So What Do We Learn From the Nokia N1 Tablet on Android?

So the Nokia N1 tablet has been annoucned for Spring 2015 launch (China first). It runs on Android and has an 8 inch screen, 8mp rear camera and 5mp front camera. Its very light. And it will not be the monster-seller tablet of 2015. Its not a phone, there is as of yet, no sister smartphone products in the phablet size. But the Nokia N1 is the return of the 'real' Nokia to consumer electronics. What will this mean..

WONT BE BIG SELLER

So lets do quick review. Nokia was world's largest mobile phone maker from 1999 to 2011. Nokia invented the smartphone and was the world's largest smartphone maker from its birth till 2011. Nokia developed several operating systems for smarthones and its main system, Symbian, was the world's largest smartphone OS until that magical year, 2011. What happened in 2011? Nokia's new CEO torpedoed the massive highly profitable market juggernaut, Nokia's handset business (including smartphones) and sunk it with his idiotic move to Windows Phone. The quarter before Elop made his change, Nokia held 29% market share in smartphones with Nokia-record profits and during hte past 12 months had grown MORE than Apple's iPhone, so the gap to the rivals was only growing in Nokia's favor. Nokia had brand new award-winning smartphones that featured elements and aspects that it would take Apple years to copy (larger screens, better cameras, NFC etc). Nokia's app store had just grown to become the second bestselling app store just behind Apple's and closing the gap. Nokia knew how to succeed in the handset market. The problems at Nokia were in its networking unit which was making losses, and in delivery schedules and 'execution' with some phones delayed by a year even. But Nokia knew how to win in the handset business. Nokia was the bestselling phone and bestselling smartphone brand on four of the six inhabited continents including by a wide margin China, the world's largest phone and smartphone market (China is now twice the size of the USA, accounting for 40% of all smartphones sold today).

Elop wiped that all out with a rampage of destroying Nokia. Three years after the new Windows Phone based Lumia smartphones were released, Nokia's smartphone market share was down to 3%. Yes Elop had managed to wipe out nine out of ten customers for the most loyal dumbphone customer base on the planet and the second highest loyalty smartphone brand (behind only iPhone). It was kterally a world record in market leader destruction. No industry has ever seen this rapid collapse of its market leader, not even under catastrophic conditions like Toyota's brakes failures in cars, or from sheer management stupdity before like Coca Cola's launch of New Coke. Never has any company collapsed its global leadership position as fast as Elop demolished Nokia. And note, when Toyota hit its brakes or Coca Cola decided to go New, they were not twice as big as their nearest rival. Nokia's smartphone unit was more than twice as big as Apple in smartphones, and the unit was four times as big as Samsung's smartphone business. (PS we found out after he was ousted from Nokia's CEO job as the shortest-duration biggest failure Nokia CEO of all time, that Elop had a personal bonus clause that rewarded him for destroying the Nokia handset business... yeah, irony of ironies. The Financial Times calculated that Elop was rewarded an extra 1.5 million dollars for every biillion dollars he wiped out of Nokia shareholder value. The FT compared Elop's heist with the worst of Wall Street criminals like Bernie Madoff)

If you thought the Windows Phone strategy was right but Nokia was just inept at implementing it, nobody should be able to do it better than Microsoft. So now we have six months of Microsoft ownership of Nokia's handset business. How is the smartphone business? The Lumia business market share under full Microsoft control now is... 3%. And mind you, in four years since Elop announced his Windows strategy the Nokia smartphone business has not managed one quarter of a profit. Yes now its been 18 quarters straight, launching Lumia, launching Windows Phone 8, and switching ownership from Nokia to Microsoft and nothing helped. Not one quarter of profit. The Microsoft handset business dream is utterly dead.

NOKIA TABLETS

Now, we know that tablets are kind of related to smartphones, especially now when almost all smartphones are touch-screen devices. There is that class of interim devices, 'phablets' smartphones of larger than 5 inch screen size, started by Samsung's Galaxy Note and now copied by the iPhone 6 series. Phablet sales have now in Q4 of 2014 passed total tablet sales for hte first time ever. Next year is the first year when more phablets are sold than tablets.

