
A brief glimpse of Nokia's popularity outside the Western world - rkwz
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/01/20/a-brief-glimpse-of-nokias-popularity-outside-the-western-world/
======
nobody_nowhere
Nokia has a pretty unparalleled manufacturing/delivery/logistics chain for low
end phones. They like to claim they can put a phone on a shelf anywhere in
africa for less than competitors' manufacturing costs. That's pretty
impressive, if true. But we're talking about phones that retail for $35. The
smartphones are a joke.

But the software! I sure hope Qt is starting to pay some dividends for them.
When i was dealing with native Symbian/S40/S60 development a few years ago, I
wanted to stick a fork in my eye.

~~~
eli
The big threat there isn't Motorola or Samsung figuring out a way to ship
phones around the world more efficiently -- it's local competitors in emerging
markets. For example, India-based Micromax is gaining serious market share in
the country at Nokia's expense.

~~~
lie
This is not true. Micromax phones are just re-branded chinese/korean knockoff
phones. There was a craze for these phone two years back because of dual-sim
capability. Now everybody realized that the quality is very bad and started
buying nokia/samsung/lg dual-sim phones instead.

------
aes
Nokia is also finally about to catch up on the developer side, which might
prove to be a big advantage. If ease of development is in any way correlated
with application quality, we might see some action in the Nokia world soon.

For the little glimpses that I've seen, UI development using Qt Quick and QML
and is actually pretty nice. Nothing like the Symbian hell, and seemed a good
deal more fun than developing for Android. (Can't say it's on par with iOS
though, at least not yet.)

This is the first time I'm actually _excited_ by a Nokia technology.

Now is a good time to check it out, since the first phones supporting 4.7 are
supposed to come out "soon" (my source at Nokia was reluctant at naming a
specific date). And they just put out a new technology preview:

[http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-
pr...](http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-preview-
released/)

If Qt / QML Quick seems a bit barebones, there's a library called Qt
Components which adds things like checkboxes, progress bars etc.:

<http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components>

------
latch
Isn't there quite a bit of data though to make this very static picture of the
market somewhat irrelevant? I'm not trying to spread FUD. I would seriously
like enlightenment if I'm wrong, but these are the conceptions that I have
with respect to the more fluid nature of the market:

-The trend, throughout the world, is going heavily against Nokia

-Nokia's margins on each unit is a fraction of the competition

-Nokia's relevance is largely in a market (phones) which is being overtaken, faster in some parts of the world than others, by SmartPhones

-Profits for 3rd party developers of Nokia products are smaller than profits for 3rd party developers of the competition.

I'm sure there was a point in history when horses were more popular than cars
in most of the world and we all know how that turned out.

~~~
alxp
Betting against high-selling low-margin products would be like betting against
Wal-Mart. You can co-exist with them but you can't beat them at their own
game, and their game is around to stay.

~~~
notahacker
Betting that learning an app development framework plus Mandarin to sell apps
on $35 phones probably isn't the best strategy for _developers_ is more
reasonable though.

~~~
Tichy
Why not? Long before the iPhone, several people got rich by selling J2ME apps
to low end phones.

~~~
kolinko
Can you name one or two J2ME apps that you ever purchased? I can't and I don't
know anybody who did. It was a disaster trying to publish back then.

~~~
Tichy
I published a J2ME app that was bought 20000 times. I also worked for a J2ME
games company for a while.

Not sure if I ever bought a J2ME app myself. But then I have only bought one
app for iPhone/Android so far: Monkey Island.

------
ernestipark
I was in Rwanda last summer teaching a class on programming/entrepreneurship
centered on mobile devices. The ubiquity and penetration of Nokia phones there
is pretty incredible. Even some of the poorest of people have cell phones.
Essentially, they are the only form of computing device for many of them, so
it IS their smartphone. There are many services and businesses centered around
SMS applications that are very useful. Rather than expensive plans, there are
people lining the streets selling prepaid "airtime". Their 3G network is also
just as fast as any I've had in the US despite not being connected to SEACOM
(although this may be due to lack of traffic on the 3G network, I had a Nexus
One Google provided while I was there). Nokia was one of the sponsors of my
program because they see how valuable the African market is with their
explosion of cell phone growth in the past few years.

------
memr
Nokia sells alot of dumbphones right? Nokia sells more smartphones than
dumbphones. Oh, and they've also been the most successful in transitioning
customers to smartphones (60-70% of nokia dumbphone users become nokia
smartphone users). Reading the US-centric blogs and tech-sites makes it seem
like only the US companies are in the smartphone market (Google with Android,
Apple with iOS, etc)

------
S_A_P
While I understand the need for a metric to see where you should allocate R&D
resources, most of these types of articles(as in not just this one, most of
the iOS or Android as well) seem to be more interested in a branding
popularity contest than providing any sort of useful info. Personally I dont
care if swarms of people love or hate the device I use as long as it serves my
needs. It just seems sorta tabloid-y to me.

------
gyardley
Whenever I read an article like this, I wonder what exactly they'd like me to
do. Build software for customers whose markets I'm not familiar with,
languages I don't speak, and customs and tastes I'm ignorant of? Sounds like a
recipe for failure to me.

