As the industry leader (is that even true anymore?), Nokia seems to have missed the boat with their flagship handset being released in Q4 of 2008. The N96 is not a bad phone, there’s no question that it packs in a hell of a lot of features, and you gotta love that dual slide action, but in the world with the IPhone 3G dominating the market, is it really that impressive? Granted, it comes with 16 GB of built in memory, and an additional expansion slot, which is not so common. Besides that, it offers the pretty much standard (a slight exaggeration) 5 megapixel camera, the same old assisted GPS, and HSDPA. I am pretty sure if the N96 would have been released during the pre-IPhone 3G era, it might have been a big hit, but with phones like the HTC Diamond Pro, and the Sony Ericsson XPERIA, I personally am not very excited about the N96 release. Besides, Nokia has got to learn how to slim down their phones a little. It is true that Nokia was ONCE so good that looks really did not matter, but with Apple around and Sony and HTC designing phones, Nokia has to get with the times. Having said that, you can be sure that Nokia will sell more than a few N96s.
-Hillel
Thanks Hillel for contributing. Great post.
Ok, first of all, stop basing facts on hype!!!!
Fact: Nokia N96 was out well before the iPhone 3G. We saw it in Barcelona in February. It wasn’t for sale, but they at least previewed it to the world. They showed how they were able to pack in TONS of features into a phone, whereas the iPhone still lacks plenty of basic features. And they did it in the “pre-iPhone 3G world”.
Fact: The only market where iPhone is beating Nokia would be the smartphone market in the US. That’s it. 1 niche in 1 market. Symbian shipped over 80 million devices last year. iPhone 3G sold, what, 3 million? (Yes, I know in much shorter amount of time, but still…)
Ok, iPhone is very pretty and got a lot of hype. And I use a Mac and an iPod. But I still don’t understand what apple did with the iPhone that was so ground breaking? There was internet, videos, music, etc on phones long before iPhone came out. Yes, they package it nicer. Where I would agree with you is that Nokia needs to do a much better job with design (even though my E71 is damn sexy), and with desktop connectivity. But please- the iPhone has a long way to go to be a serious competitor to Nokia. Nokia puts out phone like the N96 to be able to say they were one of the first to put a TV tuner in a phone. But they don’t bank on the $800+ models to really have mass market appeal. It’s davka to show that they can still kick ass in the phone market.
OK, I agree with you about the first IPhone, but IPhone 3G is not hype. The way I see it, the first IPhone really could not compete with the N96 with its EDGE and other problems. The IPhone 3G on the other hand, can be improved very slightly in order to become the perfect phone. In my opinion, add stereo bluetooth, MMS capability, a few more gigs, maybe some copy and paste functionality, and you got yourself a pretty awesome phone. I know you think it is hype but there is no denying that Apple did an unbelievable job with the user interface, you really think you can compare it to Symbian?