Nokia saw this coming too. Nokia has developed tablets on five platforms (Symbian, Maemo, Meego, Windows and Android) and launched commercially on three (Maemo, Windows, Android). So where many tech brands are new to tablets and only paid attention to the market after the iPad appeared, Nokia had been there before and explored the market. Nokia, world's largest handset maker, knew also - partly from commercial launch - that a tablet is not just a larger smartphone. Its a different device. Look at Apple, the older iPhoen keeps growing sales but the younger iPad has seen its peak and sales are now declining. Is not one market, it is two, as I explianed here years ago and now recently many are coming also to that view.

The distribution and sales of tablets is drastically different from smartphones and there is no real synergy between the two. So Nokia for example resisted a Windows Phone/Lumia tablet project until the desperation set in and Elop was willing to try almost anything. As we know, the Nokia Lumia tablet was yet another failure in a long line of handset-maker tablet failures (starting with Blackberry). Tablets were a great idea for PC makers (like say Apple and Samsung) but for pure handset makers (like Nokia, Blackberry) it was lunacy and a huge drain on their marketing and sales costs.

Interestingly, for Microsoft, the tablet market is more promising than the smartphone market, for those same reasons. Microsoft Windows for the PC is sold through IT tech sales channels. The XBox videogaming console is sold through consumer electronics sales channels. These are both good for tablets. And all Windows Phone based smartphones face a global mobile operator/carrier sales boycott (or sales suppression by now, boycott is definitely too strong a word now when the market has been effectively destroyed, they don't really care anymore about Windows). This global carrier dislike of Windows was explained by Elop when he spoke to Nokia shareholders, and Elop said it was not explicit to Nokia, it was against all Windows based smartphone brands. So its first of all a fact, its been confirmed as a well-known phenomenon with Elop underlining the issue using the word 'obviously' -and it is why most Windows based smartphone makers quit the system around that time like LG, Sony, Dell and Motorola. And why the other remaining Windows smartphone manufacturers (Samsung, HTC, Huawei) all shifted away from Windows to Android today doing a trivially tiny slice of their business on Windows at best. Only MIcrosoft/Lumia remain and all 10 of the 10 most used Windows Phone smartphones now are Nokia/Lumia branded. Not one Samsung, Huawei or HTC among them anymore.

So for handsets Windows Phone is poison and smartphones on Windows do not sell. They can't turn a profit and the total Windows Phone market share for Q3 including all brands was only 2.9% (according to IDC). But IDC finds that in the far smaller tablet market, Windows is doing better. They have a 4.6% mraket share there. Microsoft can perhaps grow that Windows tablet slice to a viable business in coming years if they keep throwing tons of money at it, like they managed with XBox in videogaming after years of loss-making.

It may well happen, that Microsoft will arrive to a conclusion that the 'smartphone' side of the Nokia purchase is not viable but will still continue on the tablets, and migrate the remnants of that workforce to focus on the tablets only. And yeah, I'm not an expert on the tablets business, they might succeed there, but 5% market share is not very viable long term in terms of ecosystem etc. Especially not when you carry all the baggage that Windows has as a hated operating system. 

TROUBLE FOR MICROSOFT

But what Microsoft did not want, when it spent 7 billion dollars to buy Nokia's handset business, is to see Nokia compete against it. The exclusive licence to the Nokia brand was a long term thing for dumbphones but only a short-term thing for smartphones (and apparently, tablets). Nokia already pulled a dirty trck on Microsoft when it launched the short-lived X series that ran on Android. Microsoft killed off that project soon after they took over the handset business this year. But that was further confusion to the minds of consumers on what is the 'Nokia' (brand) intending to do. Is that Windows Phone -thingy, the whats-it-called-operation-system is it viable or not. If Nokia already launches on Android. So yeah, Microsoft had to kill it.

Now Microsoft has stopped using the Nokia branding on its newest smartphones. They are just branded Microsoft Lumia. And just months later, appears a brand new Nokia branded gadget, a tablet. This.. running Android. Even before we hear any rumors of a Nokia branded smartphone again from Finland, this is bad news for Microsoft's tablet strategy.

Will the N1 Tablet sell in enough numbers to show any relevance to Nokia's business? No, of course not. It will be the squeak of a mouse in the noise of a thunderstorm, but it is Nokia's first salvo. It does signal first of all, that Nokia wants to return. Secondly, it signals the total break from Windows. If any device by Finland's 'real' Nokia made sense to do on Windows, more than a smartphone, that would be a tablet. That Nokia now clearly spits in the eye of its 'partner' Microsoft, and does the tablet on Android is clear signal, Nokia is finished with Windows. For good. Forever.

