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Nokia Losing its Cell Phone Dominance
supersandra writes "The Boston Globe is reporting that Nokia is struggling to offer features, such as cameras and flip-phones, that are luring customers away to phones by other brands such as Motorola, Samsung, and Siemens. While Nokia used to account for 1 in every 3 phones sold worldwide, they are down to 28.9 percent. Nokia plans to bring 35 new phone models to market this year to win back more users."
While Nokia used to account for 1 in every 3 phones sold worldwide, they are down to 28.9 percent. Holy Cow, they lost a whole 4.4%?! That's a really interesting way to make it sound like a big loss, when it's really not.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Is it really worth it to have 35 new phone models?
The article says that Nokia's problem is not having features that consumers want, like clam-shell phones. Yet their solution is not to include those features in their new phones, but to offer consumers 35 different models this year (only 6 of those are clam-shell). I'm all about consumer choice, but does this make sense to anyone?
Nokia's phones have recently been designed really poorly, IMHO. They are either too big or have a weird, non-standard design that doesn't always improve functionality.
That being said, for the most part, their GSM phones work better than most of their competitors for call quality and reception, but their competitors are quickly catching up!
Doh!
They're just falling behind in the market, simply. There's less technical difference between phones and a once innovative company has out-innovated the entire market, and now every cell manufacturer can do the same as they've done.
Not to mention Nokia's insistence on using higher rates of energy coming out of their phones. I am an Energy Sensitive and while a normal cell phone will give me a slight head pain, going anywhere within six feet of a Nokia gives me a splitting headache.
It's not to say they won't keep up as a company, but they won't keep up as a gigantic company. It'll come down to other things than pure innovation that will keep them alive now that cells are pure commodity,
I, for one, don't care about "interchangable faceplates" when the devices themselves are of somewhat dated design.
However, Nokia is a smart company. What do they care if they have 35 models? The average (not anyone reading slashdot) Cell phone user cares about two things: One, the phone looks good to them, and right now this means flip phones. And two, the phone has the features they want. That second request is going to be different for every person.
It is this diversity that can help nokia. A soccer mom who calls a max of 10 minutes a day and a corporate executive who needs a high capacity battery are two totally different segments of the market. However the Nokia brand can keep both by releasing phones taylored for each.
Lastly, you'd be surpirsed how many millions of people hate learning a "new" phone. I personally can't stand nokia phones, they're bulky, have features I never need, and I can't seem to get used to the menus. But I hear from everyone i know with one that "they're so easy to use." And if you know how to use one nokia, you know how to use them all. That's their best kept secret.
Well, first of all, Nokia has been very successful in the cell phone market, and generally when you have high-quality competing players, the competition kicks in, and things even out. Nokia boasted 34.7% global marklet share in 2003, and in Q1 2004 grew in European region with those new concept devices like N-Gage and what not. Suchy growth is hardly sustainable, especially when competition largely is just as good.
Second, US is a large market for cell phones in regards to global sales. However, few of US customers ever choose their cellphones, since in the United States the phones are purchased by the operator, not customer. Which still creates some sort of competition, but it's way tougher to push newer phones and newer features, while the operator still has the year-old models available and runs those commercial "and now get a free blah-blah-blah phone with the signup for 1-year plan".
Realistically I think slipping to 28.9% is not too big of a deal, and Nokia will kick back after maybe just one sweet deal with US operator like Cingular or Verizon, where new models get pushed.
I second that.
My first phone was functional for 2 years, and although the always new nokia models look like neato toys. They're too expensive to keep up, like these kids these days buy phones as they boy clothes. It's more "image" then functionality...
My current cellphone is I think 3 yrs now and does what it always has been doing, and only what it should. I have no new reason to upgrade, and that's the problem if you make cellphones; once you sold eveyone one (sort of speak) you need to get them to upgrade even though the phones still work.
So, you bloathe the thing with games (N-gage), "supercool extra's" and personalized designs. Ofcourse, you pay for all that too.
Not for me though, thank you very much.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
My Nokia 7650 is 18 months old. It has a camera and Bluetooth. I am in Europe so I am not sure if there was a version which ran in the US. The model is obsolete now anyway.
Now to what is wrong with it: It runs out of power after 5 days. For the last 36 hours or so of those 5 days, if you actually want to telephone with it then it powers down. You can power it back up again and send messages, take photos, whatever, just phoning takes too much power. This thing is supposed to be a telephone. What use is a shrinking violet phone which hides whenever someone calls it?
