On Thursday, October 11, 2001, at 06:58 , Benedict Evans wrote:
> In other words, have Nokia decided not to bother taking GPRS-only
> handsets seriously - is this Nokia 'treading water' while they put the
> real development effort into dual-mode 3G handsets? And decent screens?
There are quite a number of Nokia GPRS handsets due to hit the market
before and around Xmas this year. IIRC the first one to come is a 5xxx
or 6xxx with GPRS, then a GRPS version of the 82xx and I think there was
also talk about a new communicator with GPRS next year.
Maybe Nokia have simply been waiting for signals from their customers.
After all, networks in Europe have been very slow, even hesitant to roll
out GPRS, which isn't exactly an encouragement for a manufacturer to
bring out GPRS phones.
I am not so sure on dual-mode 3G handsets either. Everybody you ask
about it tells a story of high cost and that there will be an initial
focus on single-mode handsets. Even DoCoMo made such a statement.
And bigger screens don't seem to be that overwhelmingly popular in
Europe. Handsets with smaller screens have been selling better than the
likes of the Nokia 7xxx. Sure there may be other reasons for this, most
notably price for example, but maybe manufacturers have taken this as an
indication that bigger screens are not so important.
rgds
benjamin
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Received on Thu Oct 11 13:54:32 2001