Nokia’s silent, but deadly competitor: RIM
By Stefan Constantinescu on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 12:13 AM PST In Nokia, RIM (Research in Motion)
People think that the iPhone made a dent in Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s revenues, but no one realizes that in 2007 Nokia came out with over 30 mobile phones versus Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s single SKU. Apple aside, the real threat isn’t the fruit from the west coast, but the businessman from Canada. Research in Motion is estimated to own 10% of the smartphone market this year according to ABI Research and their expansion into the APAC region, where volumes make American and European figures seem insignificant, will only help to increase that figure. RIM has also managed to maintain an ASP (average selling price) of $345 versus the industry average of $248. They have a premium product and more importantly a service offering that is attracting enterprise customers and regular consumers as well. While attending the Consumer Electronics Show in January this year I wasn’t surprised to see men in suits with the new BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Pearl, but I was not expecting to see my fellow college classmates carry them around when the spring semester started a few days later.
Nokia needs to take RIM seriously and their current software implementation as it stands does not look impressive. I’m not going to say the battle is lost, hardly, there is plenty of opportunity for growth in this sector, but is Nokia hungry enough to capture it? It all starts with a quote from a conversation a few bloggers and I were having with Carlo Longino from Mob Happy at Nokia World (podcast here). I’m going to paraphrase, but it went something like:
Nokia needs to realize that Eseries users have a life after 5 PM and that Nseries users have a job.
He hit the nail on the head, Nokia is segmenting their devices based on some stupid four quadrant chart of users when in reality they need to focus on the fact that everyone is an individual. How can Nokia tailor their S60 platform to enable customization on a mass scale? Larry Lessig gave a talk at TED (video) a few months ago where he said something along the lines of “currently we’re in a dozen markets of millions and the future will be a million markets of dozens.”
Stop putting us into little boxes Nokia, treat us like real people or you might loose a sale.
I love this quote:
“Stop putting us into little boxes Nokia, treat us like real people or you might loose a sale.”
RIM has surprisingly great application market. It sound like weird but RIM third-party applications market much stronger than Nokia’s one. But anyway both of them got some unexpected (but long-awaited) Christmas present – Android.
We all talked about this quite a lot at Nokiaworld, so you know I’m with you on this Stefan. I just hope someone at Nokia is really listening to all this.
Hear hear.
I’ve been saying that about the N/E series devices for a while now. It’s very frustrating. I just want one device that will (efficiently) do everything I need it to do. It’s always one step forward, two steps back.
2 forward 1 back you mean?
To me it seems like Nokia has a rube goldberg-esque system where they randomly pick X number of major features per phone (probably using some sort of system involving sea otters and a burlap bag) for the 30 phones they’ll release *this* year and then catapult them into the market to see what sticks…
Clue for Nokia, free of charge… make competent and well-rounded devices that can do everything, and people will be happy. There’s no reason an E series phone can’t have the swank media player, and no excuse for an N series phone to not ship with QuickOffice.
I came to S60 from a BlackBerry for one simple reason: PocketMac.
PC users should be grateful for never having to suffer through an AWFUL sync client that eats your contacts and appointments whenever it feels like it.
I get what everyone’s saying here about Nokia segmenting their users, but I honestly can’t think of ANY current BlackBerry model has all the features of my E61i…