Chalk this up as one of the first semi good things to come out of Nokia during the past few months. Back in October the Finnish firm said that they would cut nearly 1800 jobs in an attempt to cut costs and just plain get rid of some dead weight. Of those around 850 were from sites located in Finland. Looks like they’ll “only” have to drop 500 people on their home turf. We’ve even got an exact breakdown of where those cuts are going to happen: 120 at the headquarters in Espoo, 198 in Tampere, where the majority of the Symbian engineers work, 103 in the northern city of Oulu, that’s where really deep levels of R&D take place, as well as some Symbian work, and 82 in Salo where Nokia produces their high end and difficult to manufacture devices.
We’re eager to see what, if anything, the Finnish firm has to show off at Mobile World Congress next month. Nokia didn’t have anything to say at CES, but we’re not really surprised about that. Their share in the USA is next to nothing and rumor has it that a Symbian^3 device that was meant to be launched on AT&T was canceled at the last moment. Over on the other side of the pond Nokia isn’t doing any better. They shut down their “Comes with Music” service in Europe citing poor uptake and last quarter it was reported that the flagship Nokia N8 was being outsold by the Apple iPhone by as much as 6 to 1.
A lot of people are pinning their hopes on MeeGo, the Nokia and Intel lead effort at making a mobile operating system based on Linux, but we’re hearing that open source developers are having a rough time contributing code to the OS and that progress is unbearably slow compared to the pace of the market.