S60 Open to new features

This is the final post in the MRKTNGman blog. I'm moving to a new position inside Nokia. S60 is going to be part of my job but I will focus to Internet and location based services and have a more holistic approach Nokia portfolio including Series 40 as well.

Before I close down this blog, I want to write couple of words about techy highlights and disappointments. I have been about 4 years in S60 marketing and it has been a good spot to follow the market and smartphone development.

Successes/Highlights:

- S60 browser. I'm very proud of the full web browser S60 has and everybody should know about this great thing!

- WiFi. Spreading to wider range of devices. Works well on Nokia S60 devices. I see space for development in Wifi/VoIP I also recognize extremely interesting disruption opportunities when SIP implementation gets mature and global WiFi roaming is in place in simple way for consumers. People deserve a world without artificial borders even when they use a mobile device.

- GPS, maps and navigation. The first implementations are out and it's already clear that this is going to change the way we use devices. Wait and see A-GPS in real life. No more waiting to get first fix when opening the app.

- Amount of available 3rd party native applications. Open platform has really shown it's value in here.

- Transition to 3rd Edition. We have more robust platform than earlier. Better compatibility, secure platform. I must say transition looked painful in the early days but it seems that things are going quite well now.

- Easier SW development. Open C was good step and soon we see how web run-time attracts new energetic web developers to mobile. 

- Technology around SW enhancing user experience. Memory, Displays, Cameras, Processing, etc. has developed very rapidly and made possible good usability.

- Smartphones are truly pushing into mass market. Cheaper models (by the way, do you know that in Nokia we never say cheaper, it's affordable, so funny) of S60 are coming to market. Once again: CHEAPER S60 phones:-)

Disappointments:

- S60 consumer marketing and feature brand is still not having consistent approach. We have over 100 million S60 users but less than 100 million people know about S60. Simple solution with no extra cost is add S60 to phone UI to visible place. Funny point here is that Real and Quickoffice brands are more visible than S60. It seems that for externals it is sometimes easier to get through ideas and requirement than for us own people.

- VoIP is a disappointment but also a big promise in mobile. Currently technology is just not mature enough for mass market IMHO. Fist use experience still needs work and has to be finetuned to make this a mass market service. Battery life is a real issue and has to be solved. Presence service is essential as well as user search. The first one of these is now coming to SIP.

- General slowness of S60 platform development. This is an open platform, innovation is out there! Utilization has been somewhat slow when I compare to proprietary platform. However I think this issue is going to better direction now.

- Telecommunication focus. S60 is the best ever telecommunication platform. It supports more operator requirements than any other software in the world! The truth is that these requirements can be very different for different customers. Differentiation in telecoms is understood so that it is enough to be just different. Elsewhere differentiation means building of sustainable position by executing differently. Having Vodafone red theme instead of Orange orange theme is not differentiation.

- Lack of prioritization and sometimes vision. Maybe the earlier bullet explains this. Less features, but better designed features, excellent quality and good usability. The longest feature list doesn't make a software the best.

- Trusting and implementing so called open standards, especially I'm referring to OMA. This has strong link to general slowness. Open standards are needed for air interface. In the other areas we have seen them to cause only failures. SMS was not standardized in OMA.

It has been great fun. Thank you all about discussion and comments. It has been so nice to meet bloggers in the S60 events. If you want to contact me in the future just send email to firstname.k.lastname at nokia dot com.

Have a wonderful summer 2007!

-Jouni

The worst thing in a corporate blogging is that you can't tell the most delicious stories and then easily outcome is somewhat boring. Like last week I had meeting with.... <censored>:-) But I don't need to write it, there are people who get it. Read this article.

Telecoms is special kind of industry and succeeding there needs special set of skills. Disruption will definitely come some day and different skills are needed. How to nurture those skills inside the company in the transition phase? It's so interesting to see is any of the current telco players capable of playing it right finally. It's so hard to cannibalize own business and this applies for both vendors and operators. Then we have a newcomer in the industry and lot's of agile start ups and youngster internet companies. Is Apple capable of shaking telcostagnation? Only time will tell. Already now I can say that it has changed mindset in Nokia and iPhone is not even out yet. I hope iPhone is even better than in the advertisements. It just means that consumers will get better products from all the rest. Heja competition!

FON offered a free access point on last November and I joined the group. Now couple of weeks ago FON access point arrived and I became officially a Fonero.

FON works with S60 but when accessing FON connection could go more smoothly. For some reason my phone gives several times a message. "This site has sent an untrusted certificate. Continue anyway?". But yes, FON works with a wi-fi phone. Does anyone know how to get rid of the warning message?

