Well, you can’t sugar-coat this a single — when the vital Nokia / Symbian site like Symbian-Guru decides to close up emporium “interjection to Nokia’s consistently piss-poor hardware choices and Symbian’s lack of capability to even remotely contest in conditions of facilities,” there’s not most else to say. It sounds similar to shutting things down was during once both incredibly easy as well as incredibly tough for site heads Ricky Cadden and Rita El Khoury, who’ve both penned prolonged letters about their decision — you can discuss it both of them remain incredibly ardent about Nokia and Symbian, but that they’ve been unhappy by common handsets like the N97 one time too most. Better goal Nokia can take which MeeGo for handsets pre-alpha you saw yesterday and whip it into something great, you suppose. You should really hit a source link as well as review a complete post on Symbian-Guru, though we’ve picked up some preference quotes after the mangle.

Ricky:”I’ve tried to make use of all of Nokia’s assorted products and services to the best of my capability, as well as I only can’t do it anymore.”"I can’t continue to support a manufacturer who puts out such craptastic ‘flagships’ as a N97, as well as who expects me to make use of services which even many of Nokia’s own employees don’t make use of.”"After this experience with a Nokia N97, there’s simply no way I trust them to not screw up with a N8 – not sufficient for me to flare over $500 of my own income, during slightest.”"Like Android, Symbian Foundation prides itself upon being open and free – loudly as well as oftentimes obnoxiously braggadocio about how the source code is giveaway for all – notwithstanding no one really caring about this, during slightest in my round.”"Both Symbian as well as Nokia have been dying brands in a U.S., if not already passed, as well as I’m ill and sleepy of banging the drum alone.”"Of march I’ll still keep my eye on Nokia. If they can put out 2 flagship devices in the quarrel which don’t utterly suck, I may even give them an additional chance. I won’t reason my breath.”"To Nokia, you guys are losing. Hard. Wake the hell up. Doing the same thing repeatedly whilst expecting different results is a clarification of stupidity.”"I unequivocally goal that a upper coronet during Nokia starts listening to the folks who are putting in additional time as well as bid – these folks know what’s going upon, and similar to I did creatively, simply want to see Nokia attain.”Rita:
“I swear I could get the VISA, buy an transport sheet, transport to Texas and talk to Ricky in chairman prior to Nokia Messaging for IM loads as well as opens a conversation with him upon my N97 Mini.”"But honestly, how can you censure outward developers when Nokia themselves can’t seem to lift through the decent application?”"What good does it do me, as the user, if you have 40 or 50 or 60 % marketshare when you fail to benefit any developer traction?”"Where are the games that have me cocktail my eyes in astonishment? The N8 will get Angry Birds. Big whoop. It took me all of 2 days to finish all levels of Angry Birds on my iPod Touch and you know what? When I was done, I moved upon to a subsequent diversion. Could I say a same about a N8?”"I can’t evangelize a platform when I’m no longer 100% assured myself: that would be hypocrisy as well as I’m not the deceiver.”" It had to be done as well as although it was tough during first, I’ve now come to terms with a preference.”

Well, hey, Nokia only officially launched the X5 in Singapore, apparently as the followup to the Twist as well as the ultimate corpulent square slider to hit in a past couple of months after the the Motorola Flipout as well as Kin One. No, we’re not sure because this form cause is unexpected the Thing either. This guy is actually Nokia’s second X5 –a China-only X5 with the totally dissimilar design was announced in April, so that’s good as well as confusing. We don’t have an official spec piece on this new X5 yet, though we’re told it runs Symbian S60, as well as has the 5 megapixel camera, Facebook, MySpace as well as YouTube integration, as good as a little arrange of shake-based presentation feature you don’t unequivocally understand. It comes in black, prohibited pink, splendid blue, as well as, um, homely yellow, as well as it’s pretty thick, if a hands-on photos have been to be believed. That’s all you know for right away — hit the source links for a bunch more photos, and we’ll let you know if we listen to anything else.

