It’s sometimes hard to remember that smartphones are still a recent phenomenon with the first devices to be categorised as such being less than a decade old. Sure there were phones before that which you could say were smartphones but back then they were more an amalgam of a PDA and a phone more than a seamless blend between the two. Back then the landscape of handset providers was wildly different, one that was dominated by a single player: Nokia. Their failure to capitalize on the smartphone revolution is a testament to incumbents failing to react to innovative upstarts and their sale to Microsoft their admittance of their fault. You can then imagine my surprise when the now much smaller company is eyeing off a return to the smartphone market as pretty much everyone would agree the horse has long since bolted for Nokia.
The strategy is apparently being born out of the Nokia Technologies arm, the smallest branch out of the three that remained after the deal with Microsoft (the other two being its network devices and Here location division). This is the branch that holds Nokia’s 10,000 or so patents and so you’d think that they’d likely just be resting on their laurels and collecting patent fees for time immaterial. However this section has been somewhat busy at work having developed and licensed two products since the Microsoft deal. The first of which is z Launcher an Android launcher and the N1 a tablet which they’ve licensed out to another manufacturer whom they’ve also lent the Nokia brand name too. The expectation is that future Nokia devices will likely follow the latter’s model with Nokia doing most of the backend work but then offloading it to someone else to manufacture and ship.
There’s no doubt that Nokia had something of a cult following among Windows Phone users as they provided some of the best handsets for that platform. Their other smartphones however had no such following as their pursuit of their own mobile ecosystem made it extremely unappealing to developers who were already split between two major platforms. Had Nokia retained control of the Lumia brand I could see them having an inbuilt user base for a future smartphone, especially if came in an Android flavour, however that brand (and everything that backed it) went to Microsoft and so did all the loyalty that went with it. Nokia is essentially starting from scratch here and, unfortunately, that doesn’t bode well for the once king of the phone industry.
Coming in at that level you’re essentially competing with every other similarly specced handset out there and, to be honest, it’s a market that eats up competitors like that without too much hassle. The outsourcing of the actual manufacturing and distribution means that they don’t shoulder a lot of the risk that they used to with such designs however it also means they have little control over the final product that actually reaches consumers. That being said the N1 does look like a solid device but that doesn’t necessarily mean that future devices will share the same level of quality.
Nokia is going to have to do something to stand out from the pack and, frankly, without their brand loyalty behind them I’m struggling to see what they could do to claw back some of the market share they once had. There are innumerable companies now that have solid handset choices for nearly all sectors of the market and the Nokia brand name just doesn’t carry the weight it once did. If they’re seriously planning a return to the smartphone market they’re going to have to do much more than just make another handset, something which I’m not entirely sure the now slimmed down Nokia is capable of doing.
