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Image credit: All About Symbian
It was February 11, 2011. The day when Nokia’s Capital Markets Day keynote was to take place, during which Nokia was expected to unveil its device strategy for the year ahead. Rumours were rife, there was an air of excitement, and all eyes were on Nokia on that day, especially since the company hadn’t fared too well in the high-end smartphone space across a few quarters and counting. A few days before, an now-infamous internal company memo had been leaked. Stephen Elop, Nokia’s newly-appointed CEO, took to the stage and by the end of the hour, he had single-handedly stunned the entire community of tech writers, developers, Symbian and MeeGo enthusiasts, Nokia fans and everyone with even the faintest amount of interest in Nokia. There was an overwhelming sense of dread. The anger was clear for all to see. People were shocked and unsure of what to make of the news. The #feb11 tweets flooded in, filled with dismay at what Nokia and Elop had just done. Nokia shelving Symbian, crushing MeeGo and placing their fate in the hands of Microsoft and Windows Phone was nothing but unthinkable then – virtually no one saw it coming. Nokia, the biggest mobile phone maker in the world, capitulating to Microsoft, the underdogs in mobile. To long-time Symbian geeks, Elop’s move was tantamount to betrayal. They had stuck with Nokia through S60v5 and the N97, waited and waited for Symbian^3 while watching the Symbian Foundation collapse in the process, sat through the ‘transition period’ that was 2009 and 2010, only to be told that Nokia was effectively giving up on both of their smartphone platforms. When the N8 was launched 4 months earlier, statements were made by Nokia executives that Symbian would be here to stay and that the company was fully committed to it. But the moment Elop shook hands with Steve Ballmer from Microsoft, all that talk ceased to have any meaning whatsoever.
The outrage lasted for weeks, and arguably still continues today. Although there were exceptions like Rita El-Khoury, no one outside of the US seemed to have anything positive to say about Nokia’s new ‘strategic partnership’ with Microsoft. After the February 11 announcement, Nokia attempted to clarify the announcement, stating that the single MeeGo Harmattan device would still be released and supported and that Symbian would continue to receive updates even as the business was wound down. Although there was now an assurance that Symbian wouldn’t be going away immediately, it was very clear where Nokia’s focus would be going forward. After the failure of the Symbian Foundation, Symbian was folded back into Nokia (where it had come from in the first place) and made closed-source once again. Eventually, Symbian development work was outsourced to Accenture alongside the transfer of a few thousand Nokia employees.
It’s been an entire year since that fateful day, and in some ways the smartphone space has evolved since a year ago. The decline of Symbian has been quicker than Nokia expected due to the popularity of cheap Android handsets. Even though large volumes of Symbian devices are still being sold, it’s clear that Symbian’s mindshare is as miniscule as Windows Phone’s marketshare. Even phone shops have all but ceased to push and promote Symbian smartphones, and I would be hard-pressed to find a single person among my classmates, friends and family who still perceives a Symbian device as being desirable. Amid rumours that Nokia has shelved all plans for new upcoming Symbian hardware save for one device, it’s hard even for the diehard Symbian fan to argue there’s much of a future left for Symbian. I ran a little poll on Twitter a few days ago asking you whether you still feel as upset today about Elop’s decision to move Nokia away from Symbian as you were a year ago, and out of the many reponses I received (thanks everyone!) there was actually a sizeable group of people who either feel that Elop did make the right decision in adopting Windows Phone or are much less upset that Symbian was shelved. But there were just as many who said they were just as upset, if not even more so, that Symbian was given the boot even after the first two Lumia Windows Phone devices have shipped and one year has passed since the decision was made public. And herein lies the core of my argument in this editorial: Symbian’s death was unavoidable, and that platform would have brought down the whole of Nokia with it if the Windows Phone strategy hadn’t come into existence. That’s the cold, hard truth.
