During an online conference taking place today, the folks of Mobilissimo.ro managed to pop a few questions to the designers of Nokia N8. We’re talking about Axel Meyer, chief of Mobile Computers Design at Nokia and Mikko Aarras, Senior Designer with Nokia. Numerous bloggers and journalists had one hour of chatter with the guys, asking them about the future of Nokia design and the secret behind the N8.
Let’s hope that such conversations will be available once more in the future, for us journalists to establish a better view on Nokia’s direction and maybe give them a word of advice or two. Sadly, the talk was mostly about the N8 today, not so much about the future and not so much about Nokia’s controversial choice of continuing on the Symbian^3 line, instead of dropping it in favor of MeeGo.
The Finnish designers dodged some questions regarding the OS of the next N Series phone after one week ago Nokia’s Ilari Nurmi (head of business smartphone section) said that Symbian will be kept as the main enterprise segment platform. Mikko and Axel said today that Nokia will keep using MeeGo, Symbian and Series40, according to the public’s needs, which is a pretty vague statement.
We were shocked to hear people talking about the N8’s reboot issues, with the Nokia people saying that if you press the Power button for 8 seconds you’ll reboot the phone and get rid of its blocked state. Also, they seemed to associate the 8 seconds with the N8 name, which was a joke, but a pretty strange one to be honest…
Things got really weird when Mobilissimo.ro asked if Nokia can compete with Android and iOS devices given their current OS choice (Symbian) and design issues. Mikko and Axel only said: “This is a competitive industry that drives on innovation, we have designed a very strong portfolio of new products that seamlessly combine the product design and the user experience, and the welcome has been extremely positive. It’s the combination that counts.”
No info about the N9, so when asked about it, Nokia’s designers claimed that the “future is bright” and we’ll be pleasantly surprised… We sure hope so…
