Before I launch into this (long overdue) post, I want to state up front that I'm talking about Nokia smartphones in particular. I know Nokia is doing well in the low end phone space (except in the US). Since I'm such a good history student, before we start this, let's take the Tardis back a few years and look at what was happening back in 2003.

In 2003, more or less, the Nokia 3650 (and the non-retarted keypad cousins of the phone) launched. I apologize if any of these dates are off, but I'm too apathetic to look any of this up. The 3650 (and the non-retarted cousins thereof) were followed up by the 6600/6620 phones.

So in the span of two years, Nokia managed to get 3 (or 4, depending on how you look at it) S60 smartphones out on various US carriers (AT&T, Cingular, and T-Mobile). They never really had a hold on the US market before this, but this was a fine start, and more importantly, people bought the phones. People liked the phones. And if you want to count the ill-conceived N-Gage as a phone, you could call it 5 (or 6) phones.

Meanwhile, Windows Mobile was a joke, Pocket PC phones resembled small bricks, and the blackberry was big, but not as big as it was going to be.

And then Nokia followed those hits up with the abysmal 6682. I'm not sure exactly what they were thinking with the 6682, but here's what they did:

• Increased the camera from .3 to 1.3 megapixels. Good.
  
• Increased the processor speed. Also good.
  
• Decreased the amount of RAM. Sorry, no... destroyed the RAM. Sorry, no, raped and pillaged the RAM
  

So there you had it... a smartphone that was a worthy successor to the device that preceeded it, but you couldn't actually do anything much with it. All because Nokia needed to save .25 cents per unit.

It's unlikely that we, the phone buying public, will ever know what happened with the 6682, but almost as soon as it appeared, it was yanked off the shelves. Apparently Nokia had designed a phone that wouldn't work with Cingular's older SIM cards. Yes, the world's largest cellphone company actually fucked on a level that big. It's almost mind boggling.

So the 6682 was discontinued sometime last year.. since then we've seen the Nokia E62, which managed to sell all of 32 units across America, and rumors of the N75. Which leads me to my next point, which is..

What the hell is Nokia doing?

And when I ask that question, I'm asking as a concerned friend. First of all, someone needs to tell Nokia, soon, that they can't honestly call any N-series phone a 'multimedia device' if you can't hook up a pair of goddamned headphones without an adaptor. Either give the phones proper headphone jacks or give them A2DP. If you're not going to give them either, call them what they really are, overpriced toys for fanboys.

Second, Andrew over at the register was absolutely right when he said that "a special circle of Hell needs to be created for the souls behind Nokia's new web browser". A lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time getting the whole mobile browsing thing working to the point where things just fit right on your phone and were usable. Then Nokia comes along and introduces the ultimate parlor showoff trick of displaying a full page on the phone in a thumbnail fashion, and reintroduced 4 way scrolling to the phone browser.

Want to simulate the nokia browser on your computer? Go to cnn.com and resize your desktop to 320x240. Done.

Meanwhile, the email application on S60 has been the same craptastic and sluggish client that's been with us for at least 4 years now. Want to save an attachment with an unknown file extension to your storage card so you can load it on a computer that might understand it. You can't... not allowed. Want to use T9 predictive lookup in your contacts app? Want to see more than one event for your today screen? Hell, do you want to increase the font size of your Today screen so you can read the thing? Sorry, none of these things are possible.

Did the competition waste their time with browsers from hell and VGA camcorders on their phones? No, they did not. They improved and refined. Today, WM2005/6 is arguably better than S60 for business users, and is fast approaching the point where it's better for casual/power smartphone users.

Nokia, or more specifically the S60 division inside Nokia, probably doesn't have the money to screw up and still maintain parity with the Joneses. And screw up they did...

But what about all that great Symbian software? Well, ya see, with S60 V3 (FP1/2), everyone had to start from scratch. And developing for S60 is a bitch. And a half. It's like being thrown to a Sarlacc.

There's just no way to begin to describe how painful getting started with S60 development is. When I started JonnyChat, I wrote the initial java version in a little under a week. When I restarted development to do the J2ME polish version, I did a Windows Mobile port for grins and giggles, and got something partially working in a few hours. If you have a few hours to spare, you *might* be able to get a IDE and SDK installed. And I say might, because if you do anything out of order, or your computer just doesn't look right, they're not going to install and interact properly.

And Nokia, to their credit, is making it as hardly as humanly possible. Let's take a look at Forum Nokia (their development website) and count the IDE's available:

• Carbide.c++ Express


• Carbide.C++ Developer


• CodeWarrior


• Carbide.vs

For the sake of my sanity I've left out the other CodeWarrior. So on the download page, you have 3 different Carbide IDEs, none of which has any benefits or drawbacks listed, and you have to figure out which to choose. Oh, they're all based on Eclipse, so you've got to deal with that loveliness too.

Now, how to figure out which SDK you want is anyone's guess. I defy you to go to the tools and SDKs page and figure out where to begin.
But let's assume you got your SDK and figured out which IDE you want. You've got no instructions on which to install where. Not a clue. It's literally install and pray.

So what does this mean... IMO, fewer S60 apps. Yes, I know, you have your choice of 8 task managers. But the guys over at Sling have a slingplayer for Windows Mobile. They've been working on a S60 version for seemingly eons.. it's nowhere to be found. The guys at Skype have a Windows Mobile version of Skype. They also have Skype client for OSX and Linux, so they probably know something about cross platform coding. They've also been working on an S60 version for eons as well. My guess, S60 development has become so much of a pain in the ass for those people that they've simply shelved the projects, or put them on the back burner.

What can Nokia do to help? First of all, fix your SDK and IDEs. Make it easier for developers to get started with S60 development.

Second, fix your devices. Improve the PIM apps. Put proper headphone ports or A2DP profiles on them. Mini-USB for everyone. Create viable and powerful smartphones, and people will buy them.

Just don't keep doing what you're doing and thinking it's all OK. Because it's not. S60's dwindling marketshare reflects this. It's time to be proactive and fix it.