Why is Symbian unheard of in the USA?

[timmytucker]

I had never heard of Symbian until I was looking into the E71 smartphone for Straight Talk. I never imagined that a Smartphone on Straight Talk would be so fully featured and great. Then when I did research, I found out that Symbian was for a while the most popular smartphone OS in the world! I was shocked!!

So, how come I never heard of it, living in New York State? Why didn't Symbian ever catch on in the United States?

[AndroidFoneFan]

Not unheard of, just not popular.
There are or have been a great many phones here that used Symbian, I have one in a closet upstairs.
Just with I Phones and Androids running amok, and Symbian OS developers taking their sweet time keeping the OS up to date with the others, it has fallen out of favor with many.
With Android and I Phones there are hundreds of thousands possibly millions of current and older apps that can be downloaded giving the phones and tablets functions galore.
As good as Symbian may be, it has not kept up with the times and needs of the consumer. This all lands squarely on the shoulders of Nokia since they took it over and put it under a proprietary license.

[corduroy]

There are several reasons. Primarily, Nokia failed at trying to sell the devices in the USA. If you couldn't find a Nokia Symbian phone at your provider's store (which you almost never saw - they were always the cheap phones), the only option was to purchase a Nokia phone at full MSRP from their little mall kiosk (if your mall had a Nokia kiosk to begin with). And the kiosks routinely sold older Nokia models (new for the USA market, but at least 6 months old already)

Smartphones were in their infancy but Nokia didn't really pack them with much to begin with. Functionally, the major population used them the same as dumbphones but with a web browser (that didn't have great performance at even doing that for the time). The only reason to get one at the time was for the camera.

I'm sure it was difficult to sell year old smartphones that ended up being used as dumbphones for 600$ And then when the N95 finally made its USA appearance, Apple introduced the iPhone with a major carrier. The way the USA market has developed is that monthly plans are the same whether you purchase a phone on contract or not. Pick up an iphone/any phone for 200$ on contract or go contract-free for 500$ for the same monthly rate? Easy choice for the majority of people. Apple's App store was a huge change and made it easy for people to take advantage of their smartphone. Nokia's response? N95-3, N95-4, dropping support for phones 6 months old, and anemic updates (aka, sometimes bug fixes). It's a shame to see them dropping Symbian - really nice to see that Belle is coming to phones like the N8. If they would have done that 6 years ago, the market probably would have been different now.

[Dr Tran]

Carriers wouldn't touch it. Consumers too stupid to buy unlocked.

[dutchtender]

it's also now unheard of inside Nokia. the name has been banished.

[3Gphreak]

Nokia hardly ever advertises in north american markets < what a bunch of idiots>. If they did people would realize how craptastic iphone h/w is. I'm lucky I guess that Robbers...err rogers has carried at least one model of Nokia for over a decade. For once I'm grateful to rogers that they either had the foresight or just lucked out offering the N8 in their line-up. I'm also lucky that Nokia has such wide support in the hacking community such that I'm all hacked and unlocked...Free At Last! WooHoo!!!

[Prom1]

Carriers wouldn't touch it. Consumers too stupid to buy unlocked.

Wrong. Quite simply Nokia's own research had originally thought that the USA users just where not savvy enough to use smartphones - this is going back and as long as since 1993. Too many users (some 80% of the cell-phone using population used cellphones as fashion/status statements and plain emergency's). 7650 was only available/worked in Euro GSM/GPRS bands, soon after it was the NGage which ONLY T-Mobile USA gave love for (along with the NGage QD, and even the Euro 3G only banded N90 camera phone). During the QD days data was sublime at $4.99/$9.99 per month for UNLIMITED Data (when data was just data no segregation of how to use it)!! Unfortunately mostly youth enjoyed those vs the vast cell using pop. whom preferred the V600 or V535 or the original Razr. (back in th e 7650 days it was the StarTac slim that was the status quo).

Nokia simply did NOT care enough to market nor entice the USA users. It was always about half stepping .... 7620 (or that Red slim flip-phone, and a really nice powerful one to follow-up but had 4mths delay on AT&T due to carrier branding issues. Since then nobody en masse would give a damn of Symbian phones.

Even worse ... Nokia played the same hop-scotch game with their licensee's to S60: Samsung got royally pissed along with LG ... and BOTH jumped ship early long before Android was even a whisper inside G-base.

Shame on you Dr. Tran for going so simple with your explanation .... you've used S60 about the same time I did waaaaay back. You should know all of this .... it almost feels like being an old gang of men remembering the days of "Romper Room", "The Green Giant", or "Finigan" (that latter show haunted my toddler days ... he was the original Chuckie)!

Cheers.