Its a big win for Android (who doesn't need wins anymore, they have won the war). Its a signal for any remaining Windows partners. And its nasty news for Microsoft.

For consumers it will bring noise that the 'Nokia' Lumia device on Windows might not be a good purchase now. For non-Nokia branded pure-MIcrosoft Lumia, it is a clear distinction. This is not-Nokia. This is the real Nokia. And real Nokia runs Android.

Its a signal to app developers that if they were with Windows Phone because of any remaining loyalty to Nokia, its time to break with that, and just quit Windows. Go Android, thats were Nokia will be.

It is also a way for Nokia to signal to the thought-leaders, the tech press etc, what is the real Nokia vision in gadgets, when the Elop experiment is forgotten. Before Elop Nokia made very good tech products in terms of their hardware, often with very innovative and inventive tech. They were beautifully designed, durable, desirable. Now Nokia can return and tbus this first N1 device isn't needed to be any major sales success really anywhere, it just needs to be shown to various journalists and analysts who visit wih Nokia, to start to build that demand again. We want an innovative competitive Nokia back in the gadget business and gosh, does the smartphone slab i-Phon-a-clone market desperately need some innovation again, the kind that Nokia once gave us.

I am certain the plans are there for a possible return at Nokia into the smartphone space. Looking a how Sony and LG and HTC have wandered into and out of profits in their smartphone businesses, and how poorly Samsung has been able to turn a dominant market position into major sustainable profit levels, there must be doubt at Nokia whether its worth returning. On the other hand, in the biggest future markets for tech - China, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Egypt, Thailand, Pakistan, Vietnam etc - Nokia is a very strong brand still today, even after all the Elop damage. A premium ultralight tablet at a competitive cost below that of the iPad and Galaxy Tab, is a clever strategy to remind consumers how much they used to love Nokia. It opens the door for Nokia if it decides to return. And now we konw for sure. Nokia has signalled, that future OS would be Android.

Comments

[ItIsARealNokia.]

To all those here who think Nokia didn't design the N1, check the comments by John Kneeland on Twitter. He helped design it, so it's definitely a Nokia device. They just shared engineering samples with Foxconn and got them to produce the device on a large scale.

[KPOM]

@LeeBase, not only that, but one of the main Android Police contributors even put the iPad Air 2 at the top of his "recommended Android Tablet" list, even though it doesn't run Android. http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/12/07/android-police-holiday-gift-guide-2014-stuff-want-newer/

[Earendil Star]

Same old story: Nokia (what remains of it) tries to get back from the dead. And immediately there is an outcry from the usual MS astroturfers, trying to question the new moves, start discussing what "real" Nokia device means. E.g.: for them it is "the real Nokia" when Flop, the MS mole, got rid of Nokia factories and engaged Compal to launch the first Lumia. Yet it is the "false" Nokia that now launches the "fake" N1, with support from Foxconn, the iPhone/iPad you iName-it OEM. In practice, the "true" Nokia is the one that is always in line with MS, while the "false" Nokia is the company that goes against MS. And Compal is better than Foxconn. Gee, Apple must have got its ideas mixed up when choosing Foxconn instead of Compal! Should we tell them??

Well, but that's the never ending MS astrostory. I am too tired to even get bothered. Meanwhile, even Ed Bott, the Zdnet senior editor and long-time MS fanboy, is giving up hope on WP.

Rather, I wanted to share the story on some unbelievable MS-induced misery on the innocent buyers of its (now) own products: just read this horror story on the sad fate of this Nokia N8 user: http://zo0ok.com/techfindings/archives/1376.

Just to quickly recap, the unlucky owners of Nokia N8 (but this may equally apply to other Nokia Symbian smartphones from 2010 to 2013), were subject to the following miseries thanks to MS:
- shutting off of Nokia Weather service for its Symbian apps
- time bomb in Swype for Symbian (first in 2012, then again and for real in 2013). In practice, and without any warning to users, on 1 January 2014 Symbian devices with Swype from Betalabs found their phones to have become unusable. Only those browsing online would have discovered that a much loved app, Swype, contained a time bomb (whose update would just require a couple of minutes of programming by the original developers), that rendered the app unusable and the phone it was installed on lame. No way anybody at MS/Nokia considered to invest 10 minutes in upgrading this app and restore its functionality.
- shutting off of Skype for Symbian. Although the app remains theoretically functional, it is no longer accepted as valid client by Skype servers, which now reject connection from the app, rendering it totally unusable.
- winding down of Sync for Symbian
All this, despite early reassurance from MS/Nokia that Symbian would be supported up to 2016. I have no doubts that this is what the old (pre Elop trojan) Nokia would have done. But not Elop. Too concentrated on trying to ensure the unattainable viability of the WP platform to bother.

