Zerojay’s just found that N810′s release date was pushed back to Dec 19th, at least on NokiaUSA. Not a good news for me, and the other 499 dev/users who received the discount code. To be honest, N810 doesn’t even show a release date on www.nokia.it, and shop.nokia.it doesn’t even know about it. In the meantime N810 can be found on the shelves of many USA’s shops and flagship shops.
That’s not a big problem. I mean, I can wait and keep using my N800, even if I have to admit it won’t make me so happy. Me, and many others, spent the last days looking at their mailboxes in the wait of that email.
But was it a smart move from Nokia? My answer is “no, it was a DUMB move”, at least from a strategic point of view.
A smart strategy would have allowed developers to get their devices pretty much in advance, even with an unstable OS2008 version perhaps? which could have helped in bugfixing, perhaps, and in order to be able to start porting apps and docs to the new platform. And also, at this point if I knew I wasn’t one of those happy/lucky 500 perhaps I’d but a N810 full price, and I’d start working with it now. But with the discount code waiting in my mailbox, the best I can do is flashing an unofficial ITOS2008 on my N800 and try something new.
Now, what’s going to happen? Simply new users, N810 users, will have almost nothing to install in their new devices.
That would be kinda funny to know who decided such a strategy. Who knows…
And also, wouldn’t have been easier to allow codes to be used (at least) in Nokia’s flagship stores?
We’ll see…
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I don’t think it was a strategic move.
I think something happened that delayed everything.
If you check the e-mail with the discount code, they said that you’d be able to use it “soon”.
Then we got the announce that the release of the N810 was delayed by a week or so.
And here we are still waiting (as THIS is the week when it should be announce and, actually, it WAS annonunced in the US).
I really think that Nokia wanted to ship it earlier, but got some problems.
They even started sending it to retail stores across the US first, but they stopped that stream too (as many on-line store says they’ll get them by Dec. 19th) and some EU store say even January.
I think this has to do with some firmware issue. Something related to OS2008.
They are “silently” working on it. “Silently”, here, means “fast”. Keep focusing on fix whatever happened and then talk to the people.
THIS may be the wrong strategy.
Yes, I agree that something happened and release date needed to be delayed. But, let’s consider that they started shipping out N810s to US reseller anyway, without having any developer working on porting apps on the new platform. Yes anything got delayed, but I still see a poor strategic move. IMHO
Let’s see what’s going on…
Aniello says “Then we got the announce that the release of the N810 was delayed by a week or so.”
This is the first time outside of ITT that I’ve seen this. But no-one’s been able to provide a source. *Where* did we get this announcement?
There was no official announcements on the matter.
Only voices from the ITT forums (Texrat) and a response on the maemo-developers mailing list from Quim Gil about “working silently” about letting us know the exact dates it would be shipped.
The point here is communication. It happens every time. It costs 10 minutes to Ari to write down a line saying “sorry, something is wrong, we are trying to solve it. It has to do with software/firmware/hardware and we think we maybe will solve it in a week/a month/a year. Keep in touch, bla, bla, bla…
Well, from my point of view Nokia in the last few months is lacking information/communication not only on the N810 side. I’m also owner of a E90 Communicator, sporting some bugs and glitches here and there. Perhaps a firmware upgrade could solve solve some of them, but who knows if and when a new release will come for the italian market (e.g. english upgrade was released about a month ago). I’d also like to have speaker to be replaced, but last time I sent a phone to Nokia repair labs it took more than two months to have it back. From my point of view, Nokia produce best phones in the world, but their communication and support is kinda buggy! :(
As one of the other 499 …
Releasing the final device is in my opinion a good move, because the 500 developers that get the device promised to do certain things with it in order to get into the program. So in some cases writing detailed reviews but most of the developers will blog about the device anyway. IMHO It would not make sense to send out preproduction units which might have bugs that are going to be fixed in the end product. The reviews would point that bugs out and maybe end users would think twice about buying because they read about bugs that aren’t there in the end product
What really shocked me is that I need to get a credit card to buy from the nokia shop. I couldn’t get the device before december anyway because I need to get myself a credit card first.
New N810 Users will have plenty of things to install because the SDK is already there. And it’s pretty easy to install. You don’t develop on the device, but for the device!
As the release date has not been officially announced I don’t see a reason for Nokia / Ari to tell that it will be delayed. You can’T say it will be released later than rumors told – that would be really weird don’t you think?
“You don’t develop on the device, but for the device!”
