Nokia better go back to the N91 drawing board

As you’ve probably read by now, Nokia launched some new handsets this week with great fanfare. The phone getting the greatest attention – the N91 – sports a 4-Gbyte disk drive for music storage. Among others, USA Today covered the announcement in “Nokia cell phone the first of its kind.” The phone is expected to ship late this year, and Nokia expects it to sell for $500 in the US – after discounts for a service contract.

The company is acting like they are breaking new ground here. Now I realize that few phones sport a hard drive. But there are many phones, that do quite well playing music, available at low cost today. Both my Treo 650 and my son’s Audiovox SMT5600 equal the sound of any MP3 player I’ve used including the venerable iPod. I added a $60 1-Gbyte SD Card to the Treo to store music and pictures. By the time the N91 ships, I’d guess that you will be able to buy 2-Gbyte SD Cards for $50 to $60. So exactly where’s the value in the N91? I bought the Audiovox phone for $50 after rebates and a two-year service contract. For the Audiovox, we also bought a couple of half Gigabyte Mini SD Cards for $49 each – SanDisk brand name cards.

Now the N91 has an impressive feature set. Nokia almost buried the fact that it has 802.11 integrated in the phone – all the better to load your music. The phone includes a 2-Mpixel camera. A hard drive is fine as an option, although I’d argue that a base model should be Flash based. The hard drive will come in handy if you use the phone as a video camera. But the hard drive must come at a reasonable price, and check the price of 4-Gbyte iPods – around $200 – and you’ll discover a reasonable price. The N91 supports popular music formats – only Apples iTunes support is missing. But either the Nokia engineers have way over-designed the audio, or the company is simply blind to the competition.