[delayclose]

TFA's main point is that it takes companies like Nokia a very long time to ship a new product. Fair enough, but the time frame and the value judgements therein are just ridiculous FUD, even if you consider that this type of prediction is always goign to have errors. A few points, off the top of my head:

1) Nokia had a touch screen phone (in addition to the tablets) years before iPhone, and released another in 2008 (5800 XpressMusic) and a third this year (N97, which the article mentions but which somehow seems not to count). TFA says first Nokia touch screen phones "with crude, unusable software" are due in 2011.

2) TFA claims that first devices comparable to the first iPhone would ship in 2014, and makes a snide remark about how competetive such a device would be then. This is, of course, a completely ignorant premise: Nokia's top models are, and always have been, technically ahead of the iPhone. If Nokia gets iPhone's usability in 2014, why would that come at the cost of losing their edge in tech?

[felipe]

As a former Nokia software engineer, I can tell you the difference is that Nokia has a bigger focus on hardware at the expense of software and usability. Basically, Nokia produces software the same way it produces hardware, using an internal methodology that follows a waterfall approach. For example, Agile practices are simply not taken seriously because most managers believe they won't fit in the grand scheme of things.

Also, differently than Apple, Nokia releases a huge number of models every year, worldwide. Apple has the wisdom (and the balls) to focus all its energies on very few products per year.

I also have a 5800, which is a huge improvement over previous Nokia phones. However, it's so far behind the iPhone that I don't even know how to begin describing it.