Will the 'N99' be the iPhone for the next generation

There's been a lot of criticism of both Nokia, for the seemingly slow pace at which it is adapting to the new competitive challenge posed by the iPhone and by Android, and specifically of the N97, its new flagship product.

when legacy (sorry, mature) software runs into a crappy half-assed UI, it's a steaming pile of suck on a slab of garbage toast.

Little noticed, however, is one aspect of the user experience that works incredibly well, and may presage something really important: the widgets.

Nokia N97 Facebook home screen

For Facebook, having an active widget on the home screen changes the user experience in some ways that are incredibly important for many (younger) users.

So, as many managers at Nokia would acknowledge, it's not there yet, but let's play this forward a couple of years, through the N98 and N99... (OK, I'm just making these products up, but think of them as the Nokia N97 2nd Generation and Nokia N97 3rd Generation)

The Facebook widget, for example, shows the number of messages in your inbox, recent pokes, friend requests, and the last 3 status updates your friends have posted

As the next generation of users have fundamentally different behaviour on the web, and expectations of an always on, active screen, will the next but one generation Nokia N Series actually be their killer phone?

Comments

[Rajeev]

Widgets are a really smart move on Nokia's part - especially since it allows developers to port Web/AJAX skills to the Nokia platform.

However, IMHO what is killing Nokia's efforts to bootstrap an iPhone like ecosystem is the almost complete lack of cross-functional product and platform management. An app developer has to deal with a bewildering array of development platform choices (Maemo/S40/S60 3rd Ed FP1/FP2/N97 SDK with an even more complex matrix of underlying platform libraries) There is no clear platform roadmap available and worse still, the version changes are quite arbitrary. Classic example is the jump from WRT version 1.1 to 7.1

http://bit.ly/Nokia-WRT-version

In short, fantastic hardware, pretty good software and service offerings - but all that is tragically let down by lack of a cohesive platform vision.

[Michael A M Davies]

Rajeev, your comments are well made. For Nokia, one of the key considerations is the trade off between building an ecosystem competitive with the iPhone, around a high-end subset of its product portfolio, and leveraging the breadth of its offer and its scale, by striving for compatibility across its platforms. It's complicated by the consideration that laying out a clear roadmap may erode support for key elements of its portfolio, those 'de-emphasized' in the roadmap, before Nokia is ready to make the transition. I'm not so sure about hardware though, one of the key factors compromizing the N97 is the unresponsiveness of its *resistive* touch screen.