Even though Symbian Anna and Nokia (Symbian) Belle, both major upgrades to the base Symbian^3 platform have been announced and released since February 11 last year, Symbian still lags behind its competitors in several substantial ways and will continue being in such a state as the existing userbase shrinks. But it’s exactly the diehard Nokia/Symbian fan who still continues clinging on to the hope that Symbian will somehow survive and be revived. It’s exactly the diehard Nokia/Symbian fan who still thinks Elop screwed Nokia up with the Windows Phone decision. It’s exactly the diehard Nokia/Symbian fan who still believes with absolute faith that Nokia could have survived if they stood by Symbian against everything else. Who’d have thought that there would ever be a relationship between an analyst we all know, Symbian and Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages Of Grief?
What happened to Symbian wasn’t Elop’s fault.
Elop just did what he had to do to turn the company around; Nokia did not switch to Windows Phone just to ensure Symbian’s death. In case you’ve forgotten, Symbian was in such a bad state on February 11, 2011 that on hindsight Nokia could not rely on the platform any longer. All Symbian devices before the N8, with the exception of the X6, had resistive screens which were soft, plasticky and provided an absolute rubbish touch experience. The N8 was launched in April 2010 but only shipped in October that year as the first Symbian^3 device. When the decision to switch to Windows Phone was made, Symbian^3 was seriously lacking compared to its rivals. The original pre-Anna build of Symbian^3 had a web browser that wasn’t too far removed from the broken abomination of a browser that existed on S60v5, had a UI that didn’t seem any different to the much-criticised S60v5 user interface, lacked even basic features like a portrait QWERTY keyboard. Every single touchscreen Symbian device continues to be stuck with a 640 by 360 pixel display that seemed mindblowing at the end of 2008 at the launch of the 5800 XpressMusic but sorely lacking by the time the likes of the N8 and E7 came about. Symbian as a platform was already very uncompetitive in 2010 and already compared poorly to iOS and Android. Just to provide some perspective, Android 2.1 and the Google/HTC Nexus One was unveiled and released in January 2010, 10 months before Symbian^3 actually existed on shipping hardware. It seems mindblowing today, doesn’t it?
Soon after the N8′s release Nokia promised a PR2.0 update for the N8 that was delayed and delayed again, gaining a new iconset and a feminine name before trickling out slowly along with the last-of-its-kind E6 and the mediocre X7 in April 2011, another 6 months after the N8′s launch and even longer for US devices. And even though the Belle upgrade has finally been released for existing Symbian^3 devices, let us not forget that Belle was launched along with the 600, 700 and 701, all devices which aren’t astoundingly different from the original crop of Symbian^3 hardware, back in August 2011. That means that it’s taken another 5 months for Belle to be made available for 1st-gen Symbian^3 devices, and a total of 2 years since the release of the Nexus One for Symbian to get anywhere close to matching Android 2.x in terms of user interface. That is exactly how far behind Symbian is, and has always been since S60v5.
It’s arguable whether Symbian^3 even had a future to begin with – it had a difficult birth, it was born in a period when Symbian was already long past its peak and on the decline, and regardless of whether it was a ‘complete rewrite’ under the hood, it was seen as a fixed version of a smartphone platform that had done nothing but drag Symbian’s name and reputation into the dust. Given how long it’s taken to get Anna and Belle on existing devices, was sticking with Symbian even an option for Nokia, a company that was already making huge losses a year ago? Could you possibly say with a straight face that Nokia could have been able to achieve success even in the mid-range smartphone market with Symbian Anna? Even in 2011, the number of compelling reasons why you’d get yourself a Symbian^3 device over everything else on the market was dwindling in proportion to the rise of Android. So do you think Nokia would be better off today if Elop hadn’t put Nokia on a new direction? I don’t think so. To some extent, media and user perception of Symbian ensured that Symbian would likely never rise again. It doesn’t matter that Symbian is functionally superior to other smartphone platforms if it’s got a horrid reputation and is seen as old and obsolete in addition to all of its real downsides and lackings.