~~~
borism
they want you to have a perspective

------
swombat
What is the chart measuring? The article implies that it represents App Store
visits. Do they buy anything, though? That's the metric that's important to
developers.

~~~
mrseb
Heya, author here.

That's the tricky thing. As far as I can tell, the graph shows what percentage
of phone users (or mobile Internet users?) regularly access the stores.

Basically, it suggests that about 9% of app users have iPhones in China (which
still seems very high -- but I guess they're all in affluent areas), 13% have
Android phones, and the rest have Symbian/Nokia phones (65%ish).

Most of the top apps in the China Mobile Mobile Market seem to be Symbian/S60
apps, too: [http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-
CN&...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-
CN&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm.10086.cn%2F%23)

------
gacba
Maybe Nokia has 41% of the market today, but back in 2006 they had 76% of it
(source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian>). They're losing ground like
an avalanche, Symbian is quickly becoming irrelevant in this world.

------
iwwr
Any tales of HN-ers experience with Symbian?

~~~
pavlov
The only way to do productive Symbian development in a non-deprecated
environment is to use Qt. Run away from anything that says "Symbian" but isn't
Qt.

The latest Symbian ships with a version of Qt (4.6.3) that isn't the cutting
edge, but is good enough.

In typical Nokia manner, they've managed to make a dog's dinner of the SDK
options: there's a regular Qt SDK, a Nokia-branded Qt SDK, a Symbian^3 SDK, a
technology preview of Qt 4.7 for Symbian, etcetera ad absurdum.

AFAIK, the "Nokia Qt SDK" is the one you want. (If you make the mistake of
choosing the wrong download and ask about it in the forums, prepare for
condescending replies from Nokia employees who seemingly can't come to grips
with the idea that they should provide a service to developers. I hope the new
management will be able to do something about the innovation-hostile, inbred,
not-invented-here cultural factions at Nokia.)

\- -

Despite the confusing options and cultural issues, the Nokia QT SDK is really
quite nice. There are a few other very good things about the new Symbian^3
platform:

\- It has GPU acceleration as a standard, so you can rely on advanced features
like OpenGL ES 2.0.

\- The platform is more than merely a single high-end device. There's a very
nice mid-range option available already (the C6-01). The total sales of this
platform should turn out quite impressive over its lifetime.

\- Nokia has promised to ship new features as free updates to Symbian^3,
rather than baking them into firmware on new devices only as they used to do.
AFAIK, these updates will include Qt 4.7 and a rewritten browser.

\- -

Unfortunately, Nokia is also shipping devices with the older Symbian versions.
Qt is also the best way to write software for these platforms.

There's a "Qt Smart Installer" that is sort of a package manager. It's
supposed to ensure that 3rd party applications can easily depend on Qt by
simply packaging the Smart Installer with their apps. I don't know how well it
works in practice, but if the alternative is to write to the crusty old
Symbian C++ API, I'd take my chances with Smart Installer any day...

~~~
brudgers
Easier of cross platform development is a good reason to use JavaMe in lieu of
Qt when developing for Symbian because Android does not fully support C++
development.

[edit] eSWT provides access the GPU under Java.

~~~
blub
JavaMe is not that cross-platform from what I've been told. Qt runs on Linux
(including embedded), Mac, Windows, BeOS and Symbian/Maemo.

~~~
brudgers
Only one of those operating systems, Symbian, is used on phones to any extent.
JavaME runs under both Symbian and Android - and that's a lot of Mobile
platforms. So if one is developing a mobile app on Symbian, Qt may not be the
most flexible option once other currently available mobile platforms are
considered.

