On 16.4.2004, at 18:34, Giovanni Bertani wrote:
> The difficulties for Nokia have been predicted for a while...
>
> Bad design?
> Too late with clamshell designs?
> Are things getting worse with 3G?
It's more about their product portfolio than anything else.
From a customer perspective I think Nokia has done several mistakes to
predict the future; which features are "must have"'s and for which
price category. They have put the features too high in the categories
and their previously successful strategy to use the very same software
and internals for several models have failed. Nokia has also suffered
from bad manufacturing quality (haven't everyone..). Nokia might be
big and market leader but things to change outside of them.
For the last couple of years I've been struggling to find a new phone
for myself -- from any manufacturer. Sometimes the features are
appealing but there's something physical that just won't do it, like
external antenna. Also the average size of phone seems to go up, which
is bad imho -- Nokia's 6100 is already big enough at 102x44x13.5 mm and
76 g, I don't want anything much bigger than that.
A local (finnish) business newspaper evaluated the Nokia phone
portfolio and found major problems with almost all of them; there were
a few basic models that are fine in the class and the new 6230 is quite
up-to-date. The rest were too big, too heavy, lacking features, ...
I recently got the 6230 and I must admit that it's the best Nokia phone
for several years now. Finally the feature set is reasonably complete,
it's fast, it's almost small enough, and most of all, it feels well
done. The construction feels very tight and well manufactured,
something nowadays pretty rare in almost any industry.
It would be interesting to see what is the competitive status for Nokia
after the next 12 months now that they have finally realized that
people won't buy sub-standard products. They have the resources to do
pretty much anything.
Petri
Received on Fri Apr 16 19:16:35 2004