Nokia still slow

Russell Beattie has a very good post about Nokia’s latest announcements entitled: Nokia: Innovate On the Inside. I highly suggest you read it as he is a pro in relation to what Nokia does and doesn’t do and I also have to say that I can very much agree to his views.

Nokia has a huge number of different phones, but very few that are really any good. Their feature mix in the phones, trying to fit the features to the target audience, is very nice, but I agree with Russell that in some cases you wonder if an additional MP3 player would have been so bad. I mean they had MP3 players in their phones before the 6600 and would it really have made the phone that much more expensive in production to add one?

I really believe that Nokia is focussing too much on two things: Margin and Platform. They are removing everything that is not needed, to increase margin. They are bringing out lots of different phones which are essentially the same because they can. Still, at this time I would not be sure which phone to recommend to somebody. Most of just something missing. The 6230 is moving in the right direction again. What they still need is a nice entry level phone with a _good_ camera in it, plus MMS and the possibility to get the images off without needing to send them per eMail. Then just make it look like a phone, as Russell says, and you have a winner. We are still in a features war. Yes, phones are also fashion objects, but that doesn’t mean we want round key pads. Function first people. Function first.

I am still holding on to my shares though because I still believe that Nokia is amazingly well placed for the future in wireless.