~~~
asmosoinio
From what I've seen, all Android phones do not have JavaME installed as
default. My Samsung Galaxy I5700 did have it, but another phone my college
tested with didn't have it.

This killed "hey we can just use our current MIDlet for Android users" -idea
for us.

If anyone knows better, please let me know. Working on porting a MIDlet to
Andoid right now. :)

------
barredo
It's not about the current data, it's about the trends.

This is like saying that "90% of people still uses horse-powered vehicles to
make their trips" five years after the invention of the steam engine.

~~~
mrseb
This is basically the default avid-tech-blog-reader response :)

The only real trend is that Android is gaining ground -- which is no surprise,
given that Android phones are the cheapest to make, and will only get cheaper!

Nokia/Symbian phones have just as many 'rich' features as their iOS/Android
cousins. They're just not marketed as well, and they don't have the orgiastic
support of the tech blogs.

------
stcredzero
_While Americans carry dogs around in handbags, Koreans eat them._

This is racist shock-talk aimed at Americans. Yes, this happens in Korea. My
understanding is that some older people believe that by eating a dog, you gain
the creature's vitality. I know that the majority of Koreans who live in the
United States do not do this and their only involvement with the practice is
to find such talk embarrassing. In many european countries, people also eat
horses, which many Americans would find just as shocking. In parts of
Louisiana, a lot of people will happily cook and eat just about any mammal.

Personally, I find this hypocritical, as many Americans happily (likely
unknowingly) feed their family dog the processed meat of other dogs.

[http://www.bukisa.com/articles/294021_is-there-dog-meat-
in-d...](http://www.bukisa.com/articles/294021_is-there-dog-meat-in-dog-food)

------
ashutoshm
nokia is ubiquitous in India.heck the subaltern has a song about it.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpKodZMQr8>

~~~
MrScruff
About 3 years ago in the UK, business people had Blackberrys and everyone else
had Nokia or Sony Ericsson phones. Fast forward to now and business people
have iPhones or Blackberrys while teenagers tend to use Blackberrys (they're
cheap and good at messaging). Others have iPhones or Androids with the
exception of people who haven't upgraded their phone in a while who still have
Nokia or Sony Ericsson devices.

~~~
teamonkey
Nokia has very little presence here in North America for reasons I haven't
been able to fathom.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that most people in the UK will have
have owned a Nokia at some point in the last 10-15 years. The brand really is
that common. It's the cheap first phone you get, or a fast replacement if your
smartphone dies and you still have a contract to uphold, or the phones parents
buy their kids 'for emergencies'.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Nokia owns much of the GSM standard, and thus dislikes making CDMA phones.
This limits their major models to the AT&T network in the USA.

Nokia also dislikes selling phones trough carriers -- they prefer marketing
directly to consumers, not tying their phones to carrier-specific plans.

Together, this means that in the US there is only one carrier where their
major model phones work, and that carrier considers Nokia's strategy to be
openly hostile to them.

So no wonder they don't sell much.

~~~
huertanix
Nokia also doesn't cut deals with carriers to subsidize the cost of their
phones like many Android phone manufacturers do. "$520 for a phone? I can
almost buy a laptop for that!"

~~~
daliusd
My coworker from USA couldn't believe that I have paid 200$ for smartphone.
I'm from Europe.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
You can comfort yourself with the fact that after comparing the contracts, he
probably paid a lot more for his.

------
davidw
Nokia is still pretty popular with the average person here in Italy, I think.
The OVI store is a big ugly hairball though and unless they seriously fix
things up, I've given up on trying to get my applications into it. The signing
process is extremely bureaucratic.

------
maguay
Hey, we still keep a prepaid Nokia around for basic phone calls. If you're
just needing to call someone, they still get the job done, and oddly enough,
the calling experience is often better (better sound) than on a smartphone.

Plus, it has a built in flashlight. Who can argue with that? ;)

------
subbu
The article doesn't consider India where Nokia is the dominant player. But
most of the phones they sell here are low-end to mid-range. They aren't that
popular for smartphones. I don't have any statistics to show for this just my
experiences.

------
jessriedel
Are those percentages of users? How about market share of revenue?

------
leon_
Until I can get a proper asian localization (on a shoestring budget) Nokia can
have 100% market shere over there. It won't be of any use to me :(

~~~
jamii
I believe that Android does a pretty good job if you can find a good 3rd party
soft keyboard. I havent used done much more than kick the tires in hangeul but
Android seems to be pretty popular here in Korea.