[Thanks, Gabriel]

When we reviewed Nokia’s Ovi Maps and pitted it opposite a foe from Google you found it was by far a quickest to calculate routes as well as get you upon your approach… or behind upon your way if you meandered off. But, communication with the app itself was the bit indolent, something that’s pronounced to be bound in chronicle 3.0.4, additionally dubbed SR4. This version offers a little serious performance improvements for drumming around a interface and also mixes in POI reviews from Qype. Qype is a arrange of European chronicle of Yelp with the likewise stupid name, as well as while which doesn’t assistance you Americans most, you regularly did feel similar to something of an afterthought to Nokia anyhow. The new chronicle of Ovi Maps is out now, so get it whilst a gettin’s great.

We’re not sure exactly what this means for the rest of the world’s nine Nokia flagship stores, but it’s been announced tha t Nokia will be pulling out of its prominent Regent Street location in London as it apparently prepares for a retail revamp going into early 2010. Weak foot traffic is cited as the main reason for the closure, and if Nokia can’t generate sales in the heart of one of its strongholds — Western Europe — we can’t imagine that this bodes well for the other flags hips either, all of which were designed and built around a high-tech, pricey theme (the Regent Street store alone was rumored to run Nokia a co ol 4 million, about $6.5 million, to open) that likely drags on the company’s bottom line quarter after quarter. Then again, we’d assumed th at these stores were built to foster mindshare, not necessarily to contribute eur o day in and day out — but this is prob ably why we’re not executives at a major phone manufacturer. Other Nokia stores in the UK will remain open, but for Espoo, the days of the over-the-top retail marvel of design and architecture may be over.

[Image via All About Symbian]

You might think MikroMikko is the name of some Asian fu sion restaurant, but it was actually Nokia’s first computer lin e — and in 1987, the Mikro Mikko 3 was a state-of-the-art MS-DOS machine with 1MB of RAM and 20MB drive. It’s been about 25 years since Nokia’s m ade a computer bigger than an N900, but it’s back in the game with its first netbook, the Booklet 3G. Nokia’s pitching the Booklet as a top-of-the-line machine with an all-aluminum chassis, integrated connectivity and GPS apps, and at $599 it’s certainly priced that way — although insid e it’s got a low-power Atom processor and 4,200rpm hard drive. The Booklet 3G is one of the best-looking netbooks out there, but is N okia’s entry bac k into the market a winner? Click on to find out what we think of the entire system in our full review.Nokia Booklet 3G Review

Design and ergonomics

First things first: when it c omes to looks and build quality, the Booklet’s the belle of the ball. The chassis is carved from a single piece of aircraft-grade aluminum, much like the unibody MacBook. The entire machine feels solid and very thick, in a good way — and we’re really into the angled edges, although we can’t quite explain why. On top of the aluminum lid is a high-gloss plastic cover (available in white, bla ck, and blue) which unfortunately gets cove red in fingerprints. You’ll thank Nokia for the included soft cloth.

Although the Booklet’s aluminum body makes it feel stro nger than other netbooks, it also makes it slightly heavier: at 2.8 pounds it’s heftier than the Eee PC 1008HA, but it’s still comfortable to hold and carry in one hand. Nokia’s also managed to fit the 16 cell battery (yes, 16-cells) flush to the bottom of the case, so the whole machine is just .78-inches thick, thin enough to nicely fit into a bag or purse. Around the sides of the machine you’ll find three USB ports, an HDMI port, a headphone jack, and SD and SIM card slots — but there’s no VGA or Ethernet ports. We were frustrated by the latter when we traveled to a location that had a weak 3G connection and no WiFi network, although you can obviously buy a USB Et hernet adapter.

The first thing you notice when you open up the Booklet is the attractive 10.1-inch edge-to-edge glass display. While we could have done with a smaller bezel, the 1280 x 720 screen is h igh quality and much roomier than the usual 1024 x 600 netbook resolution. The LED-backlit display was actually easier on the eyes tha n we’d anticipated, and 720p video clips looked vivid and crisp.

