I just read this article on The Register about Nokia’s view of the future of mobile phones, Web 2.0, mobile internet etc. I generally like Nokia, they’ve managed to overcome their long-established image as a relatively small, insignificant player from Finland and turned themselves into the goliath of mobile phones in less than a decade. They’ve also released decent products and generally led a significant part of the market. But times are changing and I’m not so sure Nokia is ready for the Era of Convergence, given its recent products and marketing rhetoric.
Take for example its internet tablets. Granted, the N800 was a great device and its successor, the recently announced N810 is even better. Yet there are several reasons for which this device appeals to urban technophiles, living in cities like London or New York with omnipresent WiFi connections, but also — ironically — people that have no real business needs and do not mind carrying both a telephone and an internet communicator. It appeals primarily to a niche. A relatively small niche I might add. Many people already using devices by RIM, smartphones or PDAs running Windows Mobile etc. cannot, even if they wanted to, replace them with Nokia’s products. People needing a decent mobile phone with features similar to those found on N810 cannot replace their phone with a N810, because the N810 is not a phone; they can, however, get an iPhone which, despite its deficiencies, does several things quite well.
Nokia has long been experimenting with devices strikingly similar to the Nxxx internet tablets both in form factor and, to some extent, features, since the late 1990s. The Nokia Communicator was an excellent ultraportable smartphone and while it has been updated several times I think it’s falling out of favour both within and beyond the company in recent years. Of course, the Communicators were also GSM phones and despite being somewhat limited in functionality offered relatively decent PIM features for their time. So Nokia knows how to do business with business. Why doesn’t it do it?
Where’s the focus?
What’s really frustrating about Nokia is what could be interpreted as its lack of focus; something that Apple itself suffered from in the mid 1990s and Sony has also been experiencing in the last five years or so. Many of its devices run Symbian, others on proprietary software and some others, like its internet tablets, on its linux based Maemo platform. Then there’s the hardware: you get loads of phones with somewhat decent features (say the N series phones) and then you get the internet tablets like the N800/N810 which don’t seem to know who exactly they were made for: technologists? enthousiasts? internet surfing addicts? If you take the N7x or N8x series phones it is more or less clear who they are targeting. The same goes for the N95 or Nokia’s other phone series. The devices are well defined, with specific uses and a clearly defined userbase. They are more like superphones than computers (maybe with the exception of N95). But the N8x0 are not.
What really frustrates me about the N800 — and now the N810 — is the lost potential; for example, the addition of a GSM radio could turn this into a fantastic device and could preempt Android before it even rolled out. The existence of the Communicator is proof that Nokia knows how to do this, and can do this quite well.
But even if you believe that the N Series internet tablets are all about not having any sort of cellular telephony radio/modem and should never include GSM/WCDMA functionality, just the addition of business friendly features, currently sorely missing from both N800 and N810 could make these products much friendlier to a huge number of people. ‘Business friendly features’ translates to a good PIM suite, Office read/write capability (and yes, Google Docs doesn’t cut it). Catering to business people would be an excellent way to properly enter a market until now dominated by other platforms (see Blackberry, Windows Mobile in the US etc). Catering to business means catering to the people that have both the money, the knowledge and the use for these kind of devices. It would, effectively tag on ‘tool’ next to ‘toy’.
In other words, what’s so frustrating with Nokia is that in so many ways the N810 is already where Google wants to take mobile phones with Android and where Apple wants to take the iPhone; it’s got an impressive display, beautiful industrial design (even if the keyboard is, well, crap), good battery life, an open source, ever improving software stack with a rapidly expanding software ecosystem. Yet, at the same time, it’s also so far away. If Nokia had played the game right they could have preempted Apple’s iPhone SDK and stomped Google’s Android before it even came out properly. But they haven’t. Yet.
What I would really like to see in N810’s successor would be its further development into a proper phone. WiFi is becoming widespread, even in backwater Europe (i.e. Hellas), WiMax looms in the horizon etc., yet millions of people in Europe and the US still depend on their 2/2.5/3/3.5G voice and data connections in their daily lives and I doubt that’s going to change anytime soon. Well, at least not before all currently available devices on the market are considered ridiculously obsolete. Then I’d like Nokia to decide where it wants to focus: Symbian or Maemo. Having both, I’m sure, is really a waste of resources, time and effort. Finally, Nokia should take steps towards producing devices that reach the potential of the technology found inside them. Devices that appeal to both enthousiasts, businesspeople, casual surfers and the commuter that wants to read RSS and watch an episode of her favourite TV series of listen to her favourite music or audiobook. Devices that are accessible, modular, open and extendable. Hopefully, devices based on Linux — technically that would require considerable improvements in the linux kernel to accomodate for the single-chip designs for mobile phones that Symbian allows for its vendors.
End Game
Many have been expecting Nokia’s response to the iPhone ever since Steve Jobs first announced it in the 2007 Mac Expo in San Francisco and the fact that they haven’t really divulged any meaningful information regarding their future plans does not mean they have been sitting idle. On the contrary. Still, with N95 starting to show its age and N810 just hitting the stores, it’s somewhat surprising why Nokia hasn’t been concentrating on an all-encompasing, Symbian (or hopefully even Maemo-based) mobile phone/internet communicator ala N810 instead of coming out so quickly with a device like the N810. I’m certain that the distribution of resources and the release of several overlapping devices is Good Business™ (viz. betting small amounts of money on many numbers on a Roulette instead of betting everything you’ve got on one) in the short-term given Nokia’s position in the market, but in the game of the converged mobile device hegemony, given the stakes, the players and the state of the market, taking risks might be essential. If anything, Nokia has more to lose than both Apple and Google in this market and whether it manages to minimise the losses to iPhone and similar devices in the future might be definitive for its survival in the future. For now, despite a streak of impressive products I find its efforts too dispersed to have the desired effect. All the pieces are there, it’s just a matter of putting them together properly.