Here in Norway, Nokia has the largest share of the mobile phone market overall, and their smartphones are quite nice (and popular). At the moment, I'm trying to decide between buying an iPhone and a Nokia N97.
Get your hands on an N97 before buying one. The one I worked with last week seemed to crash just by looking at it. I literally had to pull the battery 3 times in the first hour, and it crashed on things like opening the SMS inbox. Don't know if I had a bad model, but it was one of the worst experiences I have ever had (and since I do quite a lot of mobile dev, I have seen quite a bit).
Maybe. But I'm not looking to match the iPhone. I'm just looking for a good phone. I currently have an HTC S710, and I like the full QWERTY keyboard, so that's a factor in favor of the N97. But, on the other hand, there are a lot of iPhone apps out there. So, I'm still on the fence.
Not really. N900 is tech oriented, not consumer oriented. N97 is squarely aimed at the consumer market as per the iPhone, and has the Ovi store for applications.
Nokia, as far as I'm aware, is the biggest cell phone company in the world. Here in China, when I see someone pull out a cell phone, it's a decent bet that it will be a Nokia.
And those phones have a web experience worth targeting? I understand that Nokia has a lot of phones out there, but the vast majority seem only tangentially related to the discussion of smartphone apps.
It's fairly easy to kick together a "mobile" version of a site. Just use these simple CSS rules:
img { display: none; }
body { hideous-eyebleach: true; }
For many phones, just having 0 style, 0 images and a few text fields is enough. Their browsers are barely capable of mediating an experience beyond that (let alone displaying it). These don't really represent a valid target for this discussion, I think.
Well, given that Nokia S60v3 browser _is_ webkit, I don't think that the results with your suggested stylesheet would be satisfactory. Would you accept it on your iphone?
If the phone is worth targetting, then target it. I'm just saying that arguing Nokia's total phone market share seems like a sort of sketchy way to extrapolate priorities for smartphone-enabled websites.
Does the Nokia S60v3 have large market share worth targeting? The reason Android and iPhone markets have such gravity is that they're large and relatively homogenous consumers of rich web content from the mobile space; maximum bang for minimum buck.
I really think that this article is just wrong, and its willingness to confuse rich-web-enabled smartphones with phones that can barely display unstyled webpages is what drives me to that conclusion.
Sorry, you're the one who's confused -- the article is quite explicit that the marketshare numbers given are for smartphones, not the entire phone market.
Except that we're talking about smartphones capable of delivering a web experience that is competent enough to be concerned about experience.
There are smartphones and then there are post-2006-smartphones, which actually do real web browsing. I strongly suspect that Nokias numbers here include many phones less capable than the one that was raised in objection previously. Is there independent evidence to the contrary?
Everyone and their mom and pop in India, those who have nicer phones, have a Nokia. But, yes, you're right, here in US I don't see them very often. I'm only taking about the smartphones.
The cheaper phone market in India is pretty fragmented.
I have never met one.