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Iphone, Blackberry and Android phones are killing Nokia
FINNISH PHONE MAKER Nokia has taken a whipping in the first quarter as its smartphones have taken a beating from its competitors' models.
Nokia posted unexpectedly low profits for its smartphones and the slump was due to increasingly cut-throat competition from the other name brand players.
Nokia's telecommunications equipment unit also posted a loss of £195.9 million and the company's shares dropped by 13 per cent.
"We continue to face tough competition with respect to the high-end of our mobile device portfolio, as well as challenging market conditions on the infrastructure side," Nokia chief executive officer, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, said in a statement.
One of Nokia's problems is that competing smartphone players are moving their stock around to appeal to different audiences. Apple's Iphone isn't just for Apple acolytes and early adopters willing to sell their souls for a piece of the action any longer. Apple has knocked its prices down so it's more of a mass market proposition, making it much harder for Nokia to compete against.
RIM has taken off its "business only" sign and is making smartphones for Joe Punter, and Google has thrown Android all over the place to see where it will stick.
If those aren't enough of a problem for Nokia, Microsoft also will be having a pop at it later this year with Windows Phone 7 Series handsets, which will no doubt be all things to all men. µ
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Nokia has been killing consumers with bad quality products and even worst warranty i hope thy die soon....
Talk to a current smartphone owner about the Nokia they used to have years ago and they'll rave about battery life and an interface which - while not exactly alive with features - worked quickly and intuitively.
Today's Nokias have slipped into a weird no man's land, providing neither the enterprise grade features corporate customers demand (BlackBerry) nor the eye candy that guarantees sales to consumers (iPhone).
If you've ever used a BlackBerry for business you'll know why the phone has been so successful, and if you've ever clapped eyes on the iPhone you'll know why consumerists flock to it - not only does it look right, it's even feels the perfect weight.
Do Nokia even have a BlackBerry or an iPhone in their building one wonders? Looking at their line up you'd imagine not.
I used to praise Nokia. But as someone else stated they got caught up in their own game of diversifying features to the point where a person could never buy the phone they really wanted.
You could get the FM radio, but not email. You could get email but not the FM radio, and on and on.
Then came Nokia's inability to fully test their phones before release which created buggy N97's and the like on what really was a beautiful phone.
Now enter smartphones and Nokia is left with no phone that does what the market wants.
At this point they need to pick an open source OS and stick with it. And for the sake of everything holy can we get Active Sync support please?
- I have noticed that Nokia now has a lot of latest products that look the same, and simply childish.
- A lot of product that do not really offer much "business like functionality and simplicity".
- user interface sometimes feels bolted on rather than integrated.
For example i used to have a blackberry curve but no longer do . . . it has been difficult and almost unbearable adjusting to using my Nokia N95 8GB, despite that the Nokia is supposed to have a higher specification.
Overall, Nokia needs to stop wasting time being a jack of all trades and focus on products like:
- E Series (which looks to be their best products till date).
- N900 like Series.
- Simple voice only phones.
- Create a "legal" clone of the HTC Incredible/Iphone/Windows 7 phone.
Thus that way they would be able to cut out a lot of their junk legacy products that offer no functionality that cannot be obtained with better competing products.
The issue with phones nowadays is that phones have become a portable computing device that also has be ergonomic and user friendly while at the same time allow for use in business oriented issues.
Nokia needs to stop living in the past and wake up to the reality that they need to create products similar to and better than the latest HTC phones for them to even have a chance at competing.
Otherwise, Nokia is bound to go the way of Xerox/Kodak/IBM and so on as far as consumer products are related.
and they are arrogant and ignorant as well.
The only customers they know and appreciate are the telcos, not the end customers.
Nokia is smart since the know how to make a good phone. Nokia is dumb because the internal structure and politics does seem to allow to do make a good smartphone.
It's not the competition that is tough, its Nokia being dumb and numb and ignorant.
The N900 was late, very late, way too late.
The hardware is outdated, the MAEMO software is cancelled.
Well, MeeGo looks like a very good idea to me since it is a real life OS that is a real Linux and therefore probably will draw a lot of developers.
If Nokia does manage to pair a well-finished and polished MeeGo with an this time up-to-date hardware then Nokia has a fair chance again. If they screw up again ... I don't know. I am tired of them.
If aa MeeGo device from Nokia can match the latest iPhone, Nexus One or the best HTC than I will go for such a device. If not I will consider Nokia a waste of my time and ignore them.
It's interesting to watch how Nokia operates. Over the years it has moved from a company that focused on mid-performance hardware with excellent usability (for the time) to a company that focuses on ultra-efficient production with soso software, and hardware that's all over the map.
Just think back to the era of the original 2100 or 6100 series phones. Compared to everything else that was available back then, they certainly weren't the smallest or lightest, but had very good battery endurance and a UI that was a pleasure to use if compared to the other brands available back then.
However, at some point Nokia entered into an unholy alliance with the telcos and ignored the importance of maintaining its innovative edge. I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but it seems to have been in the late 90's.
Today it's obvious that Nokia is the most efficient phone manufacturer on this planet. There have been multiple head-to-head bidding wars where Nokia's competition had to resort to below-cost pricing in order to try to get the deal, only to be driven out by Nokia who significantly undercut them and yet still made a handsome profit.
Unfortunately that production-focused mentality seems to have placed fundamental non-hardware related innovation in a back seat. The investment in Symbian and Maemo were interesting, but there was no follow-through with products and real commitment or strategy. The support for outside developers was for years timid, placing more focus on Nokia's internal software development, and those of partners that get "assistance" from Nokia.
(Note that Nokia doesn't seem to have been trying to control its developers the way that Apple does. Instead, Nokia seems to just not have paid enough attention to the needs of outside developers to package the necessary tools and information in a way to invite independent innovation.)
It would be incorrect to state that Nokia's intentional (or unintentional) strategy when it comes to its software and developer relations is a bad one. Short-lived hype can drive companies into commitments that look awfully silly when the hype dissipates.
However, now that the glass-UI running a Linux/BSD Unix derivative are clearly a significant portion of the market, Nokia needs to make a choice if it wants to play along or not. Their N97 and N910 plays are clearly headed in that direction.
In the end, I have a feeling Nokia has difficulty letting go control of the OS. Especially letting it go to a company such as Google, that's showing the symptoms of well-developed megalomania complex.
It seems they tried real hard to make Symbian work as well as the other alternatives, but somewhere along the way that OS seems to have hit a brick wall. If not in ability, then in support from third party developers.
An interesting option for Nokia would be to create an OS extention in Symbian capable of running Android apps.
This isn't that far fetched, considering that Android apps run in a virtual machine. But sometimes large companies can't turn on a dime, and there would be plenty of deep thought needed for how the interoperation between Symbian and Android would take place.
In the meantime, I have switched from a 20 year run with Nokia devices that began with the Mobira Talkman and ended in N97, to Nexus One.