Installing FON AP was easy. But having my access point displayed on FON maps in the right way wasn't that straight forward. I was waiting that my AP appears automatically on map. It never came. Then I found out that for some reason my access point on the map was initially located to South Korea and I had to correct it manually. AP range is not huge but coverage is available outdoors. Welcome Foneros to use it. No limitations for bandwidth:-)

My better half was organizing pictures and videos in her PC. She came to me and asked, what is this file with 3gp extension. "My PC is not showing or playing it". Luckily there was a telco guy in the family who had the answer. File was from mobile phone and it was a video file and Windows XP was not able to show it.

You know that I'm traumatized by MMS. MMS rollout changed my view about telco services. Wireless Village was the final nail to the coffin what comes to my belief in telco services. There were many reason why I didn't like MMS and I have written about those in here earlier. One reason a poor interoperability with internet services and PCs (video format is a good example). I thought that things have changed during the years and maybe over 5 years old service has good support in different domains. Interoperability must be there, we have Microsoft in the game now, they have well over 10% global market share of smartphones and working closely with operators so there must be support some main telco formats also in PC. Out of box Windows Media player was not able to show 3gp file, fine. Maybe there is easy solution and plugin available for download. I spent some 30 minutes searching from web 3gp plugin for Windows Media Player, couldn't find it. My conclusion, Windows Media Player doesn't support 3gp files.

I know there are other solution like PC Suite, QuickTime or numerous conversion software. She doesn't want to install extra applications to her PC, they will slow it down eventually. Old 3gp videos from Angkor Wat remained black boxes in the Windows file explorer. 

I'll shut down my work PC now and start holidays. Back to business on 27th of December.

When I listen people to talk about mobile search and location services, "Where is the nearest restaurant" seems to be most widely used example of location services. I think it shows just poor imagination.

 Yahoo's top search for 2006 was Britney Spears (probably something is censored from the list). Mobile search is certainly different, but still ... search for a restaurant, please something else next time.

Eating is one of the basic needs so there is a possibility that I'm totally wrong so how about making dedicated search window for this particular interest then. Define first type of restaurant, tick in the box: Chinese (Cantonese, Sichuan, Hubei etc), Italian, French etc. Price range. Good search should be able look into menu. Does menu have enough vegetarian, fish, beef dishes or Chile red wines etc. Well defined search like this is more valuable. Naturally the application would remember your personal preferences. The search result could be zero lines or the nearest restaurant you are looking is in Beijing. Integration to flight services needed, maybe not.

I think the most popular mobile location based search will be "Where is the nearest public toilet".

I visited my old home town Beijing last week. Eating well, seeing old friends, trying to express myself with rusty Chinese. On Sunday I was watching TV and from CCTV2 there was a weird program. It was like a idols competition of mobile phones. Jury included a professor from Xinhua university. So this was not about people competing, this was a phone competition. The biggest difference to the real Idols show was that everything was polished, no harsh comments, no negative feedback. I wonder how much phone companies have paid to get in.

Xinhua university professor

 Mobile phone "Idols"

One S60 device was in the competition. It was Nokia N93. I'm not sure what it won but something I guess. Representative of Nokia was collecting a price on a stage.

Later in the evening same program format for used for digital cameras.

So weird. I hope this concept is not going to spread around the globe. At least replacement for Simon is needed. Mobile phone judge Simon should shoot down bad usability and infernal mechanical design for example.

Now we lucky scandinavians (Link to Finnish, Swedish, Danish pages) can order a free FON access point. By joining to FON you promise to keep your FON AP active and to share it for other foneros.
I definitely will join. Has someone tested this with S60 Wifi phones?

Feature Pack discussion in Tommi’s blog kind of surprises me. Feature Packs are not a new concept. We had them already on top of 2nd Edition. It has never been possible to update from one FP to newer one and it’s still not possible. You can be sure that we’ll make big noise in marketing, if updating becomes possible:-)

There is no business reason not to allow updating. See Intel and Microsoft way of doing business with HW and SW. The business model works fine. Most likely new FP would make your device work slow and you would upgrade it soon to new HW. So it’s bad business of Nokia not to have FP updates, not the opposite.

There was also comment about feature packs and internal releases and naming. There haven’t been 10 different internal releases for 2nd Edition as claimed. Only 2 were not publicly released. One didn’t get licensee phone projects and one was related to CDMA. As you may have noticed S60 CDMA phones doesn’t exist although they were in plans couple of years ago.

Looking from product angle UIQ and S60 have been quite similar packages. Both are using Symbian OS and providing user interface and applications on top of that. One big difference has been ownership situation. UIQ has been owned by Symbian. Naturally it has been separate independent unit but steering because of the financial background has been different to S60. Now this situation is changing and UIQ position becomes very similar to S60. We have Nokia as owner they have Sony-Ericsson. In my opinion this sounds very fair.

Rafe has written excellent article about Symbian history. Very recommend reading if you are interested about early days of smartphones from industry perspective.