Brian's Brain

A friend of mine (as I mentioned the other day) is currently using (and in the process, evaluating for me) the Nokia E71 handset that I previously mentioned back in March:

Nokia's also recently released a successor to the N95 handset I talked about in that same writeup:

along with a descendent of the Internet Tablets I wrote about in February 2008 (and elsewhere):

As such, Nokia's been on my mind a lot of late. Unfortunately for the company, the majority of the news I've been reading has been negative. Nokia's crisis is a classic example of leadership impermanence, one of the most interesting characteristics of the tech industry I've been covering for almost 13 years now. As such, I think the company's situation provides important lessons for EDN's broad readership, regardless of what particular aspect of the tech industry each of you focuses on.

Nokia's still the world's largest cellular handset manufacturer as measured by numbers of units sold per year, a title it's held for more than a decade. Yet its grasp of that particular trophy is beginning to slip, and its hold on the arguably more important revenue and profitability leadership tenets is even more tenuous (no matter how much it might hope that lawsuits will sufficiently slow its competitors to enable it to catch up). Why? First and foremost, the bulk of the company's sales (as any number of market analysts have pointed out in recent times) is mired in low-end handsets. Low end = low sales prices = low revenue and unclear profitability.

By overly investing in where the business already was to the exclusion of where the business was headed, Nokia ended up being late to the lucrative smartphone category, and the delay still shows in the company's current product line. Take the N95 I talked about eight months ago. Part of the reason I decided not to buy it is that it didn't support T-Mobile's 3G data frequency band. A bigger issue was the shoddy implementation of what on paper seemed to be an impressive feature set; a bulky and hefty form factor, poor battery life, a clunky and unintuitive user interface, molasses-slow software execution and task-switching, and other problems which firmware updates haven't measurably improved. I'd hoped that the follow-on N97 and its Mini sibling might make tangible improvements in these areas:

But innumerable reviews have unfortunately suggested the contrary. Part of the problem is that the N9x series relies on several-generation-old ARM microprocessors, as measured by both clock speed and architecture. The company's near-exclusive continued reliance to date on the Symbian O/S is another key issue. That Symbian remains largely closed in spite of long-stated aspirations to open up the code isn't, to me, the fundamental shortcoming; after all, the software running inside handsets powered by Microsoft's Windows Mobile (another company who under-invested to its disadvantage), RIM's BlackBerry and Apple iPhone operating systems is also closed-source. But like Palm's prior-generation O/S, which that company also relied on for far too long, Symbian is unequipped for the demands of modern high-end voice-plus-data handsets. Symbian's lack of a beefy web browser (a situation that's thankfully augmented by third-party alternatives from folks such as Opera and Skyfire) is only the first of its many problems.

Continue reading with 'Analyzing Nokia's Business: E71 Shortcomings And Unclear Next Steps'...