One of my personal weaknesses over the years, if you can call it that, is Nokia phones. Ever since the first days I started carrying a cell phone, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Nokia-made handsets, and this is still true for me up through the present day. This past week's press release of their new N82 model (which looks fantastic) has inspired me to share some of my thoughts on Nokia and their phones.
Back in the late 90's, when cell phones started becoming much more common in people's lives, I remember Nokia as being at the forefront of the industry. The company became known for its colorful interchangeable faceplates, the catchy little Nokia ringtone, and quickly gained the "cool-factor" in pop culture. Some of us may remember the modified 8110 model being featured in the first Matrix movie, or Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu carrying their colorful 8200 series handsets in the first Charlie Angels movie. Others (like myself) desired to have the sleek chrome silver 8800-series phone which, much like the BMW M5 or Nissan Skyline, were always tantalizingly out of the typical college kid's price range.
More importantly, I associated Nokia with simple designs that just plain worked and worked well. Personally, I appreciated the fact that Nokia phones were pretty basic in every way - easy-to-navigate menus, customizable shortcuts, a small but well-organized display, and sturdy hardware that could withstand its share of bumps and bruises. Putting all of the style factor and marketing aside, the bottom line is that Nokia phones always got the job done, and were reliable and pretty cool to boot.
As we've all seen, a lot has changed in the cell phone industry since those days. In the past several years, quite a few trends have emerged in the cell phone industry - and many of these developments have seemed to leave Nokia behind in the process, where it is no longer the dominant presence it used to be. Especially in the U.S., we no longer think of Nokia as the top dog it once was, but as just another phone manufacturer among dozens, but which happens to be one of the bigger ones.
One of the trends I noticed is that flip phones started to become much more popular in the early 2000's. While early versions of flip phones were flimsy and bulky at first, manufacturers steadily improved the hardware to be slimmer and more durable. As the technology improved, many people traded in their traditional "candybar" type phones in for the so-called "clamshell" designs that offered larger screens and more comfortable ergonomics. From the beginning, Motorola was the leader in this trend, scoring most notably a couple years ago with their wildly popular RAZR model.
Meanwhile, Nokia was quite slow to adopt this trend and continued to stick to the old candybar form factor for as long as it could. Eventually, they caved to market pressure and began to produce some flip-phone models, but by this time they were well behind the rest of the industry. And even now, I think the "bread-and-butter" of Nokia continues to rest in its candybar designs (which I personally like, but I'll talk plenty more on my opinions later). The fact is, I still don't see very many Nokia flip-phones on the market today, and the few models they do have are rather unimpressive.
Another area where Nokia arrived late to the party was in the camera-phone "revolution". I don't know what went on in the boardrooms at Nokia, but apparently they did not take the idea of camera phones very seriously at first. Whereas other manufacturers such as Samsung were quick to capitalize on the exploding popularity of camera phones, Nokia was one of the last cell phone makers to offer any of its phones with a camera of decent quality. As many business analysts have pointed out, this was also a significant factor contributing to Nokia's falling market share during the past few years.
Adding on top of these changes has been the emergence of Blackberry/smartphones among the "common" consumer segment. While business users had already been carrying these "all-in-one" phones for several years, we are now seeing a lot more of the general public adopting them as well. One reason is that the text-messaging boom has driven many of the younger crowd to demand phones with QWERTY-type keypads, which were once found only on RIM's aforementioned Blackberry devices. Additionally, the emergence of higher bandwidth networks has made internet browsing on phones more feasible, thus fueling the demand for larger displays and more advanced operating systems than before. And perhaps most importantly, the prices of these smartphones have been dropping enough so that non-business users can now afford them.
There is perhaps no better example of how the cell phone industry has evolved than in Apple's recent release of the iPhone. Unless you live in a cave, you've seen the commercials boasting about the iPhone's wide range of features. A large touchscreen for easy navigation, multimedia player (for both music and video), 2 megapixel camera, integration with YouTube and Google Maps, even built-in accelerometers to automatically adjust the display orientation.
The fact that the iPhone appeals to so many people, and not just technology geeks, says a lot about what consumers are looking for in a phone these days. Gone are the days in which a phone is merely a way to connect Person A to Person B. In the year 2007, your phone must also function as a camera, entertainment device, schedule planner, navigation system, internet browser, and yes, as a status symbol/fashion statement, all in one package.
I'm not saying that any of this is a bad thing, by the way. I guess my point is that as the cell phone industry has changed over the years, Nokia's place in the market (and its image) have changed a lot too, as a result.
In my opinion, it's not that the company has stopped making solid phones over the years, or vastly changed its culture of doing things for the worse. If anything, arguably the opposite is true. From what I can tell, Nokia's dedication to simplicity and its conservative style of doing things is what allowed competitors to step in with new ideas and claim market share. Sticking to the basics is what made their phones so great to begin with, but their refusal to divert their focus from the core aspects has been costly in terms of industry dominance, as I described above.
This is not to say that Nokia has become some sort of ancient relic in the face of competition from Motorola, Apple, or the whoever next big player in the industry to come along may be (Google, perhaps?). While they have historically been reluctant to stay with with the latest trends, I personally see that Nokia has maintained a solid identity at its core. Despite lagging many of its competitors in innovation and creativity in recent years, they still seem to do a good job of putting out a quality product, once they do catch up. To me, the interesting/admirable part of it all is that there seems to be a certain "Nokia way" of doing things where, even as they are following the innovations of other companies, they still are able to make their phones stand out in their own way.