Below the screen you’ll find a familiar, chiclet-style keyboard, which honestly could be better. The keys themselves have a slightly rubbery, yet comfortable feel to them, but they’re smaller than those on the HP Mini 5101, ASUS Eee PC 1 008HA or the T oshiba Mini NB205. We can’t help but wonder why Nokia didn’t try and extend the keys to the edge of the keyboard deck. On the other hand, the trackpad was done just right. The pad itself is large enough to navigate the desktop and the dedicated right and left mouse buttons are responsive, though they’re little louder t han you’d expect. The pad doesn’t support any fancy multitouch gestures, but we’re just fine with that — we’d rather have a good single-touch trackpad than a poorly-implemented multitouch unit (cough, HP!).

Performance, battery l ife, and connectivity
Nokia chose to use the lower-power Intel Atom Z530 instead of the usual N270 or N280 in the Booklet, and though it increases battery life, it’s definitely more sluggish in performance. The Booklet could ha ndle running Firefox and Word simultaneously, but adding an app li ke TweetDeck to the mix caused things to drag. Worse, we often got a “not responding” message when we tried to do “too much,” like streaming a movie on Hulu while running Tweetdeck, AT&T’s connection manager and Microsoft Word. And the numbers back us up; on Geekbench the Booklet scor ed 825 points, which was j ust under 100 points behind the HP Mini 5101’s 920.

But the Booklet’s s luggishness can’t be b lamed solely on the processor: it also has 4,200rpm, 120GB hard drive that’s slower and smaller than the 5,200rpm units in most other netbooks. Again, the numbers have our back – it took the Booklet over a minute to boot Windows 7 Starter Edition (and the preloaded F-Secure security suite didn’t help). Oh yes, the Booklet runs Windows 7 Starter edition, so forget about changing the desktop background or extending your desktop to another monitor.

We were happy to lea ve the Booklet’s charger at home: its battery consistently ran for eight hours when we used the system at 75 percent brightness to browse the web and edit documents. That is longer than most netbooks with six-cell batteries which annoyingly p rotrude from the notebook, though the $399 Toshiba Mini NB205 runs for over 8 hours.

The Booklet also has an integrated SIM slot that lets you connect to AT&T’s 3G network — at $60 a month for 5GB of data. Around New York City download speeds averaged between 1.0Mbps and 1.5Mbps, while upload speeds ranged between .08Mbps and .30Mbps. On a train ride to the suburbs the experience was pretty smooth: the Booklet only dropped the connection once, but we blame tha t more on AT&T.

There’s also assisted GPS in the form of an Ovi Maps widget for the desktop. It struggled to find our location while in an office building, but when standing next to a window it found our apartmen t location and plotted it quite accurately. Nokia also bundles its Ovi Suite for syncing a Nokia phone and its So cial Hub software, which is useful for centralizing your social networks (Twitter, Facebook) to one desktop application. It also lets you easily send text messages from your SIM.

Wrap-up

There’s a lot to like about the Booklet: we were really excited about its beautiful design, high-resolution screen and embedded 3G connectivity — until we started waiting around for it to load Windows 7 Starter, wondering if it was really wo rth $599 unsubsidized or $299 on a 2-year AT&T contract. We just can’t for give the slower processor and hard drive when there are significantly cheaper options out there t hat offer better performance — and don’t look so bad either. Straight up, the $399 Toshiba Mini NB205 is $200 less and performs better with a similarly lo ng battery life, while Verizon offers the HP Mi ni 311 w ith a faster processor, NVIDIA Ion and hard drive for $199 on contract.

If you ask us, it all comes back to the MikroMikko and Nokia’s recent inexperience in the laptop m arket. Sure, it’s one of the world’s leading mobile phone manufacturers (though Michael Gartenberg argues it needs to change drastically to survive as innovators), but when it comes to laptops and netbooks it’s important to know the basics and get performance right before attaching a premium price to a product. The Booklet 3G is a great-looking netbook with stellar endurance, but its price and performance simply don’t match up.

It’s been a long, long journey, but Nokia’s E72 — the hotly-anticipated successor to the wildly popular E71 — is finally available as an unlocked phone directly from Nokia USA following a November release elsewhere. The privilege of upgra ding to what could very well be the finest S60 3.2 handset ever made won’t be cheap, though: they’re charging $469 before tax and shipping, but in exchange, you’re getting a 5 megapixel cam, optical d-pad (“Na vi Key” in Nokia parlance), and full-on HSPA with up to 10.2Mbps down and 2Mbps up. Of course, you won’t get anything close to those speeds in the States — but hey, you can’t drive a Lambo 180 miles per hour on a public street, either.

