[geeks] Nokia is getting the Rick Belluzzo treatment...

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2011, Nate Raymond wrote:

> "What Happened to Nokia?"
> http://mobilesoftware.tumblr.com/tagged/Nokia
>
> "Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work"
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/10/nokia_ui_saga/

I fail to believe that Nokia's abrupt change in UI direction was
necessary.  Yes, the iPhone is a very nice product, but it's not something
that's as usable for me as my Nokia.  Surely there's room at the top for
something that looks nothing like an iPhone, yet that's nearly all that's
being built.

The industry's attempts to clone the iPhone look a lot like GNOME and
KDE's attempts to clone the Windows UI for the last 15 years: clumsy.  The
dialpad/shoulder-button model worked really well, even if you couldn't
play "Angry Birds" on it.  All these other phone GUIs, apart from not
being what I want, have the feel of being put together by people who
recognize gee-whiz, but have no firm grasp of what makes a system usable
day-by-day.

Remember when phones used to get -weeks- of battery life, even with
moderate web/WAP user?  My friend was bragging that getting the
extra-large battery for her Android phone means she can get almost two
days out of it.  My boss laments that he has to plug his iPhone into his
computer mid-afternoon in case he needs to call his wife on the way home.
My Nokia's battery life has gone from nearly a week of standby to about
three days because all the cruft they've shoveled into the OS by way of
updates in the name of UI have bloated the OS to near uselessness.

That, plus the iPhone's influence pollution the Mac development ecosystem
(Mac App Store, the nutty "Back to the Mac" features in OS X 10.7) makes
me rather sad that I'm as invested as I am in the Mac as a workstation
platform for me.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke |
Elgin, TX         | "He who is contented is rich." -- Lao Tzu
USA               |