Which brings me back to the topic that inspired this entry in the first place - that is, the recent release of the Nokia N82:
Although I work in the technology field and I like playing with gadgets as much as the next person, I don't typically obsess about getting the latest electronics as much as your typical nerd. For example, I didn't get my first HD TV or my first iPod until a few months ago (and the iPod was a hand-me-down from my sister after she got a Nano and 2 Shuffles).
But every once in a while, I see some new product that comes out and it almost immediately makes me say to myself, "I gotta get that thing!". Well, that's the reflex emotion that hit me when I first read about the N82 a few days ago. This model is actually quite similar to the N95, which was released not too long ago itself, but for a couple reasons I'll describe shortly, the N82 resonated with me a lot more right off the bat.
To quickly run through some of its features (copy pasting a lot of this from the Nokia website):
- 5 megapixel camera with Xenon flash, Carl Zeiss optics
- Built-in GPS integrated with Nokia Maps
- Digital music player, 3.5mm stereo headphone plug
- N-Gage capabilities
- Video capture and playback @ MPEG4 VGA, 30 fps, TV-out with composite cable
- USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth connectivity
- 2.4" QVGA display
- Orientation sensor (accelerometer)
- Candybar design
There's a lot to like there. The built in GPS and navigation software, for example, is something I would definitely get a lot of use out of. I also think the 3.5mm jack is a must if the music player is to be of any use. It has taken mp3-capable phone makers way too long to start incorporating this feature, if you ask me.
The last feature I mentioned may not show up in the marketing brochure, but I happen to really love the fact that they made this phone with the old-school candybar design. In the age of ultra-slim flip phones or fancy two-way sliders, I still prefer the compact style of the candybar. No hinges, minimal moving parts, it's plain and simple and I like it that way.
Out of everything listed above, the camera is what will jump out about this phone the most. 5 megapixel is certainly among the highest I've seen for a phone camera, although realistically, it's well beyond what I would ever use (for example, I usually set my "real" camera to capture at around 2 MP, even though it's capable of 4).
While I'm on the subject, I guess I should preface these thoughts by saying that personally, I've never been all that enamored by the thought of a camera on a phone. The way I see it, unless the quality is comparable to a real camera, it's just a novelty. There isn't a whole lot of practical usefulness to taking pictures that are grainy, blurry, and hard to transfer from your phone memory.
On my current phone (6230i), the camera quality is actually not bad at 1.3 MP. It's also relatively easy to copy the photos from my phone to my laptop (I've actually posted quite a few of them on my blog or Facebook in the past). But without a flash, any pictures taken indoors or at night still are pretty much worthless. So in "light" of that (har har), what I really like seeing on this N82 model is the xenon flash. Very few cell-phone cameras (if any) incorporate a "real" flash, so this is probably as close as you can get.
As far as the "Carl Zeiss optics" goes, I'm not a big photography expert, so it's well beyond what little bit I know about lenses and such. I guess as Jessica Simpson might say, "I don't even know what that is... but I want it!"
In any case, I think what Nokia is trying to say with their design of the N82 is this - if we're going to incorporate a camera with our phone, we want it done right. Though they initially seemed reluctant to follow other companies that were adding cameras to their phones, it seems that once the decision was made to start adding that feature, they fully committed to making sure the camera would actually be useful to whoever bought the phone.
And in the end, I think that really sums up what I like most about the "Nokia way". When they focus on making a product, they do so with the goal of putting out something that goes above and beyond its competitors, but is still simple enough to be practical for the end user.
A disclaimer - I'm not saying that I love everything Nokia - just that I happen to admire a lot of what they do with their cell phones in comparison to other makers. The N-Gage was a horrible idea (and extremely ugly), and I'll never understand why they decided to use the worst possible connector on their headsets. Seriously, the thing absolutely sucks. I also wish they would cater their high-end products more to the North American markets. I had to get my last 2 phones through UK and Australian vendors, and when I did get them, it was kind of a pain to get them to work fully with my T-Mobile service.
With regards to the N82, until I actually get my hands on one of these things and use it myself (and believe me, I fully intend to do that), I won't know for sure if it's as great as it sounds. So far I like pretty much everything I see, except for the keypad. Not a fan of the small buttons, and I was kind of hoping that my next phone would have a QWERTY layout. Also, the secondary camera in the front (for taking low-quality self-portraits) seems very unnecessary, and the enginerd in me wonders if they had to cut out other parts of the design in order to incorporate that feature. That would be unfortunate.
The one other major drawback I've been reading about is that this initial model can't support the higher speed data networks in the U.S. It's not a dealbreaker for me, because I'm not a heavy Internet browser, but I'd hope that they would fix that before bringing it to this side of the Atlantic (assuming that they eventually do). Especially for a device that costs as much as it does, you'd hate to see it limited by the available networks in this market.
Now if you'll all excuse me, I need to go digging for overseas vendors on the Internet, to get myself a Christmas present.
Pictures from:
http://www.nokia.com/press/photos
For more information visit:
http://www.nseries.com/n82
http://www.nokia.com/NOKIA_COM_1/Press/Materials/White_Papers/pdf_files/Nokia_N82_data_sheet.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N82
