Herkko called me in the afternoon and asked to turn my browser on Nokia’s N97 launch event… What an entertaining session it was!
Let’s start from form. Kallasvuo and Vanjoki delivered — in their own way. Kallasvuo looks like the late Leonid Brezhnev with thick eyebrows and all. He also sounds like one talking Finglish just like any Finnish politician of his generation. Is he as stagnatic as a leader, I don’t know.
Vanjoki looks more energetic, though his accent is almost as thick. Add to that a kind of cold stiffness with Harley pics and hunting references, and you have another Eastern European godfather in a pretty odd position.
Still, with their apparent shortcomings, the guys appeared as likeable. Sort of honest, foreign scout boys.
Then substance. Kallasvuo claims: “Symbian offers the industry’s only truly open and mature operating system.” As I’ve said before, open on paper is not open in practice. The most open and mature platform in the “mobile industry” is iPhone’s OS X by any meter. Most interesting apps. Most development enthusiasm. Full unix hacker pwned stuff you can trust on. To compare, Symbian is that Nokia-regulated semi-open economy where almost no one installs any third party apps. Just forget about it. — Where are Nokia’s Linux phones?! I mean it’s soon 2009. I would be truly interested.
Then Vanjoki: “Shiny and beautiful…. And it should have a name. Nokia 97. That’s what we call it.” Seeing Vanjoki do his act somehow brought to my mind Dick Jones launching another big, clumsy and ugly tech toy in Robocop. Again, the similarities are obvious, both in looks and talk: “Fellow executives… it’s a pleasure to introduce you to the future of law enforcement. ED-209.” Yeah, it did kill, but not very elegantly.