Despite Nokia’s ongoing negotiations with Microsoft regarding the creation of Nokia Windows Phone 7 handsets, Nokia still appears keen on continuing their Symbian line of smartphones.
Nokia, once the top-dog in the handset industry, has been having a tough time of it since the release of the iPhone back in 2007. Despite new contenders like Android and WP7 already achieving vast to moderate success in the smartphone market, Nokia has continued to disappoint at almost every turn with its devices always lagging at least one generation behind the competition. This is not because Nokia makes sub-par handsets; far from it. On the contrary, Nokia’s hardware is probably their strongest point.
The culprit is almost undoubtedly their software, namely the Symbian operating system (Symbian OS). Despite recent updates Symbian’s home screens remain clunky and cluttered. Its user interface (UI) still looks like something from 2007 and feels unresponsive in many instances. Basically Symbian is slow, unintuitive and nothing to look at.
We’re still curious to see what Nokia can offer us by way of an OS overhaul, but we feel like we’ve been down that road before with the Symbian^3 update. Symbian^3 addressed many of the issues that plagued its predecessor, but could still, at best, be described as a catch-up manoeuvre, rather than an exciting and new update.
If Nokia manages to pull some form of OS rabbit out of a hat on April 12th we’ll be the first to applaud, but the smart money’s on seeing just some minor tweaks and perhaps the introduction of a few ‘new’ and ‘game-changing’ pieces of software (probably cloud-based) that we’ve already seen on other OSs like iOS, Android, Palm, WP7 and maybe even BlackBerry.
Once again Nokia still makes great hardware, they’ve just been lacking in the software department for years.
We firmly believe that Nokia’s glorious resurgence will (if at all) come not from dumping money in to what should by now be a dead OS, but instead focusing on their WP7 negotiations and possibly considering moving in to the Android market as well.
What do you think?
Source: Engadget
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