picture is some sort of buttons in the bottom left corner that could be hardware or appear with the Windows 8 swipe. The style and form factor of the Lumia brand would make for a pretty nice looking Windows tab. The specs on this dream tab include the following:

Lumia “coffee” tab
1.4GHz cpu
512Mb ram
16/32/64Gb storage
9.7? AMOLED “clearblack” display (1280×800)
8Mp Rear camera, 2Mp front facing camera
Windows 8 tablet edition
Wifi/3G connectivity

When the Lumia 800 first hit the Internet, a fair amount of people raved about the style and form factor of the Windows Phone powered handset — I wasn’t one of those people. I thought the design was something fresh looking, but I didn’t consider it a game changer. In my opinion, the design is better suited for a tablet, and Tristan’s concept mock-up illustrates that belief.

[via My Nokia Blog]

Microsoft to bring the Nokia Lumia 800 to the US for $900 this Valentine’s Day

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:39:20 +0000

Nokia’s Lumia 800, which was announced in late October of last year, then hit the market a few weeks later in mid November, is finally coming to the United States. It’ll be available from Microsoft’s retail stores starting next Tuesday, otherwise known as Valentine’s Day, for $900. Now that price tag might seem a bit absurd, but you get a lot more than just the phone. You also get a Nokia Play 360 speaker, Purity HD stereo headset (read: Monster Headphones), and an unnamed Bluetooth headset. To give you an idea of how much the accessories cost, Amazon is selling the Lumia 800 for $510 with free shipping. So in other words you’re paying $390 for a speaker, a pair of headphones, and a Bluetooth ear piece. Will Americans snatch this up? We severely doubt that. The unsubsidized model of buying smartphones simply doesn’t work over there. That and most folks are looking forward to the Lumia 900 on AT&T, which is rumored to launch on March 18th for just $99 with a two year contract.

While we’re on the topic of Nokia launching devices in the United States, we have to question why Nokia partnered with AT&T instead of someone like Verizon. We know the Lumia 710 launched on T-Mobile in mid January, and is already available for free in some places, but offering the flagship Lumia 900 on AT&T is just plain suicide. In Q4 2011 AT&T sold 9.4 million smartphones. Know how many of them were iPhones? 7.6 million. In other words, out of every ten smartphones AT&T sold during the busiest shopping season of the year, eight of them were made by Apple. Nokia is essentially competing against AT&T’s entire portfolio for less than 1.8 million units of sales.

Anyway, at the end of the day we’re still recommending that you skip out on Windows Phone completly until the next version of the OS hits the market later this year. There are rumors suggesting Windows Phone 7.5 will not be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8, so why even bother buying today’s Lumias when Microsoft’s next generation platform is just half a year away?

[Via: All About Windows Phone]

Nokia 803 to land in May, said to pack the largest camera sensor the mobile world has ever seen

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:15:59 +0000

Rumor has it that Nokia is going to announce just one more Symbian device before finally kicking the platform to the curb. That device is said to be the long awaited successor to the Nokia N8, which launched in October 2010 with a 12 megapixel camera and Xenon flash. During the 15 months that thing has been on the market, nothing has come close to touching it in terms of image quality. Samsung’s Galaxy S II, Apple’s iPhone 4S, they both have fantastic cameras, but they don’t hold a candle to the N8. Now back in December we saw an image (below) of a device called the Nokia 803 hit the internets thanks to the folks at Pocketnow. They said that it would have a 3.5 inch screen, NFC, HDMI out, and not much else. Today we have a little more information about the 803 courtesy of Boy Genius Report. They corroborate much of what’s already been said, except for one minor detail. The screen is now no longer 3.5 inches in size, instead it’s 4 inches. Supposedly the 803 will also take microSIM cards instead of regular sized SIMs. The most important new piece of information however is an availability date: May 2012.

Assuming that Nokia announces the 803 at Mobile World Congress later this month, that would mean a three month gap between official unveiling to being able to buy it from your local electronics store. That’s not so bad considering the Nokia N8 was announced in April 2010 and then shipped half a year later. We still don’t have any idea about the type of camera the 803 will have, other than the fact that it’ll have “the largest camera sensor” ever seen on a mobile phone.

Image capture aside, the 803 will be running Symbian Belle, so it’ll be easy to use, but not exactly fun compared to the likes of Android or iOS. Still, if you’re the kind of person who values image quality above all else, then the 803 looks to be the device to hold out for this year.