[Thanks, Pan kil]

You know that new Symbian user experience promised by Nokia next year? Want a sneak peak? Althoug h Nokia’s downloadable slide-deck from its Capital Ma rket Day event leaves out all the new UI visuals, fortunately the webcast has ‘em all. And if we’re not mistaken t hen that’s a wall-to-wall capacitive multitouch slate up there from Nokia’s conceptual studios. As Nokia tells it, the Symbian OS is not the problem, the UI is — and we agree. In 20 10 new hardware and tweaked software will reduce Symbian’s clutter, add multitouch input on “large capacitive displays,” minimize steps to requ est functions (2-taps to get to favorite music or video instead of 8, create an email account in 2 steps, not 4), significantly improve the browser experience, and make the entire UI 3 times faster than current high-end Symbian products while t aking scrolling to 60fps (up fr om 15fps used today). Notably, Nokia will remove more than 350 user prompts that make using Symbian so frustrating today. The user experience promises to be so good that Nokia CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, calls it “magical.” Us? Sweet, but it’s only slideware for now. Watch the rousing video after the break.

Update: We added a link to the 51MB PDF containing all the presentations. Bonus points for spotting our quote about the N900. [Thanks, Pasi] Nokia offers sneak peak at improved 2010 Symbian user interface

The miniaturized version of Nokia’s N97 began shipping to eager con sumers in Europe in late October, but for those unable to save their pennies in America while waiting for the N900, today’s the day to unload. As of right now, the (obviously unlocked) N97 Mini is shipping from both Dell and Amazon here in the States, with the f ormer offering it for $430 (after coupon) and the latter selling it for $479.99. Any takers? Or has the full-sized N97 already claimed that piece of your heart?

It’s Nokia Capital Market Day again which means that the boys from Espoo are fawning over investors and giving them a reason to stick around in 2010. And you know what? It su re sounds promising for gadget nerds. Why the optimism? Easy: Nokia is hell-bent on redefining the user experience of its Symbian devices. To quote CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, “In 2010, we will drive us er experience improvements, and the progress we make will take the Symbian user interface to a new level.” To bolster th is proclamation, the very first bullet point listed under Nokia’s Devices and Services operational priorities is “improve our user experience” — some thing that would thril l us to no end if it happens.

The revamped Symbian UI is set to deliver on two “major product milestones” in the first and second halves of the ye ar. Nokia will also deliver its first Maemo 6 “mobile computer” in the second hal f of 2010 flanked by a significantly increased proportion of “touch and/or QWERTY devices” in its smartphone portfolio. It’s worth noting that all the discussion is around Symbian, just a single mention of Maemo and its “iconic user experi ence” in the forward lookin g press release. Developers w ill be happy to hear that Nokia will also continue to scale service s geographically while continuing to enhance its developer tools like QT4.6 announced yesterday. Financially speaking, Nokia expects to see the erosion of its average selling price slowed compared to recent years. That’s good as Nokia attempts to grow its margins. However, while Nokia expects mobile device volumes to be up approximately 10% in 2010 across the industry, it sees its own mobile device volume market share as flat in 2010, compared to 2009.

Be clear on this though: our incredibly frustrating S60 5th user experience was by far the biggest complaint we had when reviewing Nokia’s flagship N97 — having the most bullet points on a list of features is not what it takes to lure consumers anymore (if ever). If Nokia can better the best in class experiences carved out by Apple, Palm, and HTC with its Sense UI then consumer mindshare, and our hearts, will follow.

[Original image via Vladstudio]

It’s the largest cell phone maker in the world, with the lar gest share of any smartphone vendor in the world. Yet I increasingly look at Nokia’s products and listen to its strategy wondering if the company can remain relevant in a mobile world that’s changed drastically over the last two years. I’m not talking about a Nokia deathwatch, or whether the company will remain in business — that’s fool ish. Of course Nokia is going to stick around; it’s what it’s going to look like that concerns me. A future of selling low-end phones into e merging markets with some minor services might be profitable, but it’s not a direction that leads to industry relevance or influence.

First, I’m confused by Nokia ’s p latform strategy. There’s been a lot of chatter about Maemo being the future, and while it might be a strategic direction, it’s nowhere near ready for primetime now. Chris Ziegler s uggested to me the other day that “Maemo 6 (or 7) in an X6 form factor with a more cohesive Ovi strategy could be killer.” Pe rhaps, but right now Maemo feels very i mmature and unfinished. In fact, it feels like what it is: an OS design ed for Nokia’s Internet Tablet MIDs. On a phone like the N900 it’s just too k ludgey for the mainstream market. That leaves Symbian-based S60, which was totally innovative in 2002 but now looks creaky and has fragmented into multiple versions, leaving a very confused developer market. Sure, Nokia supports Flash and Silverlight with Qt somehow tying all this diversity into some unified grand t heory, but it’s enough complexity to make most developers look elsewhere — and that’s exactly what’s happened. Without a clear platform strategy, it’s going to be difficult for N okia to get the developer mindshare require d to stay relevant to the mass market.

Second, Nokia’s services strategy is as muddled as the fruit in Don Draper’s Old Fashioned. Ovi sounded good when it was announced but it’s now gone through so many iterations, with different services added, dr opped, and changed that it’s hard to know what’s in and what’s out. Comes With Music has been reported as having as few as 107,000 users worldwide, and Nokia’s put off bringing it to the US this year, leading me to wonder what kind of future it has as a service. The N-Gage project not only resulted in two failed phone designs but the service itself is on its deathbed.

Third, Nokia’s most recent hardware designs are baffling. Noki a’s had some great phones. The 8860 defined fashion and technology in its t ime, the Matrix-inspired Nokia 7710 was the first phone with a WAP browser, and the N95 was a marvel of technology. Recent designs, however, have been a strange mix of checklist features that simply add up to a poor user experience. Last year’s N97 flagship was an exercise in how not to create a touchscreen phone, complete with an odd three row keyboard

Nokia failed to lead a changed market and has been forced into reacting to competitors instead of driving its own vision of the future. 

featuring a space bar mysteriously m oved ri ght of center. The N900 feels more like a science experiment to me than a product that’s designed for mainstream users — although, to be fair, Nokia does position it as an enthusiast device. I used to feel Nokia’s hardware designs defined cool, but these days they just remind me of an aging movie s tarlet trying to re-capture some former beauty.

Finally, Nokia’s greatly in decline in the US / North American market and in dire need of a successful product strategy and launch. With no US carriers supporting its flagship and most profitable d evices, Nokia’s share in the US is in huge decline, and only the most devout users are willing to pay ov er $500 for unlocked devices to use on T-Mobile or AT&T. There’s more to the world than the US and North America, but if you’re going to remain cutting-edge and re levant it’s not a market that can be ignored.

Tossing around ideas about this column on gdgt last week, my good friend Peter Rojas said, “Nokia has a cl assic innovator’s dilemma: they’re so big and (at least to-date) have been so dominant that it’s been hard for them to create innovative new products which might cannibalize their existing product lines.” I think it’s more than that. Nokia failed to lead a changed market and has been forced into reacting to competitors instead of driving its own vision of the future. As smartphones left the realm of the enthusiast and became mass-market in terms of adop tion and feature use, Nokia fell behind.

Now, I don’t think that’s fatal or long term, and I don’t believe Nokia is going out of business. But I do question the company’s positio n in the market and ability to lead without a major change in direction and strategy — especially in the US and North America. Truth be told, Nokia now reminds me a lot of Apple back in 1996, losing relevance and market share in places that matter but with hug e potential to leverage core assets and a terrific br and with millions of loyal fans. And as Apple did in its day, Nokia must now either try to decisively seize back its leadership position — or lose it entirely.

Michael Gartenberg is vice president of strategy and analysis at Interpret, LLC. His webl og can be found at gartenblog.net. Contact him at gartenberg AT gmail DOT com. Views expressed here are his own.