Category: nokia

On All About Windows Phone #61, they discuss the Nokia Lumia 520 as well is the Lumia 521 that will launch on T-Mobile in May. Given Nokia’s dominant share of Windows Phone devices, it’s interesting they are attacking it at a variety of price points and appear to be gaining some market share in the low end of the Smartphone market, a place Android has dominated due to lack of alternatives.

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Nokia may have left Symbian on the side of the road in its quest to embrace Windows Phone, but Symbian is not dead.

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My quote in The Mobile Industry Reviews Yesterdays Lumia Launch by Nokia – Forbes sums up my feelings nicely:

Here’s my very short summary of Nokia’s announcement: 2 handsets, no day and date of release. The rest of it is meaningless rubbish.

The 800 pound gorilla in the smartphone space (Apple) does a proper job of doing a product announcement. They will almost always tell you two important things about it:

• When you can order it (usually immediately)
• When will it ship (usually in a few days)

If Nokia hoped to wow any real consumers with their announcement, they’ve already lost. Even if consumers were pleased with what Nokia announced, or even excited, they have no idea when it will be available or when they can order it. They will simply forget about it and move on.

Nokia may have taken some cues from Apple in terms of handset design–copy with pride, as they used to say internally–but clearly they also need to take some cues on how to announce a product.

A lot of people are talking about the freefall of Nokia’s stock, lately. A few have even made the comparison that Nokia’s stock is now lower than X, which we never thought would happen. Here’s my own personal version of that:

Why am I making this particular comparison? Three years ago, Nokia sold a part of themselves–the part I spent a decade of my life working for–to Check Point. At the time, the profits our business unit was making was “rounding error” to the larger Nokia, who was still doing reasonably well in 2009 despite the ascension of the iPhone. That said, our business wasn’t core to Nokia, so they tried to sell us to an investment firm in 2008, which ultimately backed out due to the general state of the economy at the time.

Check Point picked up the business unit, which immediately contributed to the bottom line. In the last three years, Check Point stock has more than doubled and revenue continues to increase quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year.

Nokia’s? The stock is down over 85% over the same 3 year period. Profits? None to be seen anytime soon.

I’m very glad I got off shoved off the platform before it started burning.

I had some more thoughts on Nokia’s entire strategy with gutting Symbian and Meego and switching everything to Windows Phone and their Lumia handsets. It is related to Tomi Ahonen’s excellent post about how Nokia Lumia handsets are not being sold by operators.

There is clearly a perception that the Lumia 800 is a “flagship” device. Especially for consumers who haven’t heard much from Nokia lately under than about Lumia. That’s not entirely true as Nokia has also been pushing their Asha devices. I find them quite compelling from a form, functionality, and pricing standpoint (especially the Asha 302). I’d buy one if they were sold in the US, which, sadly, they’re not.

Anyway, Tomi’s assertion in his article–which I agree with, by the way–is that people expecting certain features to be present in “flagship” devices will be truly disappointed when they pick up a Lumia device, either immediately or shortly after they take it home. In fact, even in its current iteration (7.5 “Mango”), Windows Phone seems a bit like iPhone 1.0, which also lacked many smartphone features. That didn’t stop people from buying it in bucketloads.

Personally, I think Windows Phone 7 is targeted at people upgrading from featurephones, which don’t have a lot of the features that are missing on Windows Phone. People who aren’t accustomed to “smartphone” features aren’t going to notice those features are missing, thus may not complain and return the device.

This highlights just how risky Nokia’s strategy truly is. They gutted their high-end phones (Symbian, Meego, etc) and opted to replace it with an yet-unproven “smartphone lite.” Meanwhile, the rest of the market is clearly pushing towards smarter phones, not dumber ones.

It’s no secret that a number of outlets are reporting that the Nokia Lumia 710 will launch on T-Mobile USA sometime in January. This phone is one of two devices Nokia has produced with Windows Phone 7 on it (the other being the higher-end Lumia 800), which were initially made available outside the US in November. 
 
Being an ex-Nokia employee for nearly 3 years now, and not being among the smartphone reviewing elite that companies regularly send handsets to for view, I haven’t seen this device up close and personal yet. That said I’ve heard and read a number of reviews of the device that suggest that it is a respectable device for the price point. Having used Nokia handsets for more than a decade, I have no reason to doubt those assessments. 
The chatter I’ve seen on Twitter suggests people are excited about Nokia’s return to the US smartphone market, even if it is on the weakest of the largest carriers and not their “best” Windows Phone device they have. You have to start somewhere, I suppose. 
 
I read an interesting statement on The Verge about how T-Mobile is positioning the Lumia 710 against other smartphones: “against first-time smartphone buyers.” In other words, they are betting the Lumia 710 will be big among people buying smartphones for the first time. 
 
It’s great that Nokia’s getting back in the US Smartphone game with the Lumia 710, but let’s face it: the real barrier to adoption isn’t the price point of the handset itself, it’s the cost of the monthly service plan required to operate it. 
 
If you wanted an iPhone and hadn’t yet bought one, you can get the 3GS for free on a two year agreement with AT&T. The iPhone 4 can be had on Verizon and AT&T for $99 with a two year agreement. You can find Android handsets at similar price points on all operators. 
 
Handset cost for a subsidized smartphone is really not that much of an issue. It’s a one-time cost most people can absorb or save their pennies for. The much harder pill to swallow is the additional $15-$30 per line per month (in addition to a $40 voice plan) that is required when you buy a smartphone from a major US carrier. That’s a price you have to pay even if you choose to pay full price for the handset. 
 
Until the operators restructure their service offers to make the overall cost operating a smartphone on their network cheaper, I don’t expect to see a massive uptick in smartphone adoption–here in the US or anywhere else. 
 
And as for Nokia kick starting Windows Phone 7 sales, I doubt it. They’ll bring in some incremental improvements to their overall market share numbers, but I don’t see this phone on the weakest of the four national networks being the one that breaks open the market for Windows Phone 7.

From When a Smartphone Is Too Much for Travel – NYTimes.com:

With the rise of the iPhone and the Blackberry, it’s hard to imagine hitting the road without a phone that can’t download music, serve up maps or send and receive e-mail. But sometimes a body just needs to make a few calls from the road. Sometimes a body needs a featureless phone.

Or you can use an older Symbian device like the Nokia E71 and get the best of both worlds–the ability to make calls, long battery life and some Smartphone niceties like maps and social networking.

Some of the annoyances of Symbian phones of this vintage, namely the incessant prompts to connect, are actually a benefit. When I’m traveling and using one of my roaming SIMs (e.g. Truphone, Maxroam), I can certainly use data, but even at their lower rates, I don’t want to use very much data. Just enough to, say, update my Twitter feed.

Using Opera Mini on a late-model Symbian device like the Nokia E71, which compresses web pages by up to 90% by routing requests through Opera’s servers, you can do that and more without breaking the bank.