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The most interesting latest news on the topic: Symbian |
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Nokia will offer a diverse range of phones this year, boosting both its feature phone business, while betting big on Windows to propel its high-end smartphones to success. Nokia announced the new budget-friendly Windows Lumia 610 at the Mobile World Congress and played up several upgraded basic phones that run on the older Symbian operating system, including the Asha 202 and 203, the Asha 302 equipped with keyboard, and the mid-range 808 PureView, which boasts a camera with 41-megapixel resolution. Nokia is banking on the Windows Lumia line, already successful in the U.K., to launch the company into the high-end smartphone market. The focus on feature phones running its aging Symbian platform surprised many at the showcase, but shows the company broadening its focus to include various markets. The Finnish phone maker maintains a strong following in emerging markets like India and the Middle East, with 1.5 billion feature phones sold globally. Offering a new Windows feature phone, in addition to upgraded basic options on lower-priced models, will likely help the company keep a stable bottom line. That allows Nokia to please existing customers while rolling out the higher-end Lumia phones in Europe and North America, and eventually China. Nokia, once a major player in the U.S. smartphone market, lost significant ground to the rapid rise of Apple and Android smartphones. Microsoft is also struggling to make a splash with its operating system, which failed to gain ground in other devices. The partnership between the two companies aims to regain Nokia's lost ground and offer Windows the chance to become a major player in smartphone software. The lack of apps in Nokia Windows phones could set the phone maker back in the crowded U.S. smartphone market, however. The Windows platform now offers 65,000 apps in its store, but lags behind giants Apple and Android, which offer hundreds of thousands of apps and games. Consumers repeatedly list apps as a high priority when choosing new devices, and Nokia and Microsoft are working furiously to close the gap by bolstering incentives and relationships with app developers. Still, there is potential for success with a planned marketing blitz for the U.S. Lumia launch on AT&T topping $100 million and a focus on first-time smartphone buyers. Nearly half of U.S. residents own smartphones, and new activations are soaring. A user-friendly phone with Microsoft's software is expected to appeal to new customers to enter the smartphone world. Nokia is wisely diversifying its offerings, catering to existing customers with upgraded feature phones and new customers with the Lumia line, perhaps learning from its past mistakes not to put all its Symbian phones in one basket. |
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Nokia today unveiled its E6 and X7 phones, featuring what may be the last gasp of its Symbian operating system, a stop-gap as the company transitions to the Windows Phone 7 OS.
The Espoo, Finland-based company's E6 phone is geared towards business customers. It features a 2.5-inch touch screen and keyboard, and boasts more than 14 hours of talk time or 75 hours of music playback on its battery. It also comes with access to Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Communicator Mobile and Microsoft SharePoint.
The X7, meanwhile, is designed for entertainment and media, with a large 4.0-inch touch screen, 8.0-gigabytes of storage, virtual keyboard, an 8.0-megapixel HD camera and fully integrated social networking functions. It also comes with the Galaxy on Fire HD and Asphalt 5 HD video games.
"With these new products and more Symbian devices and user enhancements coming in the near future, we are confident we can keep existing Nokia smartphone customers engaged, as well as attract new first-time and competitor smartphone users," said Jo Harlow, head of Nokia's Smart Devices business.
Both handsets are the first to ship with Nokia's latest update to its Symbian mobile operating system, nicknamed "Anna." Anna features better security, hardware-accelerated encryption, improved e-mail support and faster Web browsing, according to Nokia.
But the company will be eschewing Symbian in the future as its strategic partnership with Microsoft, announced earlier this year, goes into effect in an attempt to strengthen the company's weakening position in the smartphone market.
The agreement between the two companies will make Windows Phone 7 the principal operating system on Nokia smartphones, a move intended to regain valuable ground for Nokia in the smartphone market by partnering with a stronger software solution after ignoring the market's shifting focus to apps and functionality. The shift to the Microsoft platform may begin as early as next year.
With Windows Phone on Nokia's horizons, it's unlikely that these new Symbian phones will draw in new customers, especially on phones designed to function as mobile office tools or entertainment centers, which require a wealth of apps to access. But the company may not have much choice, since it still must compete in the market while it waits for its next stage to begin.
Despite the shift, Nokia will still soldier on, and will plans to make the Anna version of its Symbian operating system "standard" on the N8, E7, C7 and C6-01 in the coming months.
The company did not state specifically when the E6 and X7 will launch and how much they will cost.
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Nokia pushed back union talks on job cuts until the end of the April, as it struggles to come to grips with the transition from Symbian to Windows Phone.
The Espoo, Finland-based company has 6,500 staff working in research and development, with 3,000 of them Symbian engineers. It has not announced how many jobs will go.
