Poor Nokia (News - Alert) has taken a beating last week in the popular press. It gets beaten up by Wall Street for its latest results, Americans just don’t buy its phones like the rest of the world does, and the phones just aren’t as sexy these days as the almighty iPhone or Palm Pre.
What’s a company to do?
Part of Nokia’s problem with the IT and North American market has been the relative lack of CDMA offerings for Verizon and Sprint’s (News - Alert) networks. Nokia’s bread-and-butter is GSM, so North American users have been forced to either buy relatively limited – but subsidized – models through AT&T (News - Alert) and T-Mobile or go buy an “unlocked” model at list price down either online or at the local Nokia store (of which there are only two, in New York City and Chicago).
List price for the elite Nokia N97 phone is $600 as of Sunday afternoon, a drop of $100 from a couple of days ago. For that price, you get a phone with a 3.5 inch color touch screen, around 9.5 hours of talk time and up to 17.9 days of standby time on a GSM network, full slideout keyboard, up to 32GB of internal memory, a microSD card slot, GPS, Bluetooth, 802.11 b/g WiFi (News - Alert) and all kinds of other whistle including a 5 megapixel camera. Software includes a full Web browser, Flash video support, and streaming video support. It supports Microsoft Exchange, so it can talk to Outlook without breaking a sweat.
Put the N97 hardware specs next to the Palm Pre, and the Nokia phone smokes the Pre. In addition, the N97 can WiFi “tether” a laptop or netbook to the Internet – a trick neither the Pre nor the iPhone (well, AT&T) currently allow in the United States.
The rest of the world likes Nokia’s phones – a lot. Last quarter, the company shipped 9.3 million N and E series phones worldwide during the quarter; more than all the BlackBerry (News - Alert) and iPhone sales put together during the same time, says The Motley Fool. But in the United States, it has about a 1 percent share of all the smartphones.
Nokia realizes it has a lot of work to do if it wants to win over America. The company plans to try to sell more of its smartphones through U.S. carriers and has decided to stick names rather than product numbers onto new phone. It is also investing in research to fine-tune its offerings to U.S. tastes, including the user interface.
To woo U.S. carriers, Nokia has opened up an office in San Diego to help manage its relationships with Verizon and AT&T. It also plans to directly ship new smartphones to the United States at the same time they ship in other countries and work more on opening up its operating system for both developers and end users searching for apps.
Will this all work? I don’t know, but Nokia definitely has its work cutout for it trying to displace the BlackBerry within the enterprise environment and trying to jump ahead of the iPhone and Palm Pre in the latest-cool-toy value for power users.
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