Symbian in Motion

SiMo, a Retrospective

by Zach at 9:51 am | September 03rd, 2008 | Category: FYI

The first SiMo post was written on January 9, 2007. At that time, I had a Nokia N80 and it was far and away the most impressive handset I had even owned. When launched, this blog carried the horrendous name “the Nokia S60 3rd Edition Applications Review blog” and was dedicated to app reviews as the name might indicate. The blog title was the result of a slightly rushed launch and at that time it was hosted on blogs.com. Within 12 days of going live, the blog had already exceeded the blogs.com free bandwidth allotment (thanks in large part to a link from Tommi Vilkamo’s old blog) and was moved to Mobile9.com servers shortly there after.

The first application reviewed on the blog was Remind Me by Mobifun Soft. It’s still a hugely useful app. The first contest held on the blog was posted on May 2, 2007 and its goal was to rename the blog. The winning name of course, was Symbian in Motion. A big thanks to RIM for not suing me.

Surprisingly perhaps, the most popular post published on this blog in terms of traffic was a simple announcement that rotateMe 1.21 became available. The most popular post in terms of reader comments (319) was Palringo’s 1,000 Words Contest where we gave away a Nokia E90 handset. The winning picture, snapped by Cheryl, was awesome.

Not surprisingly, the most viewed category on SiMo has been Freeware followed very closely by Themes and then Application Reviews.

The top three sources of traffic in order are Google, direct (no referral) and Mobile9.com. The fourth is Jukka’s site. The most popular search term that lead people to this blog is “rotate me”. The most visited page is the home page.

The top three countries in terms of unique traffic in order are the US, UK and Germany. SiMo has had visitors from a total of 206 countries. My favorite stat for some reason is the fact that we have had one single unique visitor from each of the following 13 locations: British Virgin Islands, Somalia, Mayotte, Equatorial Guinea, Micronesia, Chad, Burundi, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Haiti and Vatican (though I doubt it was the Pope).

As of today (and since Google tracking code was installed on the blog a few months after launch) there have been just under 1M unique visitors to this blog and they have viewed about 1.5M pages. The most visits to this blog in a single day (3,497) took place on March 18, 2008. There are currently just under 1,000 subscribers to this blog’s Feedburner feed, though that number was much higher when content flowed a bit more regularly.

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You might be wondering why we’re posting all of this and the answer is two-fold: First, it was kind of fun to go back through the blog and get all nostalgic. Second, and more importantly, Abul and I decided about a month ago that we would shut SiMo down indefinitely.

On my end, there are several reasons for this decision and I won’t go into all of them. Lack of time is one and lack of return is another. The biggest reason perhaps is that Nokia simply hasn’t innovated in quite some time. The scope of this blog is “Symbian” and the space is a bit stale right now. Sure there are some great new handsets that came out recently and there are a couple of nice ones coming down the pipe. Are they innovative though? S60 hasn’t received a major revision (from the user’s perspective) in who knows how long, and it likely won’t any time soon. A different form factor and few more megapixels each year just don’t cut it. Long story short, I’m tired of trying to find new ways to say the same thing.

So what does the future hold for Nokia? Honestly, I have no idea. The “Internet Company” thing hasn’t yielded anything to write home about thus far, at least not as far as I’m concerned. To me, the strategy has been “give them what they already have”. Nokia is slowly building a portfolio of services that already exist ad nauseum with the hope that customers will use them because they tie in very well with Nokia handsets. There are several problems with this strategy, not the least of which is the simple fact that these services don’t tie in especially well with Nokia handsets. Mosh is the most obvious example but even an app / service combo like “Share Online” and “Share on Ovi” is trumped a thousand times over by ShoZu.

As for Nokia’s upcoming handset lineup (that we currently know about), color me unimpressed. Different shapes, different sizes, a mid-range touchscreen handset that has been pushed back continuously… I see nothing that gives me any reason to replace my current stock. Perhaps 2009 will bring some surprises with it but even the few unannounced handsets that I know about are nothing outside of the current trend at Nokia. I’m glad that Nokia decided to start including AT&T UMTS compatibility with new handsets despite the fact that it makes little attempt to actually sell smartphones here in the US. A strange strategy indeed, and Nokia’s quarterly reports tell us quite clearly how this strategy is working out.

One of Nokia’s biggest problems I believe, is its success. Nokia appears to have gotten way too comfortable at the top, forgetting that it got there by innovating. The company most certainly won’t stay at the top without remembering this and going back to the drawing board on several levels. The mobile space will continue to become more competitive and the smartphone space is already in the process of getting flipped on its end with handsets like the iPhone swimming around and gobbling up market share from the big boys left and right. What happens in a few years when Apple has multiple handset models available and uses its marketing and design prowess to bring them each as much hype as the iPhone? Millions upon millions of lost customers for companies such as Nokia, that’s what. And let us not dismiss Android because Google will become a major player in the mobile game over the coming years.

I still enjoy the few Nokia products I own such as my E71 and N95 8GB and I’ll continue to cover Nokia on BGR as well as my personal blog from time to time. I just hope that Nokia gives me more interesting content to cover down the road as opposed to more of the same. A $900 flagship Nseries that barely offers anything new for the consumer and will run for about three hours before the battery starts gasping? No thanks.

Abul seems to share many of my sentiments and here is a quick note from him:

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In the last few months it’s been a pretty hectic schedule trying to blog for SiMo whilst keeping a lot of other things on my plate going on and frankly I’ve done a pretty decent job of coping with it up to now. The fact is it’s taking a lot of energy and to be honest I’ve lost the interest on Symbian, there just isn’t much out there which I find to be able to write about. So it’s decision time, and it has come down to dropping a few projects, with SiMo unfortunately being one of them. I’ll still be blogging for adonismobile and perhaps more frequently now.

So thanks for reading my posts and the great feedback up till now, I’ll probably see you on the other side, somewhere.

Abul.

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As for me, I’ll be maintaining The Outsidr as my personal blog and I will continue to write on BGR and elsewhere. I also have a side project that I’ll be announcing later this month, though it is not mobile-related. Those of you who subscribe to SiMo’s Feedburner feed will be forwarded to The Outsidr beginning next week most likely and I hope that some of you stick around to discuss a wider range of topics with me. Symbian is hardly down for the count and I’m sure each of you currently subscribe to a handful of the thousands of other Symbian blogs out there. The web is flooded with them. If not, check out my blogroll for a taste and try Google to fill in the cracks.

Thanks to all of the great SiMo readers out there for having read my posts and especially to those who have participated in resulting conversations.

To the many talented developers I’ve befriended along the way, you each deserve an award for helping to fill the many, many holes in S60. Every OS has holes that need to be filled of course but I don’t think any mobile OS has more talented developers supporting it than Symbian. Kudos.

To my friends at Nokia, please know that this is my personal opinion and though it seems a bit negative, it hardly reflects my feelings about individuals within the company. Nokia is at the top and it got there due to the hard work and passion of many, many talented people. With the right direction, my hope is that all of this talent will be properly harnessed once again and Nokia will continue to dominate the market it played a huge role in creating.

If anyone needs to contact me for any reason, feel free to shoot me an email:

zach [[at]] mobile9 [[dot]] com

-Zach

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