Nokia N8 not ready to ship
by Volker Weber
Photo: Nokia
I was expecting to have a Nokia N8 around the middle of September, briefly before it was going to fill up the channel for a late September release. This date has now passed, and Nokia has told me there won't be one by the end of the week before I leave for BB DevCon. Clearly, Nokia is missing their date for shipping by the end of September. Now there is a tweet from the Netherlands:
Slecht nieuws: Nokia N8 uitgesteld naar november door (wereldwijd) software probleem. Meer info volgt, ook voor mensen met reserveringen.
Which Google translates to:
Bad news: Nokia N8 postponed to November by (global) software problem. More info will follow, including those with reservations.
I am not surprised. The N8 that Nokia gave out to developers, but not to press, were running non-production software, that was clearly having issues. The N8 hardware has been done for a few month* already, but Nokia cannot get Symbian^3 out the door. My experience tells me, that even when they ship, you will have some issues until they fix them in the field.
*) Look at the date in the picture.
Comments
Is it worth looking at when it does (finally) come out. Nokia is effectively dead in the smart phone market these days isn't it?
It will be full of bugs. The E72, being more than one year old, is now running fine after around 5 major firmware updates. I honestly do not believe that the N8 will pull Nokia out of their crunch.
Nokia is doing the right thing NOT shipping it as is. We will see how good it is, once it hits the shelves.
Matt, Nokia is in a transition. The N8 is decent hardware and Symbian^3 is not bad. However, we will only see what Nokia can do, once they ship Symbian^4 and MeeGo. The current plan is that the new ^3 devices will not be upgradable to ^4 or MeeGo. We will see what Elop has to say about that.
Oh Vowe!
'Decent' and 'not bad', eh? It's going to be hard work to generate some real queue-overnight-before-the-shop-opens hype for a device like that, isn't it?
I don't want to write them off either, but they're going to have to pull something pretty amazing out of the bag to recover their position and the N8 with its what-the-future-looked-like-in-1976 looks doesn't really seem to be it, does it?
does anybody remember the release of the N95? It was unusable until two or so firmwareupdates came along.
John, I think that Nokia is doing an excellent marketing job for the N8. It does look compelling, and I will have to reserve judgement until I have actually used one for more than an hour or two.
Two questions run through my head:
1. What is the difference between the C7 and N8 other than (it seems) just the Megapixel count for the cameras?
2. How much will I regret something like 'less apps' or similar for Symbian^3 versus Symbian^4/MeeGoo?