Job cuts are to be expected from Nokia's strategic partnership with Microsoft, as Windows Phone 7 replaces Symbian as the operating system of choice on Nokia's devices. But while radical action is needed, the move may cost Nokia talent and political standing in its own country as developers find new homes writing code for other platforms.
Samsung has publicly called for ex-Symbian coders to develop apps for its Bada feature phone OS, and Skype and Google have also expressed eagerness to tap that talent well.
Nokia would rather its workforce not help rivals, and it has been outspoken about helping laid-off employees. "We will take part in supporting the setting up of new companies so that people could re-employ themselves, instead of just discussing the size of their redundancy package," said Jorma Ollila, Nokia's chairman.
Developing those plans may be part of the reason for the delay, but there are also political considerations, such as the Finnish General Election on April 17. Nokia has a huge impact on the Finnish economy, and its poor performance and alliance with Microsoft are unpopular with the electorate. Job losses would stoke that anger.
Finally, the Finnish company may be delaying because it is still negotiating the precise terms of its partnership with Microsoft and has yet to ink a deal. The new strategy may be unpopular among Nokia staff and the Finnish electorate, but big shareholders support it.
"We have spoken with 20 to 30 central shareholders and they consider the strategy good and the Windows decision the right one," Ollila said. "They do not like that we are about to start a restructuring period that takes 18 months or two years."
Nokia's shares have dropped 30 percent since it announced the partnership.
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Nokia is planning to launch its Symbian-powered C7 on T-Mobile, in a bid to maintain some presence in the smartphone market while readying its next-generation of Windows handsets.
The Espoo, Finland-based handset maker, which won't ship a significant number of Windows phones until 2012, could debut the C7 -- called the "Astound" for T-Mobile -- as early as April, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Symbian-based handset would cost $80 on contract, and feature a 3.5-inch AMOLED touch screen, a 680-megahertz chip, 8.0-megapixel camera and a VGA webcam. Analysts, who describe the C7 as a consumer version of the flagship N8, said the Astound replaces the Nuron.
This will probably be among the last Symbian phones, though Nokia has promised to support the platform for several years to come.
Following its catastrophic failure to recognize demand for touch screen, app-centric smartphones, Nokia's share of the U.S. smartphone market shrunk to a sliver as Google and Apple dominated the sector. Thanks to stronger adoption overseas, Symbian was still the largest smartphone platform globally until the fourth quarter last year, when it was passed by Android, according to research firm Canalys.
Going forward, it is unlikely that any Symbian phone will have much of a following. Users have been abandoning the platform for the user-friendly app ecosystems offered by Apple and Google -- a shift that is likely to accelerate as the popularity of app-ready handsets increases. Potential buyers will also know that any Symbian device has a limited lifespan and that support for the platform is likely to disappear.
But the release of a Symbian phone may be a concession towards Nokia's current crop of developers, keeping them interested and committed enough to begin to develop apps for Windows Phone 7 smartphones later, according to analysts at Forrester Research. The phone also maintains a presence for Nokia in the market, even if the offering isn't entirely competitive. To disappear from the market, even for a short time, could endanger Nokia's presence with U.S. carriers even more.
Last year AT&T decided to cancel the release of the X7, a gaming-centric version of the N8, which would have been released earlier this year.
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Samsung today said it would welcome disgruntled Symbian programmers with open arms, joining Google, Skype and others, that hope to lure highly-skilled coders abandoned by Nokia to develop their own operating systems.
"If you are a Symbian developer unhappy about Nokia's recent announcements, and are hence looking for a new platform to showcase your talents, we say 'Hello!' and 'welcome to Bada operating system,'" Samsung said in a newsletter. "If you're new to Bada development, or are moving your app from Symbian, we'd like to welcome you."
Those developers, seen as having valuable skill sets, are being sought after from rival companies hoping to entice them after being left in the cold. Nokia abandoned its Symbian platform in favor of a partnership with Microsoft to build Windows-based devices.
After Samsung's statement, Nokia chief financial officer Timo Ihamuotila said the company would continue to support Symbian "as long as it gives us a profitable margin."
Much of Nokia's current lineup still runs on Symbian, so it can't wash its hands of the platform. But the comments show that it hopes developers don't completely abandon its platform, since it needs at least a year to push out new Windows devices. Without any company fully-backing the platform, Symbian looks like it is in store for a quick death.
Nokia's stock value has also fallen 20 percent since the announcement of the Microsoft partnership, highlighting investor skepticism in the radical plan. Ihamuotila's statement was enough to win back a modest two percent in the hours which followed.