Mobile devices now responsible for 8.5% of all web traffic, Nokia phones dominate

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:20:13 +0000

One could argue that you don’t need a personal computer to function in today’s world. You can do pretty much everything anyone would ever want to do on the internet with just a mobile phone. That was Nokia’s message back in 2007 when they launched the N95 and told people to refer to it as a “multimedia computer” instead of a smartphone. Now back in 2007 that message was a little hard to swallow, even with the release of the iPhone during the summer. Technology being what it is though, things have progressed exponentially over the past five years. One look at the 5.3 inch Samsung Galaxy Note is all you need to see that! The folks at StatCounter have been keeping track of the rise of mobile devices. They’re an analytics company, meaning that websites use their service to keep track of how many people viewing their pages. They say that in January 2009 only 0.7% of the web’s traffic moved through a mobile device (tablets don’t count). In January 2012, just three years later, that number has now reached 8.5%.

Which manufacture is building the devices that are responsible for the most of that traffic? No surprise here, it’s Nokia! Say what you will about their smartphones, it’s their feature phones that put the internet in more people’s hands than any other handset vendor on the planet. More than one out of every three phones that accessed the internet were made by the Finnish handset maker. Close behind Nokia is Apple, with 28.7% of the traffic. Samsung, the third most popular, is just a hair under 15%.

Looking towards the future, that 8.5% figure will likely double by this time next year; low cost smartphones are certainly going to help that. That begs the question, has the personal computer peaked? Last year was the first time more smartphones were sold than PCs, so we’re going to have to say yes.

[Via: Read Write Web, StatCounter]

End of an Era: Nokia to stop making phones in Finland, factories to be moved to China

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:49:51 +0000

Half a decade ago when I first started covering Nokia’s every single move, there were debates in many online forums about whether or not someone’s new Nokia smartphone was better just because it was “Made in Finland” instead of “Made by Nokia”. The former signaled to people that what they were using was not only designed and developed in Finland, but also made in the same country where standards were assumed to be higher. Devices in the latter category were shunned by Nokia enthusiasts for illogical reasons. Today the Finnish handset maker announced that they’ll not only be closing their factory in Salo, Finland, but that they’ll also be shutting down their factories in Komarom, Hungary and Reynosa, Mexico. Why? Niklas Savander, Nokia Executive Vice President of Markets:

“Shifting device assembly to Asia is targeted at improving our time to market. By working more closely with our suppliers, we believe that we will be able to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and ultimately be more competitive. We recognize the planned changes are difficult for our employees and we are committed to supporting our personnel and their local communities during the transition.”

How many people are going to get the axe? About 4,000. Nearly 1,000 of those folks are in Finland alone according to YLE. Now we’re not really surprised by any of this. Everyone makes everything in China, and has been for a long time. Nokia was the only one crazy enough to keep factories outside Asia, but now that’s changed.

Will Nokia’s new “Made in China” smartphones be any different than their “Made in Finland” smartphones? Not really. Just look at Apple, who makes everything in China, yet gets praise for the fantastic build quality of their devices. The real question is will Nokia pass on the cost savings they’ll now get thanks to cheap Asian labor to consumers? Something tells us the answer is no, but hey, we would be delighted to be proven wrong.

Nokia starts rolling out Symbian Belle, Mac users left out in the cold

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:21:37 +0000

Yesterday evening Nokia announced that users of Symbian Anna devices can now update to the newest version of the operating system, ~~Symbian~~ Nokia Belle (see video below). Seeing as how I got my girlfriend a pink Nokia N8 for her birthday last autumn, I told her to rush over to my place with her smartphone and a microUSB cable so we could begin the update process. It’s not that I didn’t trust her to do it herself, I just wanted to see first hand what Nokia Belle looks like on a Nokia N8. And even if she did want to do the update herself, she can’t because she has a MacBook. That’s right, you need a Windows PC to perform this update. Not a big deal since Windows has the dominate share of the computer market, but still, it’s an inconvenience for a quite a few number of people.

Anyway, we sit down in front of my netbook and load up All About Symbian to follow their step by step guide to update to Belle. They say the first thing you should do is download Nokia PC Suite. Ignore that. You can if you want to, the program will ask you to reboot your computer, but when all is said and done and you click update an error pops up saying that an executable is missing. See, Nokia has two desktop software applications. One is Nokia PC Suite, the other is Nokia Suite. Similar names, but two radically different apps. Nokia Suite took a little bit longer to download, it also asked me to reboot the computer, and then when everything was configured properly and we hit update … nothing. The app crashed. Mind you that my netbook is nothing more than a Windows 7 machine with Spotify and Google Chrome installed. No viruses, no bloat, it’s cleaner than fresh snow.

So I reboot the computer, again, click update, and Nokia Suite finally starts working. It downloaded a file that was close to 300 MB in size, backed up my girlfriend’s phone, flashed the software, and then it finally worked.

