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Comment by marty_himself | Hacker News Reader

My experience with Nokia is: great hardware and absolutely awful software. How to rescue Nokia? Continue making great hardware and switch to Android on all phones, before everyone else does.

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I assume that recent nokia's phones are great mainly because they cannot run any other mobile OS than Symbian EKA2 (main reason being that EKA2 is hard-realtime microkernel with GSM/UMTS stack in userspace, while any other OS expects anything related to radio interface or telco protocols running on second separate CPU).

And I assume that this is major reason, why Nokia can pump out reasonable smartphones with size and battery life of dumb feature phone with price certainly bellow other smartphones. (Well I have E90, which certainly is not small or was not cheap, but battery life is unsurpassed by anything, except 10 year old high-end Nokia phones).

>My experience with Nokia is: great hardware and absolutely awful software.

I could say the same of Motorola. However, Android hasn't been a saviour for them. The Droid X has been criticised for a bad UI skin (originally called, perhaps somewhat ironically, Blur), and pre-installed bloatware that can't be removed.

Exactly. I've been looking at the new phones coming out and I think that a Nokia Android phone would kick everything else, including the iPhone4, out of the water.

I don't know if they'd ever be as beautiful as an iPhone, but on the other hand, they'd likely be able to make phone calls even if you did things like hold them in your hand. And, joking aside, I have a suspicion that Nokia does more in terms of design and testing to ensure that dropping the phone isn't going to wreck it. Probably more so on the lower end phones that are likely to be owned by teenagers, but my wife and I have had Nokia phones for a while, dropped them every now and then, and (fingers crossed) never had a problem.

I love the durability of Nokia phones. They're tools rather than some kind of precious object.

Their low-end consumer phones, maybe. In my experience their smartphones have been as poorly-built as everybody else's. My Nokia smartphones were the only phones I've owned that didn't still look good after two years, with discoloured plastic and loose parts.

I've been working at a large Finnish company for a year or so, and there's a lot of people with creaky old E90's. Discoloured and floppy, but they still work great.

I think it is part of the deal with moving-chassis phones (hinges and slides) - it's very hard to make them durable and still light.

My last Nokia ran Symbian. Lasted for years and years. Sure the case was pretty scratched up, but I didn't have to replace it every time I dropped it on the ground.

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