Do you think any of the former Nokia N8 (or 808 for that matter) owners would ever switch to WP? No way, not after having been treated in this way by the MS bully. As will be the case of the early WP7 adopters, that were shafted with the realease of the WP7, which was immediately osborned by the new and incompatible WP8. FY MS.
Being so incapable of understanding that consumers cannot be treated in this way is the greatest asset MS is providing to its competition. Which is flourishing from Android to Apple, and widely so. So dumb. MS just deserves to be failing in mobile.

[Huber]

@Leebase:

I looked at the article at androidpolice.com - you stated:

"Even a prominent Android site has nominated the iPad Air 2 as the best tablet"

While in the article, I read: "Nexus 9 vs. iPad Air 2: A [Mostly] Subjective Comparison"

This is not about "the best Tablet", this is a subjective comparison of two devices WHERE EVEN THE AUTHOR ADMITS THAT HE LIKES HIS IPAD!

Why are you lying? Or do you have the analytical capabilities of spinach, so you think that this is the same?

[Wayne Borean]

Interesting, We have two different viewpoints:

1) Nokia designed the N1
2) Foxcon designed the N1

Tomi, how about an article?

Wayne

[abdul muis]

@Wayne

True. Interesting.

There is 2 side.
The one that think Nokia did the right thing when choosing WP think N1 is the fake nokia.
The one that think Nokia did the wrong thing when choosing WP think N1 is the real nokia.

I wonder is there any other side such as
think nokia did the right thing when choosing WP, but think N1 is the real nokia, or
think nokia did the wrong thing when choosing WP, but think N1 is the fake nokia.

[Huber]

@Leebase:

"I didn't lie. I presented one, and someone else the other -- there are actually 2 articles on that Android site praising the iPad as the best of tablets."

Sorry, I haven't seen KPOM's link.

But this link you can also forget - this is just "Android Police Holiday Gift Guide 2014: The Stuff You Want, Only Newer".

A holiday gift guide is no in-depth tablet test - please stay honest here!

When you say "Even a prominent Android site has nominated the iPad Air 2 as the best tablet" then I assume that some serious tests have been performed with various devices, with battery runtime, performance, screen etcetc, not just a subjective comparison of the Nexus 9 vs. iPad 2 Air by some iPad-lover or a gift guide!

As I said, the retricted design of the iPad is a trade-off which makes everything else unimportant. If I don't have a freaking file system with a file browser and a locked bootloader, everything else becomes a moot point for a lot of people.

As I already have stated, the Sony tablets are well-made - and Sony lets you unlock the bootloader, which is a mandatory feature for me.

[RottenApple]

@Leebase:

"The iPad Air 2 stands head and shoulders above the competition for those who value things like build quality, app ecosystem and ease of use."

And it sinks into a bottomless pit if you need a file system or openness. No app ecosystem can make these major design flaws go away. Either these things are important - in which case the iPad is a no-go by default or they do not matter - in which case it can be a good product for some customers. But please don't pretend that an app ecosystem trumps everything else into irrelevance.

As a toy it's certainly a nice product - but beware if you need to handle some data that is best served by a file system. Good night!

[KPOM]

@RottenApple, LeeBase concedes your point. However, not everyone needs a file system or "openness." The IBM partnership should improve the functionality of the iPad for enterprise settings. The applications released yesterday focus on data analytics and CRM, neither of which directly need a file system.

[RottenApple]

@KPOM:

"However, not everyone needs a file system or "openness.""

I know. But for some this is a deal breaker And frankly, I really don't understand Apple here. Why not allow some control over the file system so that 'serious' apps work better. This was the biggest complaint I even heard from several iPad users where they thought that it wasn't as good as it could be.

[eduardom]

Microsoft guy drops Windows Phone for Apple

http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/11/7377021/ive-given-up-on-windows-phone

[eduardom]

As I have said before, I think Microsoft is going to drop Windows Phone, probably within 6 months.

Microsoft put enormous money and effort into Windows Phone because its strategy for decades has been Windows Everywhere. But the new strategy under Nadella is Microsoft Services and Software on All Platforms.

