Nokia Corp., the world's largest mobile phone maker, plans to bring 40 new handsets to the market next year. This is an increase of 5 over it's 2004 promise to launch 35 headsets. Is this strategy going to work?
Nokia Corp., the world's largest mobile phone maker, plans to bring 40 new handsets to the market next year as it seeks to expand its already dominant market share amid increased competition from rivals Motorola Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and Sony Ericsson. - NYT
Bluntly, this is not going to work:
Firstly, the multiple new models from Samsung actually mean something, in stark contrast to new Nokia models. Each new Samsung model brings with it slight improvements in technology, as well as variations (or improvements!) in look.
Secondly, Sony Ericsson does not seem to need to release more models to stay current: In fact, SE has a very stratified phone selection. There are a couple of quite uninspirational lower end models, the T-series which is becoming low-end now, but have 65K colour screens and bluetooth, the K series which is the new mid-high range, the very new S-series which basically consists of the S700 (arguably the best widely available camera phone today), and the P-series which are Symbian UIQ phones.
Thidly, Nokia, in 2004, has managed to release far more handsets than ever before, but they are mostly very similar feature-wise, and do not necessarily boast better form-factors. Indeed, the smallest current phone in the traditional candybar format is the 6100. This is quite pathetic, considering that it has a mere 4K colour screen, and no bluetooth/GPRS.
Nokia seems to be releasing phones with no technological improvements in different form factors: A good example of this is the new 2650; it has roughly the same features (4K colour screen/screen size/no-bluetooth) as the 6100 mentioned above, and the 6100 was released more than a year ago! While SE has done something similar with the K600; the T610 starting point already had bluetooth and a 65K screen, and the K600 screen is actually an improvement! The 2650 is not even smaller, though it does adopt a clamshell format. The premium 89** series has not been usefully updated for over 2 years.
Finally, and most importantly, the vaunted Nokia software advantage is being whittled away: The latest Sony Ericsson are at least as good, although they will require getting used to, after the familiarization process they are equally excellent.
In conclusion, unless Nokia does better in quantitive terms, releasing even 100 new handsets a year will be useless and simply a waste of engineering resources. The Nokia 7610 is the first phone in a long while which is groundbreaking in any way, and it is still functionally crippled. (Think - mono mp3 player!)