Wrong … I develop on the device for the device :)
Michael, I could agree with you about not shipping pre-production devices, perhaps. But from my point of view, developing using ONLY the SDK, and thus not being able to debug/check/verify on a real device is not the right way. The SDK works great, true, but it’s not the real device.
By the way, I think that since as of now we don’t have nor a “real” release date, neither a “supposed” release date, it’s a lack of communication anyway. Having so many/only rumors about dates doesn’t sound so good, IMHO.
Well but as Quim stated in his e-mail they don’t have a confirmed date either (they had one and it was postponed by something). I don’t think they want to make the same mistake (give a wrong date) again.
So.. if we believe him, and I do, we’ll know when they’ll know.
At least I hope they will let us know as soon as they do.
Absolutely true. In fact I am “complaining” specifically about Nokia (odd?) behaviour. Quim, as well as everyone at Maemo, always proved his/their great attitude and openess to the community. I hope this was clear from the beginning.
We have official unofficial dates. I mean the anouncement of N810 said it would be available by mid november. It is already mid november and we don’t know:
a) If it is available anyplace (we’ve been told you can buy it in US but Nokia said no word about it),
b) The estimated official price of the product.
c) If there is a delay and how long (more or less) gonna take it in Europe.
I don’t care if they say it is gonna be in two weeks and it happens to be four weeks. But I’d like to know if we are talking about days, weeks or monthes.
@Eduard: I totally agree.
Well, Nokia officially announced the US availability around Nov. 19th.
Weird, the link did not appear in the previous post.
Retrying:
http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1169511
I understand your frustration but note that it is caused partly because of early delivery to developers (Chinook SDK) and contributors (codes). We could have done like in the N800 program and let pass first hardware, distribution and discounts enabled in shops. But this caused confusion on contributors not knowing whether to go and buy or wait to get a discount.
This time everybody knew in advance about the discounts, independently from hardware – distribution – shops schedules. If this turns to be a problem then we must to be more conservative next time. Delivering the same transparency on hardware – distribution – shops then with oss development is out of scope.
About us telling dates before having then confirmed, let’s not forget that we did so this year with the 770 HE and, well, it didn’t work out. Please understand if we don’t forget about some of the lessons learned. This is why we are “silently” working on having confirmed dates, an exercise that involves more parties and variables than you probably think. The day we have those dates you will be the first ones to know in maemo.org.
@Quim: first of all, thank you (as always) for answering. I want to clarify something, at least from my very own point of view. I’m not upset by not getting an N810 anytime soon. My thoughts were about Nokia’s (again, not Maemo’s) strategy. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense, to me, releasing a device to end users a month or two before than releasing it to developers.
Michael pointed out in one of the previous comments that pushing out to developers pre-production devices could have been too much, exposing too many bugs, that’s true. But it’s also true that releasing production devices to developers first could have helped poiting out more bugs, because of the “advanced-user” nature of those developers.
Again, beside being somehow sad having to wait until the new year to get my N810, I am not upset. I am grateful to you and everyone at Maemo for the great job you did and you are doing.
And as Eduard said, I don’t care if N810 will be released in the next weeks or in the next momth. That would simply nice, from a *strategic* point of view, to know when. Moreover if Nokia released a press communicate announcing N810 availability on shelves. Just strategy.
Also, I don’t think you did anything wrong in giving out codes so early. I strongly believe you did the right thing, from a community point of view, and Maemo is *also* a community. I strongly believe you don’t have to change anything in this process.
I also understand, as I said more than once, that what’s going on with Nokia/Maemo is something completely new and different.
A kinda big company {trying to deal | dealing} with an open source project and community.
I perfectly understand that’s not an easy task, both have their distinctiveness and peculiarities, they need to be put in harmony.
Not an easy task. But a great challeng for sure, both from Nokia’s/business and Maemo’s/Open Source point of view.
I guess they are about to perform public tests on IT OS 2008 beta and then release IT OS 2008 for both n800 and n810 synchronously and well-tested.Seems to be a good idea.Nobody wants to have half-working thingie.Though I have to admit that OS 2008 is great and the ONLY real issue is lack of apps.
Not to get anyone too excited, especially since the checkout page is giving me “Page Not Found,” but the n810 is now listed on the nseries.com online store. Maybe that means we will be able to use our developer discounts soon, though the n810 is listed as backordered.
December 15th aproaching ;)
I only hope that Italy won’t be last shop to have it available ;)