[SweetBearCub]

My very first smartphone was a Nokia 6600, sold through the USA division of T-Mobile, I think it was mid-2004. I was enamored with it, having never seen such a capable device before. My previous phones were all dumbphones, where the best "trick" I could do was to load 2 really compressed MP3's as songs, and switch between 2 very low resolution custom-made background images. The Nokia, on the other hand, was much more flexible/accommodating. Before long, I was pushing the limits of its 6 MB of onboard app storage space, and its 104 Mhz processor. I got an SD card for it, but that didn't help much in the long run.

I really liked the interface, and the phone gave me a taste of what was possible, but in the end, for me, its own limitations killed it. Nokia compounded this by never really pushing Symbian (or whatever they're calling it now) here.

To this day, I have a Nokia E71 for the AT&T MVNO 'StraightTalk'. It's a refurb, but essentially brand new, but it mainly sits in a drawer waiting to serve as a backup should Sprint ever kill the deal I'm using. If that ever happens, I'll probably take the SIM card out of the E71 and put it into a much more capable Android phone, as even though time has forced Nokia to advance, the E71 is still quite limited. At least, that's the impression I get from playing with it for a few hours. It was very slow to install apps, those apps loaded slowly, and navigating the menus was not very fluid.

Of course, bear in mind that the E71 was being compared to my current phone, a Samsung Epic 4G, essentially a somewhat modified Galaxy S handset.

As a side note, I remember that the camera on my 6600 was quite impressive for mid-2004, especially compared to other camera phones of the day. Unfortunately, the same is not true for my E71. My Epic 4G's camera blows it away, both in still and video modes, and in sound sensitivity while recording videos.

[Uxi]

Carriers wouldn't touch it. Consumers too stupid to buy unlocked.

What he said.

All they really needed was a US carrier to market N95 as a hero phone, but they've always been a step too slow in the mass marketing.

N97 even with it's flaws would have been acceptable instead of the N96, which is where they really came off the rails and never caught up. N900 coming out when N97 originally did (6'09).

When the first rumors of an iPad were beginning, they should have publicized limited production mixture of touch only and touch with keyboard 8-10" Freemantle tablets based of the N900 and gotten them in stores. When the iPad actually came out they could have rightfully pointed out that Apple wasn't innovating but following in their footsteps. How many iFanboys even know about the N800 or N810 these days?

[Dr Tran]

Quite simply...

... is not a long rambling block of text.

[Nokia69]

All they really needed was a US carrier to market N95 as a hero phone, but they've always been a step too slow in the mass marketing.

On a related note: I just started watching "The Big Bang Theory" & noticed that the main characters all used Dells but Howard also had an N95. My guess would be back then no one knew what kind of phone he had, otherwise, it would have been good product placing in the US.

Pretty much everyone I talk to knows nothing about Nokia phones other than the occasional "Don't they make the cheap phones you can get for free with a contract?"

Now that they are getting their WinPhones subsidized, this may change ...

[SweetBearCub]

Unless Nokia can bring their quality & usability WAY up, then not much will change. The last review I read about their Lumia 800 was extremely lackluster. And let's face it, the competition is now much stiffer in the market, with Android and IOS setting the gold standards. Maybe years ago when Nokia had the market virtually to themselves they stood a chance, but in this market, they will have to really work at it, and produce real results, or they will fail. The fact that Windows Phone holds somewhere less than 5% of the US market doesn't help either. Why they chose to align themselves with such an unpopular platform, I will never understand.

Pretty much everyone I talk to knows nothing about Nokia phones other than the occasional "Don't they make the cheap phones you can get for free with a contract?"

Now that they are getting their WinPhones subsidized, this may change ...

[FFR]

Will the phone enthusiast here ever realize that Nokia and Symbian have not only failed in the USA market, but they have already been crushed/decimated/destroyed in their core markets.
Where they were king, where they had market share, profit share, brand recognition, reputation,respect, and even in one case nationalistic pride.
I'm not talking about developing/emerging markets, but their target demographic. Europe; Finland, the Uk, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy.
Where they have ad dollars. Billboards, Commercials, radio broadcast, and even sponsoring tv shows; I'm talking about the whole nine
yards.
And yet they still failed.
Failed miserably.
Humiliatingly.
And some of you think, had nokia spent a little more money on advertising, or brand awareness, or hardware components, etc., etc. things would have been different. Nokia would have remained. Retained.
Thats retarded.
Because the fault always remained with symbian.

"The 32-bit EPOC developed by Project Protea resulted in the eventual formation of Symbian Ltd. in June 1998 in conjunction with Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola.[1] The OS was renamed the Symbian Operating System and was envisioned as the base for a new range of smartphones. Psion gave 130 key staff to the new company and retained a 31% shareholding in the spun-out business. The Symbian operating system as of 2007 powered around 125 million mobile phones such as the Sony Ericsson P900 series."


