When Nokia (NOK) revealed late last week that it was postponing until sometime in November the launch of its much-anticipated N900 “Rover” tablet/handset, eager buyers were disappointed again. The device, which is the first to use the latest version of Nokia’s open source Maemo operating system, had already been delayed from a planned August debut.
But mobile industry watcher Caroline Gabriel, in her always incisive newsletter, Rethink Wireless, offers a smart and interesting analysis of the reason for the delay. Gabriel says that Nokia is using the time to get more feedback from independent Maemo software developers and to fine-tune the device’s user experience prior to delivery.
That might sound like a lame excuse, especially so close to launch, but Nokia’s willingness to risk bad press and annoy customers underscores how crucial this product is to the company, which has been struggling to recapture momentum in smartphones lost to the likes of Apple (AAPL) and BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIMM). The company blamed a shortfall in smartphone sales in part for its disappointing third quarter results announced Oct. 15.
It also highlights the growing strategic importance of Maemo in Nokia’s product and technology roadmap. The open source operating system, based on the Debian distribution of Linux, first appeared in early form in 2005 in Nokia’s intriguing but little-known N770 handheld tablet and officially debuted in the follow-up N800 in 2007. Now it’s the linchpin of the company’s drive to stay relevant at the high end of the smartphone market.
Nokia's longtime platform of choice for such devices, the Symbian operating system, is showing signs of age and isn't up to the task of handling the kinds of sophisticated functions possible with the iPhone, such as computer-grade program and memory management, multitasking, support for advanced user interfaces, etc. Symbian is being pushed down to the mid-range, where it can easily support so-called "feature phones" that handle music or images but aren't optimized for downloadable apps and mobile computing functions. There's still plenty of developer support and momentum for Symbian, but it's not the future for Nokia's most powerful devices.
Maemo, meanwhile, has been a work in progress for many years. In an interview I did several months ago with Nokia executive vice president Anssi Vanjoki, he called Maemo a "key future asset" and said that the software is in the midst of a five-year development trajectory that will likely result in a final "go-to-market" release sometime in 2010. Outside developers are starting to amass—Nokia held a developer's summit in Amsterdam earlier this month that attracted 400 delegates, according to researcher CCS Insight—and Nokia is making it clear that Maemo will be the software that lets it compete on a more level playing field with the iPhone.
That's not to say there won't be plenty of competition for the attention and commitment of developers. In addition to Apple, Nokia faces a challenge from search giant Google (GOOG) and its open-source Android mobile phone operating system, which appears to be gaining significant market momentum. There's also a rival open source scheme called LiMo, plus webOS from Palm (PALM), Microsoft (MSFT) Mobile, and the BlackBerry's system software. Some of these are bound to be squeezed out as the market consolidates around a few standards.
Experts give Maemo fairly good prospects to be among the survivors. Analyst Alan Nogee of researcher In-Stat, who recently declared 2010 "the year of Android," nevertheless included Nokia's software in his prediction that "new OSs such as Android and Maemo will cut away at Symbian's market share." Meanwhile, Rethink Wireless' Gabriel reports that the Mozilla Foundation, the outfit behind the Firefox Web browser, is enthusiastic about Maemo. She quotes an interview between Mozilla CEO John Lilly and blogger Om Malik, in which Lilly told Malik that he sees Maemo as "a modern mobile OS built with the Internet in mind."
The stakes are high in this battle, with a potential market for high end smartphones and netbooks of as many as 385 million units annually by 2014, according to recent estimates from ABI Research. (In-Stat's Nogee pegs smartphone sales alone at 412 million the same year.) This is a market Nokia has to master—so waiting a few more weeks to work out the kinks in the N900 seems like a reasonable trade-off to get it right.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
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