Nokia’s new CEO, Stephen Elop, may have grabbed all the headlines, but another hire could be just as critical to the firm’s attempt to match Apple in the high end handset space. Peter Skillman – now head of Nokia’s new software platform MeeGo, and formerly chief designer at Palm – has given his first interviews. He wants to shift towards quality not quantity, reducing the vast number of phones Nokia makes, but improving the focus on design values.
Skillman left Palm in the summer after it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He is a good win for Nokia – although the Palm Pre, whose design team he headed, was not a resounding commercial success, it has been widely applauded for its features and user interface, and caused a big stir when it was initially unveiled by Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein. Combining that kind of design flair with Nokia’s channels and market weight could deliver impressive results, and with MeeGo, Skillman will be working with a new generation, web-oriented OS, close to webOS in approach.
In a podcast with design firm Zurb, reported by Forbes, Skillman criticized Apple’s famous user experience. He said its weakness was that it forced users to return to the homescreen before using a new application. “If a user wants to walk from the kitchen to the dining room in her house, she simply walks through,” he said. “It does not work like that in mobile – you have to go through the front door to get to the kitchen. This is not a model that human beings are used to. People are spatial.”
He also had little time for some of the user interface overlays that firms like HTC, Motorola and Sony Ericsson have put on Android. UIs like HTC Sense have managed to close the user experience gap with iPhone, and are certainly ahead of Nokia’s recent UIs, but Skillman is undaunted, and said there was “too much junk” in overlays, particularly pointing to Motoblur.
While acknowledging some of the flaws in the Palm Pre and Pixi, notably browser performance issues, he was mainly looking ahead to the strategy for Nokia. He “Nokia might focus on a smaller range of really great products”, and dismissed the opinion of many analysts that the firm should concentrate on the mass market, where it has its greatest strength. He commented: “If you’re not succeeding at the high end, then you’re absolutely doomed to failure”, and believes this will remain true as long as phones are heavily subsidized, so the high retail price is hidden from the consumer.
Other essentials for a Nokia turnaround at this high end? A strong developer community (already a plus in the Finnish firm’s track record), plus several areas where the company is not yet proven – “delicious hardware”, cloud services and a “rich physical user interface”. He said ominously: “If you’re missing one piece, in this game, you’re dead.” He also said there was only room for five vendors in the advanced smartphone market, and as well as ticking the above boxes, these would need to embrace newer trends, notably convergence with TVs, PCs and cars, and behavioural changes like gesture recognition.