Symbian is based on an operating system That statred development in 1987. 1987! The 32 bit version of epoc went on sale in 1997.
Symbian was formed a year later. Symbian was the ceiling.

"1984 also marked Psion’s first foray into hardware; the Psion Organiser, the world’s first handheld computer, in appearance resembling early games machines. In 1986, the vastly improved Psion Organiser II was released. Its success led the company into a decade long period of "Psion" Computer and operating system development. It included a simple-to-use database programming language, OPL, which sparked a large independent software market. In 1987, Psion began development of its "SIBO" ("SIxteen Bit Organiser") family of devices and its own new multitasking operating system called EPOC to run its PDA products.[1] It is often rumoured that EPOC stands for "Electronic Piece Of Cheese" however Colly Myers, who was Symbian's CEO from founding until 2002,[2] said in an interview that it stood for 'epoch' and nothing more. This development effort produced the Psion Series 3 (1993–98) and the Psion MC-series laptops.
A second effort, dubbed Project Protea, produced the Series 5 Psion for sale in 1997, a completely new product from the 32-bit hardware upwards through the OS, UI, and applications.[1] It is still remembered for its high quality, especially its keyboard which despite its size allowed for touch-typing. But the entirely new feel of the product, and the removal of certain familiar quirks, alienated the loyal Series 3 userbase — who tended to stick with their robust PDAs rather than upgrade. Psion was also challenged by the arrival of cheaper devices running Microsoft’s Windows CE and the lower functionality approach of the Palm Pilot.

So there you have it. The insanity.
It was apple marketing that destroyed Nokia. Steve's reality distortion field that Caused consumers to stop buying Nokia's defections.

Roflmao
Fawaz

Ps written on an iPad.

[fraydog]

Unless Nokia can bring their quality & usability WAY up, then not much will change. The last review I read about their Lumia 800 was extremely lackluster. And let's face it, the competition is now much stiffer in the market, with Android and IOS setting the gold standards. Maybe years ago when Nokia had the market virtually to themselves they stood a chance, but in this market, they will have to really work at it, and produce real results, or they will fail. The fact that Windows Phone holds somewhere less than 5% of the US market doesn't help either. Why they chose to align themselves with such an unpopular platform, I will never understand.

As an American let me inject the perspective of my market.

First of all, people here WANT subsidized phones because of family plans and would rather prefer to stay with their current carrier than port out to AT&T. Nokia offererings through operators here sucked. Where was the N8? Or anything Nokia did for that matter? Not subsidized, not on the best US carrier (Verizon). Nokia could have embraced CDMA in a better and more methodical fashion, along with really being aggressive with competing with the iPhone with Symbian top end phones when the iPhone was released in 2007. Unfortunately OPK was too dull and stupid to give Verizon what they wanted, which was an iPhone competitor. Eventually Motorola filled that niche with the Droid line which fueled Android's growth here. That decision alone should have cost OPK his job along with the failure to push Symbian forward. Even Elop, for all the complaining about his move of the Nokia top end along with Windows Phone, has done more to push Symbian forward than the last blind Nokia leader did. OPK should be remembered as the worst Nokia executive in history. Elop had to do something, and that was Windows Phone. The issue Nokia would have had with Android is more fragmentation. I'm sure Nokia could have completely splintered Android further but what good would have that done?

The Lumia 900 for this market has got extremely good buzz out of the gate. Mango, the most recent WIndows Phone update has also got great reviews. Unfortunately it's still tied to AT&T, but if AT&T pushes it with Microsoft money, you could see more time get bought. If Paul Thurott of Windows Supersite is correct, the exclusivity is short on the Lumia 900 and there could be a version out for Verizon and T-Mobile by summer. Yes folks, they have CDMA prototypes running. In the end, Microsoft has to get devs on board. They have 50,000 Windows Phone apps running which is a big improvement over where they were at at the past. Sure that's not the 500,000 apps that are in the iTunes Store but that's still a big improvement. Windows Phone also needs dual core superphones and Nokia also needs to get a 720p Super AMOLED Plus non-Pentile display by the summer IMO. Having the new Qualcomm MSM8960 in this market would be a big aid. Overseas in GSM only markets they could do the similar chipset from ST-Ericsson.

[Prom1]

... is not a long rambling block of text.

So AT&T:
Nokia N75, N76, N95b, 6682, E71x

T-Mobile:
N-Gage, N-Gage QD, 6682, N-90, N-92(2nd major camera phone along with a video contest submitted to Spike Lee).

That was what I was stating before to refute that US providers would not touch it. Try reading what i posted before stating it was rambling. Too many ppl skim for facts and get things out of context.