Total time to get all this done? 94 minutes!

What does she think of the new software update? It’s hard to say since we had to run to a movie and then hang out with a few friends later that evening, but her initial impressions after an hour with the device was: “Why didn’t they make it like this from the beginning?”

And that’s the real question, why didn’t Nokia make Symbian in 2008 or 2009 look and feel as good as it does in 2012? Would they be in the same situation that they’re in now if they picked up the pace?

Update: Those of you who follow the All About Symbian guide will now not have to deal with the same hassle that I went through:

@WhatTheBit @stevelitchfield @rafeblandford Thanks, now, now updated.

— All About Symbian (@AAS) February 8, 2012

Microsoft stores supposedly taking pre-orders for the white Nokia Lumia 900

Kelly Hodgkins — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:06:50 +0000

We don’t have an official launch date for the Nokia Lumia 900, but that hasn’t stopped Microsoft from accepting pre-orders for the Windows Phone handset. According to recent reports from SlashGear and wmpoweruser, it’ll cost you $25 to secure yourself a Lumia 900, which is available in black, cyan and, surprisingly, white. The original press release for the 900 says the handset will be available in cyan and black only. Though Nokia announced the white Lumia 800, there’s been no mention of a white Lumia 900 until now.

Regardless of color, the Lumia 900 is a gem of a phone. It has a 4.3-inch WVGA ClearBlack display, an 8-megapixel Carl Zeiss rear-facing camera with dual LED flash, a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, a 1.4GHz single-core processor, 16GB of internal storage, and support for AT&T’s LTE network.

Though not confirmed by Nokia or AT&T, the handset is rumored to debut in mid-March with a rock bottom price of $99.

[Via SlashGear]

Nokia 801: Are they seriously going to release a Symbian device that looks like the Lumia 800?

Stefan Constantinescu — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:54:40 +0000

It’s bad enough that the Nokia Lumia 800 looks exactly like the Nokia N9, now rumors suggest that Nokia is going to release a Symbian running device called the Nokia 801. Said smartphone is a picture perfect image of the N9 and Lumia 800, except that it has a 4 inch screen that does 640 x 360 pixels, 12 megapixel camera, and will be the first Symbian device that can record 1080p video. Under the hood there’s a 1.4 GHz processor paired up with 512 MB of RAM, though we have no idea if it’s going to be the same 1.4 GHz processor in the Lumia 800 that’s made by Qualcomm or an overclocked version of the 1 GHz processor inside the Nokia 701. Now some might argue that Nokia should use one of their more recent popular designs to sell more smartphones, but we think that Nokia should be put in an insane asylum if they’re seriously considering bringing the 801 to market. Not only would it create confusion among consumers, but it would dilute the flagship status of the Lumia 800. We know HTC and Samsung have no qualms about releasing Windows Phones and Android smartphones that look exactly alike, but this is Nokia we’re talking about. They have plenty of talented hardware designers, so why not make something new and different?

This Nokia 801 leak doesn’t jive with the rumors we’ve been hearing. Yesterday we reported that Nokia would release just one more Symbian smartphone before throwing the platform into the trash. Said smartphone would be the successor to the Nokia N8, the company’s flagship cameraphone. In mid December 2011 an image (above) from a product manual of an unreleased Symbian smartphone called the Nokia 803 hit the internets. It looks absolutely nothing like the Nokia 801. In fact, it looks more like the N8 than anything else, which makes a ton of sense.

Anyway, we’ll find out if the 801 is real or not at MWC later this month.

Update: Mark Guim from The Nokia Blog also covered this story, and he points out that the Nokia Lumia 710 running Windows Phone is basically an exact copy of the Nokia 603 running Symbian Belle. That’s a good point, but still, we’d rather not see Nokia put Symbian on a device that’s already been used to run two other operating systems.

Nokia unveils the white Lumia 800

Kelly Hodgkins — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:14:11 +0000

Nokia used its Conversations blog to unveil the new white Lumia 800. Under the hood, the handset is identical to the cyan, magenta and black version which launched late last year. On the surface, you will get a snowy white casing that nicely accents the curved black display. According to Nokia, this isn’t some cheap spray-on job either. Instead, the phone’s unibody polycarbonate shell is dyed all the way through. Judging from the images release by Nokia, those who prefer blanc to black will be wowed by this handset.

Nokia didn’t announce a launch date for the Windows phone-powered handset, it only confirmed the phone will go on sale later this month. It’ll arrive in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Finland, Poland and Switzerland. A launch in other countries will follow shortly afterwards.

[Via Nokia]