The Finnish phone maker is desperate to make headway in a market dominated by Apple and Google. Despite fielding a number of cutting-edge handsets, its efforts have been crippled by Symbian, which failed to keep pace with developments in the smartphone world.
Symbian began as an open-source smartphone platform, with code contributed by Nokia, Sony Ericsson and others, and was bought by Nokia in 2008. It was intended to be developed by a community, organized under the Symbian Foundation, but never fully took off due to licensing issues. A clean cut would remove the dead weight.
The writing is on the wall, and Symbian developers should probably consider jumping ship. Nokia has already sold off part of Qt, its Symbian support platform. And for better or worse, there's effectively one less smartphone OS in the running now. That means more opportunities for everyone else.
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Nokia has sold part of the software that helped create apps for its Symbian and MeeGo operating systems, in a move to focus resources on its new relationship with Microsoft.
The Espoo, Finland-based company recently sold the business part of Qt, pronounced "cute," which deals with commercial software licenses and services. Developers had previously used Qt to create apps for its platforms. Stephen Elop, Nokia's chief executive, said the software would "potentially confuse the developers and confuse the consumers and create an environment where Windows Phone moves slower than the competition."
The move to drop Qt is one of Nokia's first concrete steps to capitalize on its strategic alliance with Microsoft last month. By shedding old tools, it intends to get the Windows Phone platform up-and-running as quickly as possible on its phones. It also has begun talks with its Finnish employees over the company's new software strategy, which will reorganize the ranks as it implements Microsoft's software on Nokia phones.
Nokia's announcement to use Windows to build its next-generation smartphones sent shockwaves through the industry. Until now, Nokia has developed its own phone operating systems, including the long-running Symbian and MeeGo platforms, which the company was developing in partnership with Intel.
Those mobile operating systems, which Qt was intended to support, failed to keep pace with competition from rivals Apple, Research in Motion, and a host of phone makers using Google's Android platform. Nokia was marginalized in the smartphone market, especially in the U.S.
Microsoft also has high hopes for the new partnership. After years of stagnation, it refreshed its smartphone OS with the release of Windows Phone in October, which subsequently failed to make inroads against fierce competition despite generally warm reviews.
The plan is for these two smartphone underdogs to fill in each other's weaknesses: Nokia needs viable software, and Microsoft needs a handset partner than can deliver standout hardware. How this marriage works out will determine both companies' future in the smartphone market for some time to come.
Nokia acquired the Qt platform in 2008 for $153 million from a small Norwegian company called Trolltech. The company that acquired the licensing and services aspect is called Digia, and it will continue to support the existing 3,500 clients.
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Nokia's stumbling performance is slowing the economic growth of Finland, with exports of mobile software and services from the world's largest phone maker down last year.
Service exports fell 7 percent in the country, and even though exports of goods increased 10 percent the overall economy grew a lower-than-expected 3.1 percent. Meanwhile, the Espoo, Finland-based phone maker aims to regain market share under new management. Earlier last month, it announced plans to team up with Microsoft and adopt Windows Phone as its main mobile operating system.
In the process it is abandoning the MeeGo, which it was developing with Intel, as well as phasing out Symbian, its own longstanding operating system. That translates to potentially massive layoffs, many in Finland. Nokia will cut jobs among 6,500 research and development positions and some 3,000 employees work on the beleaguered Symbian OS. The company currently employs 19,840 people.
"This is the biggest structural reform which has ever impacted new technology in Finland," said Mauri Pekkarinen, Finland's economy minister. The government will try to help people find other jobs, while unions are demanding severance packages of 100,000 euros, or around $138,000, per employee.
Nokia is struggling to compete with more robust mobile platforms like Apple's iOS and Google's Android after failing to foresee shifting consumer demand from so-called feature phones to smartphones. Although Nokia has lost market share, particularly in the U.S., and is being squeezed at both the low and high ends of the market, it remains the world's largest phone manufacturer by units sold.
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Nokia is struggling with how to treat laid-off workers, who will see their jobs go due to its new partnership with Microsoft to develop Windows-based smartphones.
The Espoo, Finland-based company is facing the task of trimming jobs in 6,500 research and development positions. Some 3,000 employees work on Symbian, Nokia's operating system, which it said it will no longer invest in. The company currently employs 19,840 people.
Nokia's chief executive Stephen Elop said that it would take several months before it would know how many jobs to cut. In the meantime, company spokesman Henna Pelkola said it would work to find alternative jobs for the affected employees.
"Nokia has promised that it would do the transition as smoothly as possible, and that would be to find new jobs for former Nokia employees," said Heikki Kauppi, chairman of the Finnish Federation of Professional and Managerial Staff. "Nokia is not supposed to know how many people it will lay off before it has concluded collaborative negotiations with employee representatives."