I am guessing the only reason Nadella hasn't ditched Windows Phone already is he has been busy with other things, plus wanted to give it one last chance. But it is continuing to fail, so the end is near.

Anyone disagree?

[Earendil Star]

Ooh, the astros are really angry... I must have stricken the right spot once again...

As usual coming back with false statements.

Striking similarity to the ipad mini. Really? Yes, it is a rectangle. Yes, the size is more or less the same. Aluminium frame. So what? Should they have released a 3 foot pizza shaped tablet in heavy steel to be "original"? By the way, it has no button... They must have missed something...

Nokia did not copy... Blackberry... true, and the E-series? Ah, that does not count. Regardless, wasn't it a Steve Jobs who said that shamelessly stealing great ideas is OK? Never mind.

Pathetic design? That's just value judgement, personal preference. I actually like it, but that's just me...

And I could go on, but I'm tired. Tired of those who said WP was the best for Nokia, were proved totally wrong, and now continue spreading BS and saying that the others are the clueless ranters.

Ah, and as usual the tactics are the same, concentrate on minor details and forget the main message: a MS free Nokia is fighting to become relevant once again; MS brings misery to its partners and customers.

The rest is bogus.

[Earendil Star]

By the way: of course WP will be ditched. Windows 10 is coming. MS has been involved in mobile for more than 20 years now, and still have not been able to get their act together. To the astros: in 2011, WP7 (the half baked obsolete win ce pos), was more ready than Meego? Really? Fail. Total fail.

[Huber]

@Leebase:

-->"Read the article yourself. The one I posted was a LONG article by someone who's a genuine fan of Android. It's still just one person's opinion, but you could see from their holiday guide, that others shared the same conclusion."

I have read the article. It is just subjective nonsense, and it even doesn't have a definition of the _BEST_ tablet. What qualifies for _BEST_? Screen quality? Battery runtime? Openness? Amount of RAM? Flexibility?

Hence this is all subjective bullshitting and does not proof anything at all.

-->"The iPad Air 2 stands head and shoulders above the competition for those who value things like build quality, app ecosystem and ease of use."

Have you had a look at the newer Sony tablets? This nonsense is getting old, I can do this, too:

"The Sony Z2 and Z3 tablets stand head and shoulders above the competition for those who value things like flexibility, openness, built quality, ecosystem and ease of use"

The same bullshit, just a differenr device.

-->"The sales numbers back this up. None of the premium Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab or the Nexus are selling all that well when compared to the iPad. It's only when you get into the vastly cheap tablets are basically used in Asia for watching pirated tv/movies that you get the kind of numbers to dwarf the iPad."

That's why the outlets are full of Android tablets in all price ranges - from €59 to €649. They put them on the shelves because they don't sell.

Apple may have the lead in the higher price ranges, but rarely do people need these devices - I bought my expensive tablet for its 3D capabilities. For everything else, A Galaxy Tab pro 8.4 for €230 does the job pretty well for anything else (if you can stand the fugly Samsung-UI or replace it with something sane).

The iPad Minis are just an overprized joke, I huess they are for people who like being ripped off.

-->"And no, scaled up apps are not as good an experience than apps made to take advantage of the large screen of tablets".

Scaled up apps are a non-existing problem. I encountered this occasionally, but never without having an alternative which is tailored for tablets.

--> "Want to see something comical, look at the Facebook phone app running on a tablet."

When I want to see something comical, I look at people who use a tablet with a Web App. I do use them occasionally on the phone, but never on the tablet, since it is big enough to just use the browser.

Regarding Facebook, I do not use this. Probably Facebook also expects sane tablet users to use the browser...

[Tester]

@Earendil Star:

For god's sake, grow up. Your paranoia concerning Microsoft is just ridiculous. Nobody in mobile cares about them anymore, there are no astroturfers for them anymore - we sure have some people astroturfing for Apple, but if you continue to accuse them of Microsoft astroturfing you only ruin your own credibility - if that ever existed, all your posts I remember are the same pathetic hate style.

@Leebase, eduardom:

Even if Microsoft hasn't given up on Windows Phone, the app developers sure have. I see it left and right with people who once were enthusisastic when they started quickly give up when they see that they
a) never make any profit from app sales, if that was their initial intent
b) even with service apps never get any traction - the time is better invested into improving the iOS and Android versions because they feel that gives them a bigger advantage.

So, the app market definitely has peaked. We can see that in the increasing amount of dead apps, among them several high profile ones.

