Nokia: regular WinPho handset releases through 2012 Nokia could be punching out Windows Phone handsets at the rate or one every two months, the company has said. That seems excessive, but it's what Jo Harlow, Nokia's executive vice president of smart devices, said this week. Specifically, "we should be launching new devices in a rhythm that might be every couple of months, …
that the problem is not the number of handsets available. The most profitable smartphone maker only really has 5 SKU's available, and 4 of those only differ in capacity and colour (and that's only black or white). AFAIK Nokia's hardware has been OK, quite good in fact. The software implementation on their smart devices has just been extraordinarily poor. I'd also suggest that they should stop trying to full an nerd's checklist of features and only implement what works and works well. I'm still surprised that they chose Microsoft's offering over Android (other than it is a former MSFT employee at the hem), which would have allowed them to keeps some of the feel of Nokia products (fonts, UI elements etc.). Instead Nokia look set to become another MSFT commodity manufacturer. What do I know though, I'm not a successful manufacture of smartphones, but then neither are Nokia!
Is that an old Nokia policy that stuck? Flooding the market with a gazillion models that fail to differentiate from each other, and confuse the customer?
I want few good models with one clearly standing out of the crowd to meet my specific requirements. I don't want a bunch of mediocre options which do pretty much the same thing and only vary in terms of case colour and butttons shape.
Mind you, I don't care, I'm not a Nokia customer anymore, so they can do whatever the heck they want, as long as they don't drag us all down in the process.
"Pushing new releases on a quarterly basis is what Nokia - and many of its rivals - have been doing for the past decade" - Oh for god's sake, when Nokia started doing this is when they jumped the shark, though it took Blackberry, the iPhone and Android to hammer the point home.
I remember the days when most people in my peer group, and not just the geeks, could name at least a few model numbers of Nokia phones, which they preferred, and the differentiating factors that led to this choice. Despite these factors, impressive battery life and a very intuitive UI were consistent across the range.
Then Nokia expanded their range massively, but without obviously useful differentiating factors (and in some cases terrible design choices - 3650 anyone?), whilst the battery life decreased and the UI became increasingly fragmented and complicated. This rapid expansion could have been interpreted superficially as a sign of innovation, but then RIM, Apple and Android came along and demonstrated otherwise.
Reading the article gave me a flashback to the operator magazines you get in the mobile phone shops here in Portugal, of which I have a few around the office. In each magazine there are a couple of pages of Apple, Android, Blackberry "star" devices and then about twenty pages of undifferentiated slush from Nokia.
Those with clue will choose carefully and pay top dollar for a premium smartphone. Those with no clue will carry on buying undifferentiated nokias from the slush pile at the back of the catalogue - and in a few years, they'll all be on Windows Phone 7 rather than Symbian.
These punters are used to having just Windows computers at home, and all our nerdy platform-wars go totally over their heads.
This could actually work if they get the price down to around the right psychological threshold and the mobile operators continue stuffing their catalogues with Nokias...
What do they expect to change so fast so as to have a new model every few months (I can see the QC process - it turned on - SHIP IT)..
How will it work, will this months model have blue buttons instead of red.
And what retailer in their right mind will sell a product that may be obsolete before they finish stocking the self.
I can see one upside. When a customer comes and the salesperson suggest a Nokia/MS phone and the customer says no they heard it was a piece of junk. The salesperson can truthfully say that was last weeks model, this weeks is much improved.
See it has nice blue buttons
..but credit where it's due.
Apple don't piss about with a dozen releases a year. Just make one damn good one, and keep making it.
Christ-on-a-bike, they even managed to successfully sell a non-3G model when 3G was becoming all the rage, and people KNEW it'd be obsolete in a year or so. Like selling barbecues in the face of an impending apocalypse. Hat's off, and all that.
So, if Nokia is going to churn 'em out, with the Windows Constrictor snake preventing innovation like added memory cards, etc, maybe - just maybe - Nokia could take a leaf out of Apple's book here. Just make ONE fuc*king good business fone, and ONE fuc*king good fone for the multimedia fans.
Then, let the Injuns make the fones for the Injun market.
(Preferred the previous troll icon, btw)
They went from the undisputed world leader in handsets to a company that put out so many slightly different phones that nobody knew the difference, all of which were adequate at best. Destroyed by their own internal competition, management squabbling and adherence to an outdated, broken GUI system.
So then they announced a total turnaround, a move to a new OS (even though they had invested several years in a next-gen OS of their own), new management strategies, new everything!
And other than the OS the fist major new strategy is .... wait for it ... exactly the same strategy that screwed them up last time!
This has to be a joke of some form. In a month or two they're going to announce the new Meego-running Nokia N and the Nokia F featurephone. All other models will be canned, this Winphone 7 thing will be abandoned and Elop is going to go on TV just to say "psych!"
Right?
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