In my opinion, competitive pricing and Nokia hardware has driven (and continues to drive) Symbian device sales for the past few years, not the platform itself. In other words, one of the main reasons why Nokia has continued to move millions upon millions of Symbian devices in 2011 is merely down to value-for-money and quality hardware especially in developed markets where iOS and Android have established a strong hold. Remember how almost every Symbian device in 2006 were truly high-end devices? 5 years later, the most expensive current Symbian smartphone, the 701, is a midrange device that’s not even available in every market. Symbian ceased competing in the high-end smartphone space a long time ago. And guess what? The high-end matters just as much as the mid-range devices that are priced to sell because they create mindshare and increase the desirability of the rest of the product line.
In any discussion about why Symbian is in the position it is in now, it is hard to ignore the failure of Ovi as being a major contributing factor. Who still remembers Nokia asserting that they wanted to transition to being a software and services company? In all honesty, Ovi was a great idea – having a set of online services baked right into the Symbian platform would emulate one of the key advantages of Android on Nokia smartphones, and the concept of Ovi as an end-to-end mobile-focused Web 2.0 service layer was generally sound. But the implementation of that vision was completely screwed up. Every Ovi service apart from Ovi Maps sucked one way or another, and that’s already an understatement. Ovi Contacts and Calendar were clumsy and limited and synchronization was error-prone. Ovi Share and Ovi Chat never took off because there wasn’t a single compelling reason why you’d use any of those solutions over Flickr or Picasa and any cross-platform IM network respectively. Ovi Mail was complete rubbish any way you looked at it and no one really understood or used Ovi Files. But the Ovi Store was easily the worst failure of the lot. Between a slow, clunky, laggy, poorly-organized Store client that couldn’t seem to remember your account credentials or install apps reliably, a broken search engine, a poor app selection, screenshots that are square and a lousy web interface, it’s hard to pin down what the biggest flaw of the Ovi Store was. Today, the Ovi brand is dead and gone and the only surviving components are what used to be Ovi Maps and Ovi Store, with Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat having been taken over by Yahoo.
Symbian should not have survived. If it did, it would eventually make them completely irrelevant in the smartphone space at best. Of course, MeeGo was meant to be Nokia’s solution to becoming relevant at the high-end of the market once again before the February 11 decision, but it’s just as questionable whether the N9 and MeeGo Harmattan could have competed alongside the iPhone and the multitude of high-end Android devices. Whether MeeGo Harmattan is technically superior to Android and iOS doesn’t matter a single bit if the apps and games for the platform worth an ounce of attention are few and far between, supporting services are absent and the fledgling smartphone platform has to go up against far more established rivals that boast their own unique selling points in a smartphone space where even a big, concentrated effort like Windows Phone struggles to gain traction. A beautiful and intuitive user interface and smooth user experience aren’t the only factors that sell smartphones. Otherwise, Palm’s webOS would have been a massive success. If the N9 and MeeGo Harmattan was supposed to save Nokia, I’d have laughed at the effort because that is exactly what it wouldn’t do.
Obviously, Symbian continues to enjoy a huge but silent userbase so the platform will definitely remain in mass adoption for several more years. The release of the Belle upgrade should go a long way towards keeping Symbian users happy for the near future. It’s an excellent upgrade that brings an Android-level user experience to the Symbian platform, but that’s really only because it’s meant to extend the lifespan of the platform for a couple more years. If Nokia were still pursuing a smartphone strategy reliant on Symbian, Belle would be an unmitigated disaster. It’s 2012 and Nokia has only managed to get itself on par with an outdated version of Android? And the portrait QWERTY keyboard is still rubbish? And email notifications don’t work? What the hell?!
For better or for worse, Nokia is a different company today.
I'm a full-time applied drama and psychology student and part-time blogger who's interested in the mobile industry and loves phones all at the same time. Follow @alv1nW
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