Thursday, December 30, 2010

Why Nokia is to be feared in coming years?

I still remember my baby steps in the world of cellphones. It was the year 2000 and information on cellphones was very scarce on the net. gsmarena was in its infancy . Very few genuine sites were there, some like mobile-review.com have become bigger and better. Some have vanished. Some improvised(special mention of 3lib, one of the pioneers)
whatever decision an individual made depended on his peer group and shopkeeper's recommendations. In early 2000's only one name came to mind of both. It was not a question of which company , rather which model . Those days people used to depend on phones for communication, and in Nokia they got bullet proof Signal,voice quality and Battery life (most of the times,but the last point is debatable)
Fast forward to the present. Nokia is getting pounded from everyone atleast the so called "american blogs". Unfortunately for them It does little to affect the perception of buying public in India,Malaysia or sweden,Russia. Even today when The espoo company is making trend setting phones like N8. It has kept the three basics "reception,voice quality,battery life" intact.


Today It is a connected world. Every app on your smartphone wants to keep you, your news and your social feeds upto date. For this they require constant data connection. This is enabled by default in modern OS's like Android and iOS. However what must be understood That Nokia has learnt its lessons in very competitive markets:
India,China where data rates have traditionally been very costly vis-a-vis the average income of the populace. That is why symbian was designed in such a robust way that every app that tries to access the internet(other then some cert enabled apps) require the permission of the owner. Morever It also give you the option of using separate access points for separate apps. That is a feature to be appreciate if your carrier uses separate apn for mobile streaming and another one for tethering.
This policy also helps you get a rather healthy battery life as compared to connected "OS".


Also recently the issue has emerged where people expect hardware prices to become cheaper- and want the big companies like apple,Nokia to be sustained solely based on the services. Nokia should be careful here. It has always been a hardware company, Delivering some of the best design and never outsourcing its manufacturing to taiwan like others. Services though nice to have should never form the basis of its existence.


contrary to popular belief, N97 even though quite disappointing was actually a bestseller. N8 has none of the flaws of the predecessor. With meego things may get even sweeter for Nokia.

1 comment:

Rex said...

nice article. However, Nokia already manufactures its phones in China and the Philippines. It's not as though each and every handset comes out of Finland (at least the ones shipped around Asia are all made in China).