People think that the iPhone made a dent in Nokia’s revenues, but no one realizes that in 2007 Nokia came out with over 30 mobile phones versus Apple’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 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.