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"well-patented""well-patented"Posted Oct 11, 2012 2:57 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193)In reply to: "well-patented" by pboddie Parent article: MeeGo to return next month with Jolla phone launch (The H)
> Jolla may indeed fail, and a lesson from Nokia is already available: don't expect to be showered with champagne, medals or whatever after releasing one or two handsets when you are not Apple (or even Palm) and your other competitors are releasing tens of them.
Apple have only ever released six handsets since mid-2007, while there's a strong argument to be made that a huge amount of Nokia's difficulties stemmed from their desire to release hundreds of handsets. They tried 'the more the merrier', and it just didn't work out for them.
Getting away from patents and on to real work would be really, really, really nice, but the cold hard reality is that you cannot even consider doing a mobile phone without either an extensive patent portfolio to cross-license, extremely deep pockets, or both. I think people are forgetting that despite OpenMoko being a fully open-source community-driven phone (which it wasn't), it was backed fully by FIC, which could afford to license it into existence.
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"well-patented" Posted Oct 11, 2012 12:04 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Nokia, as I said, "are not Apple". Apple can afford to do one handset per year because they are the media darling and can virtually guarantee favourable publicity: had any other product had the same flaws as those in the Apple maps product, reviewers would have been scathing and the product swiftly withdrawn, but instead everyone makes excuses for the company and it still gets 9-out-of-10 scores. To Apple's credit, the company also tries a bit harder to make a product that doesn't give the impression of being the incoherent result of an unholy committee of hardware test engineers and marketing executives. Nokia and Microsoft have neither the favour of the media nor the stamina to make a single product (or maybe a handful) that can outshine and outsell the relentless competition for several months at a time.
As for OpenMoko, I'm aware of how OpenMoko came about and why that project was able to bring a finished product into existence without being immediately sued, although I imagine that the real patent defence was mostly based on the licensing of the various patent-encumbered standards so that the various cartels couldn't "double dip" and demand that the project pay royalties for each and every affected component and then also the assembled product. Maybe FIC also licensed non-standards-related patents from all the different patent predators, too, but given what we see now, I really doubt that.
"well-patented" Posted Oct 11, 2012 12:53 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
> Apple can afford to do one handset per year because they are the media darling and can virtually guarantee favourable publicity: had any other product had the same flaws as those in the Apple maps product, reviewers would have been scathing and the product swiftly withdrawn, but instead everyone makes excuses for the company and it still gets 9-out-of-10 scores.
This is true now, but wasn't necessarily true (and certainly not to the same extent) when they launched the iPhone in mid-2007. At the time, people were saying that the iPhone was useless because it didn't feature a replaceable battery, or extendable memory (e.g. SD).
Say what you like about Apple, but they earned their position through consistently brilliant execution (iOS6 maps notwithstanding). Nokia once had that position — who said anything bad about a Nokia phone in 2005? — but utterly, utterly wasted it.
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