This is a battle Microsoft can never win, they tried without success for 4 years now and there's still not even a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Their only chance would be to sink even more money into this futile endeavour - this is something Steve Ballmer would have done, but with Nadella I have my doubts. He cannot just shut down the business so closely after its acquisition but if I judge him correctly that was a deal he'd happily have declined in the first place. I think the only option left right now is to sit it out for a few quarters while trying to reduce the costs and then in maybe 1.5 years tell the public that they see no future in their deficient mobile unit and then close it.

Leebase is correct that their only salvation may be the enterprise market - provided they find enough stupid executives they can sell their deficient product to. But considering that these people are the core of the often lauded 'affluent Apple user base' it's an uphill battle with an extreme amount of resistance to overcome. So again, it's doubtful that the costs will justify the results.

In the end the shareholders will speak, and since 'maximizing shareholder value' is the ultimate goal, this will mean that they won't tolerate a deficient business unit with no hope in sight forever.

Mobile is a market Microsoft has lost - and it's clear that with their past strategy they won't gain a foothold there, they completely need to rethink their approach - to one that doesn't involve their own operating system on every platform. And when I see some recent signs - like MSOffice being released for competing platforms or - gasp! - cross platform development options being integrated into their Visual Studio development suite - something unthinkable even one or two years ago!, I think the signs are clear that management has realized this and is acting accordingly.

[Earendil Star]

"Microsoft in Mobile is in slightly better shape than Blackberry"... (JOD)

In other news, Ford dumps MS and switches to Blackberry for its car infotainment system...

http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/12/technology/ford-microsoft-blackberry/

MS, crappy software does not last if you are no longer the monopolist...

[AndThisWillBeToo]

@Baron
What do you expect from Earendil? The whole blog post from Tomi has more Elop/MS/WP rant than stuff about Nokia N1. Quite hilarious as Elop and MS have nothing to do with it and N1 does not run WP.

As an unrelated news: my phone broke so I've used my old N900 as a replacement. It's funny that it fails so many of Tomi's complaint items from the 101 reasons not to buy a Windows Phone list, such as "The idle screen is completely blank and cannot display time or notifications" or "phone can be powered off while locked". And don't get me started with FM radio...

[Winter]

@boron95
"In Mobile, Microsoft is the little guy, trying to take a seat at the Apple Android table. 3 competitors is better than 2 in any consumer market."

Just like market competition between DC current from Edison and AC from Westinghouse. And all the battling mobile network standards in the USA, and the global battle between 110V/60Hz and 220V/50Hz. They have all been (and still are) a huge and senseless cost on technology.

Only someone from the USA could hail the consumer lockin and burden of senseless standard wars as a "win". The win is only in the higher consumer prizes from the lockin.

[Earendil Star]

Woha... the Astros are really angry today... I like it!

As usual they like indulging just in personal attacks... a pack of wolves... no focus on topics and facts.

Comments on the quality of MS' sw for car infotainment? No.
On MS' attitute towards its customers (see N8 horror story I talked about)? No.
No way. What counts is "you see MS everywhere", "rants", "stuck in 2010", etc.

Well, the reason why MS is connected to the Nokia N1 is that Nokia's fate since 2011 was dominated by MS and it's crappy WP (P)OS. The software that -according to you, astros, since your past comments are there for everyone to read- was supposed to be the "best that could happen to Nokia". In fact, it was the worst that could have happened to Nokia, as is now totally clear and evident and in line with what I went on repeating for ages.

So the interesting story, for me, now, is that a company that was devoured from the inside by the MS Moloch is now trying to stage a comeback, and to keep the value of its brand from waning. The reason I commented was that for the first time since 2011 finally Nokia seems to be showing a touch of leadership, which had disappeared during the MS Flop era.

And what happens now? That the usual astros start -as expected- to criticize current Nokia actions, while the same or similar things that when done under the MS tenure were considered "the best Nokia could do". This is the kind of inconsistency that must be highlighted, and must be singled out and exposed and ridiculed.

Nokia now stands a tough fight, it will be really hard to repair the damage that was made by Elop. But the signs coming from the new management are promising. And the first device, on Android, also looks quite appealing.

These are the topics that interest me. And fighting against attempts at rewriting history.

I gladly leave it to the astros to discuss about the N900 (from 2010, precisely...), America vs Europe, how good MS is, alleged GSM cartels, how bad Samsung is faring together with Android, etc., all nonsense, for which I really cannot give a...