We do need competition

Apple is in the news:

  • Apple, Samsung overtake Nokia in smartphone market
  • Apple Has More Money On Hand Than The US Government

Nokia also:

  • Nokia reports loss of €368m
Competition
Competition

While Nokia is still the leader in phone market, it has lost the top place in the smartphone market.

In any market, competition is good and monopoly is bad for customers. With the failure of Nokia to be that competition, it may goad Apple into being even more dollar hungry. Nokia always builds phone that integrate well with other non-Nokia technology: be it tethering, a much better file system (though this point is debatable), or support for memory cards. Apple builds devices that integrate badly with non-Apple hardware. Three versions of iPad, each with a different diskspace capacity could have been avoided simply by adding support for cards. Similarly iPad only offers a crippled version of Bluetooth.

I am not against Apple: at this time it definitely has the better product on its shelves. However, we should not write off Nokia either: with our support it can regain the slot that it had, and deserves.

Nokia – continue to build open devices please. In my opinion the following are the most important of the steps Nokia should take:

  1. Stop creating new, incompatible flavours of Symbian. Select one OS for all $200+ devices, and stick to that. Focussing on one platform will help improve it
  2. Support Unicode. iOS has done that for ages
  3. Improve the dialer: the phone is used most for making phone calls. Nokia dialer is from the stone age (Nokia recently pushed an update that improved this big time)
  4. Make the phone snappy even if it means having a faster processor
  5. Let users select which browser they want as default. Let them set Opera as default. This will be the winning stroke over iPhone, which allows only Safari as default
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