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Nokia Shifts To Selling Back-End Systems To Mobile Networks
jfruh writes: With Nokia's handset business now sold off to Microsoft, you might be wondering what the remainder of the company does, exactly. The company is trying to use its expertise at other end of its old business, offering data centers and virtualized infrastructure to wireless networking companies to make their businesses more efficient. Competitors include Ericsson, another mobile phone also-ran.
No no...
Much of the hardware that Nokia produced was superior and worked with only it's own handsets and wireless kit perfectly. Here's an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_full_rate
Licensing and patent issues
The Enhanced Full Rate incorporate several patents. It uses the patented ACELP technology, which is licensed by the VoiceAge Corporation.
Enhanced Full Rate was developed by Nokia and the Université de Sherbrooke (Canada).
Just about everyone else just produced handsets, but couldn't use features that were only found in Nokia handsets.
Most people didn't care too. But you could certainly tell on older first-generation GSM phones as well as phones that were still being sold in 2004 that only the Nokia phones sounded "better than a landline"
It wasn't until UMTS came along and gave any better option... which was AGAIN a Nokia thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_Wideband
Just about everything that makes up a mobile phone network is produced by Nokia, Ericsson, or Siemens. Other companies that once existed like Nortel had patents on key parts of GSM, UMTS and 4th generation mobile phone technology but they didn't actually produce the consumer hardware, just the software and the chips they run on.
People aren't aware that the current place we are in right now with SmartPhones is actually quite unprecedented. Up until the iPhone, companies like Nokia and Ericsson were producing both backend hardware and handsets (often with partnerships) and Nokia was the only one that produced "superior" hardware in it's home country. That's why Nokia handsets were far more popular in Europe. In the US, Motorola's flip-phone was what everyone wanted. And in the US, we had a pile of incompatible technologies and frequencies being used. So it didn't make sense for European handset manufacturers to produce anything other than low-end disposable handsets, because nobody would ever buy a high end handset because the phone carriers would never subsidize one.
Then LG and Samsung came into the space and started making substandard cell phones, and the rest is Android history. That was before Apple BTW. Because Samsung and LG produced all the "free" handsets, they had super-high warranty return rates.
That is the primary reason why I will never buy an Android phone, let alone a Samsung or LG phone. Seeing the kind of junk that was passed off then, and is still passed off now (just look at the difference between a domestic Samsung phone and a Korean-market model) just to get people to not buy into the Apple ecosystem just makes me roll my eyes.
People can not buy into Apple if they don't want to. That's not the point. The point is that there is no distinction between a "free" Android device and a 1000$ Android device, so this makes people think they are equal. That's about as equal as comparing a Kia Rio to a Lexus ES 350. Sure 4 tires and an engine makes it street-legal. That doesn't mean that they perform the same or have the same comforts.
Nokia has also been in the market of selling the infrastructure for mobile networks for a long time. And, unlike the handsets, this is a very profitable place to be. Both Nokia and Ericsson saw the commoditisation of the handset market and Nokia in particular watched their margins evaporate and decided it was time to get out. But because they're now no longer in the public eye, they're perceived as losing. Now their customers are people who make money from the products that they sell, so are willing to pay a reasonable premium because a few minutes of downtime costs far more.
Of course, when Apple decides to concentrate on the high-margin part of a business, no one claims that they're dying, because they concentrate on a consumer-visible part of the market.
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