Interesting Links for 3-6-2011

[andrewducker]

• Sony hacked again. Storing passwords in plain text. What the fucking fuck?
  (tags: sony EpicFail security)
• Imagine having one number that would tell you how fit you are - and what it means for your heart health.
  (tags: health fitness exercise)
• Therapies to improve biochemical functions hold promise as treatments for autism
  (tags: autism)
• Stephen Elop's Nokia Adventure - nicely in-depth article. Not sure how much of it to believe though.
  (tags: nokia android symbian microsoft mobile_phones)
• Complex multiicelled creatures found living over a mile beneath the surface
  (tags: biology science awesome)
• The 'Oh Shit!' moment that Nokia decided to abandon MeeGo
  (tags: nokia mobile_phones)

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yes, apparently different Sony departments haven't gotten the memo that maybe, just maybe, they might want to encrypt customers data.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> He tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world's biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia's corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google's software.

At least they tried to go with Android.
But I don't get this statement at all. My Sony Android phone came with a ton of crapware I neither wanted nor use, including a custom desktop, an app for 'seeing all my social timeline in one go' that sounds so badly thought-out I've never even opened it, games that require me to give my credit card (ha! not happening) and more.

What stopped Nokia from doing the same?

[andrewducker]

I really don't know.

I don't know if Sony had special permission (in which case HTC must have it, and others as well, so I can't see it being a major problem), or Nokia wanted to diverge even more.

Seems very odd to me.

[andrewducker]

If Nokia wanted to make changes to the base Android OS itself, I can understand that Google would be wary. But with Google already having a PR problem over fragmentation I can understand that they wouldn't be happy with that.

[matgb]

Google are very wary of letting manufacturers remove some of the core Google stuff, like Gmail, Calender, etc. If Nokia wanted to add or supplement that in some way, that could've been a deal breaker.

Nokia would definitely want to not use Google Maps, having used Nokia's mapping suite and Google on both the same phone and an Android, I'll go with Nokia Maps over anything else I've yet seen, currently.

Obviously we'll likely never know what the specific dealbreakers were, but I'm personally glad that they didn't go with Android, really don't want one dominant player in the market that quickly, and that's what it would've been.

Bad experiences with Android aside, I'm pleased it exists as an OS, but having 4 viable smartphone OSs and another in the works is good, I suspect if Nokia had gone with Android both RIM and WebOS would be in their death throes already as all the app devs would go to Android and it would set all non-Apple standards.

[danmilburn.livejournal.com]

I'd say (as a Nokia employee, but I really don't know much that's not public) that in terms of particular services maps were the big sticking point. More generally, it's just as it says - Nokia wanted preferential treatment and Google were unwilling to offer it.

Articles like this leave me somewhat more sympathetic to what Elop is trying to do, but at the same time I think he screwed up massively in the short term. Symbian devices were still selling quite nicely even if market share was declining. There was no need to kill it so suddenly.

[matgb]

Agree on the second point--market share was declining in a massively growing market, total sales were up substantially on the figures I've seen. Going from 50% to 30% share in a market that's expanded by 250% due to new entrants is actually impressive, not a reason to panic.

And the N8, even with a few problems for some in the UI, is a damn impressive bit of kit, but it's effectively dead in terms of new apps &c.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

working with a team from South Africa’s University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, descended into the deep mines about 25 times to collect samples

Troglodytes being found near Bloemfontein is not generally news ;)

The cool parts are these:
It uses the radioactive decay of nearby rocks as the energy source
and
more than half of the biological mass on Earth is below the surface

[innerbrat]

After just two weeks of therapy, one child in each group was reported to have some improvement in energy level.

I did not seek out the original papers, but these studies appears to be heavy on the 'changes biochemistry we believe to be linked to autism, and light on the 'actual evidence this affects the expression of autism'.

[matgb]

That Elop article has made me reasses his approach a lot--that he was specifically worried going to M$ would be tainted due to his previous employment and really balanced all the other options is a good sign.

That the third key part of his strategy is to seen a bunch of engineers off to do blue sky work without having to worry about deadlines and similar, with the aim of coming up with something so good it's an iPhone & Android killer, and that it's hopefully to be Open, is even better.

Sounds actually similar to what Palm did when they signed up for Windows for a bit while developoing WebOS, shame they weren't big enough to survive in the meantime, and hope HP can make a go of it.

IF his long term strategy is to create something completely new and dump Windows at that point, but in the meantime make good quality kit that just works, I'm fine with that.

My N8 that arrived ten days ago? Absolutely awesome, best phone I've ever had, it Just Works--if they'd put some real marketing muscle behind that instead of chasing their own tales, maybe a different world now, but I'm happy to see they're not abandoning the idea of innovation themselves.

[andrewducker]

I do hope that they can come up with something amazing in the future.

But sadly they seemed to be incapable of selling Symbian phones - I suspect largely because they never managed to make it easy to write apps for them, or make the user interface as slick as it should have been.

[matgb]

Except Symbian phone sales were up, year on year, and they had double the market share of iOS. Plus, while Android boomed, that was partially as it was a dirt cheap platform and low end consumers that otherwise wouldn't be buying smartphones were getting it, etc.

I can see that there are issues with Symbian, and the delayed but still due new UI is supposed to fix them, but I personally have few issues with it, it does what I want, where and how I want it, and stuff others find annoying is stuff I want--I've read people complaining that it defaults to asking to connect when roaming, I want that, I don't want my data allowance used up, and you can turn that off easily if you have a big allowance, I don't pay for one as I don't need one.

We shall see I guess, Symbian may return anyway given how good it was at the actual basics of making a phone work properly, it's open source, someoen may run with it.

[andrewducker]

Nokia sold 12.6million phones in Q1 this year, which is a 10% drop from the 14million they sold in Q1 last year:
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUK22816311

Still good - but dropping.

Smartphone wise, things are worse for them:
"Smartphone shipments, that’s multitasking, OS-powered devices, increased 76 per cent year-on-year to 21.2 million units – representing 47 per cent of total mobile shipments.

Android turned out to be the most popular operating system, achieving 36.7 per cent market share. Apple’s iOS is second with 20.8 per cent – not bad when you consider the sheer numbers of Android devices available.

Symbian took a big hit, dropping to 20.5 per cent, and we can’t really see this improving anytime soon."

Personally, I think dropping Symbian was a big mistake. They should have gotten a decent interface onto it, and found a way to make app development easy. Going with MS sounds remarkably foolish when they had a much bigger market share than it did, and the announcement that Symbian will be dropped will stop anyone from developing for it.

[matgb]

Ah, hadn't seen this quarter, was going on previous quarter, however a fall of 2 million in the quarter that Elop announced the death of Symbian abotu half way through perhaps doesn't surprise too much, the way that was announced has killed interest and carriers are moving away from it quickly (Orange always mod their phones, I suspect they're less interested in working out how on new Symbians &c).

Note on the smartphone only chart, which is interesting, Nokia sales fell a tiny bit (half a million), the massive drop in share is due to the increase in the size of the market.

And part of that is almost no effective marketing, people want iPhones due to marketing and brand cache, they're not even being told Nokia exist at the moment.

But I agree re Symbian, I think it's bloody good, and also able to run at a much lower battery usage and still give me good results, my N8 can run three days on a full charge, with me using it for stuff regularly, including playing podcasts through the speaker a fair bit--it has a 7% charge remaining right now, and that'll give me 8 hours according the the fairly accurate meter.

If the only thing they advertised was battery life and a bloody good camera (best on the market, apparently) they could massively boost sales. Add on some of the other things it just does.

But the brand's dead now, they're waiting for a WinPhone to launch, probably next quarter, then Symbian sales will fall of a cliff, no marketing muscle behind it at all.