Nokia's future will hinge on how Elop deals with the issue. Its recent alliance with Microsoft has not gone down well. The company saw more than 1,000 employees stage a quiet walkout and protest after the announcement of the deal. In addition, Elop, a former executive at Microsoft, has even been accused of being a "Trojan horse."
Nokia has been struggling to compete with more robust mobile platforms like Apple's iOS and Google's Android after failing to foresee shifting consumer demands from so-called feature phones to high-end smartphone devices. After trying to develop Symbian and MeeGo, amid product delays and sinking market share, the company last week announced that it would team up with Microsoft, another beleaguered giant, to put Windows operating software on its smartphones.
The move to join forces comes as both companies look to regain lost market share in an increasingly-crowded sector. While necessary, the human costs of the partnership will no doubt prove a sticking point, especially in a culture and country that prizes cooperation over cutthroat decisions.
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Nokia is fending off attacks by a group of disgruntled shareholders who want the board of directors replaced, after the company announced plans shutter its Symbian and MeeGo platforms in favor of Microsoft's Windows mobile software.
The group of nine anonymous "young" investors who previously worked at the Finnish company, calling itself "Plan B," posted an online manifesto on Tuesday, demanding, among other things, that chief executive Stephen Elop resign, as well as top managers such as services head Tero Ojanpera, sales chief Niklas Savander and product development lead Mary McDowell.
The group also wants Nokia to make MeeGo its primary operating system, increase Symbian's lifespan to a minimum of five years, and restructure its deal with Microsoft to limit the number of handsets to two devices a year, and only in North America.
The names of the shareholders are unknown, as well as what capacity they worked for the company. It is not known how many shares the group owns.
Nokia, the world's biggest phone maker, announced on Friday that it will team up with Microsoft and adopt Windows Phone as the main mobile operating system.
"Our new strategy has full approval from the board of directors and the Nokia leadership team, and our focus now is on the execution of this new strategy," said Mona Kopponen, a Nokia spokeswoman.
At the same time, Nokia is being attack from union groups, after the company announced that it would cut research and development jobs, largely in its Symbian unit. The union is demanding a severance package of $100,000 euros, or roughly $135,000, for each layoff.
In addition, shortly after Nokia announced the deal, more than 1,000 employees at its Tampere and Oulu offices in Finland decided to leave work early as a sign of protest of the move.
Nokia has been struggling to compete with more robust mobile platforms like Apple's iOS and Google's Android after failing to foresee shifting consumer demands from so-called feature phones to high-end devices. After trying to develop Symbian and MeeGo, amid product delays and sinking market share, the company last week announced that it would team up with Microsoft, another beleaguered giant, to introduce Windows products in the future.
The move, out of necessity rather than choice, comes as both companies look to regain lost market share in an increasingly-crowded sector.
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Nokia and Microsoft today announced a partnership to develop Windows smartphones, in a desperate effort to gain ground on Apple and Google in the fiercely-competitive smartphone market.
By making Windows its primary mobile operating system, the Finnish phone maker's outdated Symbian operating system will be pushed out as a franchise platform, while its once-promising MeeGo software, which was co-developed with Intel, will become open-source.
The alliance is expected to sink Nokia into a two year "transition period," where it warned of dismal short-term results.
"We will combine our strengths to deliver an ecosystem with unrivaled global reach and scale," said Stephen Elop, Nokia's chief executive and a former Microsoft executive. "We are at a critical juncture, where significant change is necessary and inevitable in our journey forward."
Many analysts see the deal as a coup for Microsoft. Under the terms of the agreement, Nokia will also integrate Bing search engine across all its products, giving the software giant added reach and ammo to challenge Google in the mobile search space, as well as share its Nokia Maps technology with Microsoft's mapping services.
In addition, Ovi app store will be combined with Microsoft Marketplace.
Nokia and Microsoft are working together out of necessity. Nokia didn't anticipate the shift in consumer demand to higher-end smartphones, while Microsoft failed to make inroads with its Windows Phone 7 software.
Now, both embattled companies are seeing their market share eroded by Apple and Google, whose iPhone and Android products dominate the lucrative, and fiercely-competitive, sector.
For Nokia, the situation is dire. Earlier this week, in an internal memo, Elop compared its scenario to a man standing on a "burning platform," faced with the choice of jumping into an icy ocean to escape the flames.
"Our platform is burning," he wrote. "And we must decide how we are going to change our behavior."
Microsoft, meanwhile, after a series of misfires and failed software pushes into mobile, is finally getting a vendor to push its Windows Phone 7 software.
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