Missed Opportunity: Finnish Edition

 Finnish as in Finland the country that is. A country that makes itself known to me through two great industries; Valmet, who have made everything from assault rifles to Saabs, and Nokia, a company that brought mobile phones to the masses. For once I’m not going to write about cars, prepare for a phone blog.

 You're all probably aware that once upon a time mobile phones weren’t very popular, aside from being expensive and huge; they used analogue networks which were easily listened into or duplicated. Mobile communication really started to get going with the introduction of GSM networks or 2G. This turned the market it on its head, with one system Europe wide, phone makers could make a phone for all markets. Things got competitive, but one company was streets ahead. That company was Nokia, their phones were the most ergonomic, the easiest to use, and they had snake.

 While others caught up, offered new things which Nokia hadn’t got to yet, nothing could quite topple their market dominance. Right up until the iPhone came out. Suddenly Symbian and its competing OS’s looked like a confusing mess by comparison. With the introduction of 3G and ‘apps’ to the iPhone it was safe to say the game was officially changed. Android stepped up as primary competitor, while all Nokia had to return fire with was Symbian v5, which was too late and far too little.

 How the great have fallen. Nokia were getting slayed in innovation, the area in which they once excelled. The woeful Symbian v5 struggled on for nearly 3 years, the focus was on Nokia’s new operating system MeeGo (formerly Maemo) which put simply wasn’t coming quick enough. Things came to a head in February of this year when Nokia’s new CEO Stephan Elop’s ‘Burning Platform’ memo was sent out. He followed this with the announcement that he had chosen Microsoft, with their struggling new competitor to iOS and Android, to partner up against the aforementioned competition. This was some announcement from a company that had always been fully independent in its actions.

 One of the more bizarre aspects of this decision was that Nokia had invested all this time and money into MeeGo only to now drop it in favor of Microsoft software. As it stands there will only be one consumer Nokia/MeeGo phone, and it’s made it to market ahead of the Microsoft infused Nokia’s.

 A great website called This is my next has just reviewed this solitary phone, the Nokia N9, and given it a pretty rave review. The software looks fantastic in operation, bringing some new ideas to the table, and in combination with Nokia’s winning hardware, the phone makes a great proposition for itself. However as a one off there are unlikely to be any apps, and very little in the way of future support, making the phone a brave purchase. And that’s a huge shame, because this phone software has the all the potential that was required of it, if only it had come in 2009 or 2010.

Short video review from This is my next;