When I originally got it, it was set up so one of the two main buttons went into camera mode and the other one went into some Internet function. Hey guys, this is supposed to be a telephone. Calling (or messaging someone) needed 5 or 6 separate inputs and some positioning with a trackball. It was only when I found out how to reconfigure the beast that it actually became useable. Apparently a lot of phones do not allow reconfiguring.
Having said that, my next phone will probably be a Nokia as well, friends have Siemens phones - I will never go there - another friend has a Sony. The menus in both cases are simply too cryptic.
Whatever it is, it won't be a 7610. The keyboard layout is simply insane.
The advantage of a Nokia used to be that they were good phones which were really easy to use. Some of the more recent models are poorly designed toys, overloaded with too many useless functions which just added unnecessary complexity.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Hello Nokia! If you're reading this, we have already figured out your trick: You never sell a phone will all the features. I guess you do this to artificially "keep the hunger up" for your phones, because people will then have to buy a phone which has one more feature the next year. And then again.
Well we have found out your trick already 3 years ago. Other companies sell phones with the whole nine yards, and they're light too. So we now buy these phones. Bad Nokia, bad!
If you want my business back, give me a phone that has every feature in it. Every acronym, even if I don't know what it means. I want to have it. It's some sort of spiritiual thing, you know.
... or with whomever manages to solve the basic issue: low-price, reliable communication anywhere in the world. I am sick and tired of phones that have silly gimmicks, but which deliver a pitiful performance on those counts.
.. that can make phone calls and NOT take pictures (Ah!), NOT allow changing a faceplate in under 5 seconds (Oh!) and NOT do something else as usefull as baking a cake or running an embedded Java (why not Perl, BTW ? ;)).
:-/
Seriously, I've been looking for a new phone with no extra features - just wanted GSM phone, which is light and small to carry in a pocket. It also must look good, but that's subjective. Something like this (Nokia 8910), but triband or at least Canada-compatible.
And guess what - I'm still looking
3.243F6A8885A308D313
The strongers players and winner candidates are those with best reserves and profitability and preferably other branches of business. For example the chips company like AMD which supported the unprofitable cpu line with cash-cow flash-memory business for years.
Nokia has large reserves, good profibility and high market share going for it. It needs to sacrifice both the reserves and profibility to save the market share though. Sony-Erickson, motorola and Samsung have other business branches they can use to wage the pricewar. In the end there will be just two major phone manufacturers.
The longer the pricewar continues, the more upper hand the multi-branches companies will gain over Nokia. This would put Nokia in a position where it in order to survive needs to merger with a profitable company in a different business which can support it over the war. I for one welcome our new Microsoft-Nokia overlords!
My old 3210 survived two hours in the washing machine. My girlfriend's recent model died after a full day in her pocket in rain.
It goes the same way with pretty much any company:
1) Make a good product
2) See it take off
3) Profit!
4) Dump the quality
5) Wonder why the market thinks you suck.
But the really bad thing is that the other manufacturers now know that they need to live up to the old standards of the successful company: They only need to be marginally better than the successful company was after they dumped the quality.
Which means, we loose.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
They might sell more phones if they didn't put stupid non-standard keypads on all of theirs. I know I used to love Nokia, but I switched to Sony Ericcsons for the Bluetooth, Java, and a normal keypad. I never use the stupid camera on the phone.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
"Nokia has done a lot of research in to the keyboard layout of a phone"
N-gage. Enough said?
"they are all actually the same basic layout, which is optimized for use with one hand"
I suggest you go look at their phones.
5 buttons in a column on one side of the screen and 5 in another on the other side (the 7600) isn't the same as 6 toggle switches with 2 numbers each (the 3200) isn't the same as buttons in 3 groups of triangles (3650), isn't the same as the conventional layout but with the middle column too big (2600) isn't the same as just slapping the buttons about in a swoopy pattern (7610).
Apart from actually hiding some of the numbers on the back of the phone, they have done everything they possibly can to make dialling numbers on some of these phones difficult.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I loved my Nokia phone. But I wanted it to sync with my computer, and Nokia didn't have any Bluetooth phones for sale in the US. So, I got a Sony Ericsson.
The Sony Ericsson is slow and poor quality compared to my Nokia, but Nokia still only have one Bluetooth phone on the market, and have a ton of stupid designs--circular keyboards, keyboards with two buttons on each key, slanted keypads, and so on. Idiots.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak