So don’t think people in Third World countries don’t want sophisticated phones. A friend of mine over there has an iPhone 3G she bought used from someone upgrading to a 3Gs. And when the iPhone first came out, people were getting $1,000+ for unlocked phones for a while.

Unfortunately, iPhone plans in the Philippines are really terrible, and overall Internet connectivity is poor. But customer sophistication, at least in the more affluent areas, is there.

D

meanwhile their new Linux N900 announced today clearly signals their future 2nd gen smartphone strategy. it won’t be Symbian. the N97 was a weak holding tactic it turns out. feel bad for anyone who bought it. but when will the N900 go on sale? is an SDK ready? have to wait to hear next week.

really, backing up, it is Ovi that will determine the success or failure of Nokia in this new era. without a good Ovi ecosystem to tie all the Nokia products together for user convenience and free Nokia from dependence/enslavement on dozens of telcos for user services, they will just become a perpetual also-ran with uncoordinated products, which is what is happening today to dying Sony-Erriccson.

but creating such a solid ecosystem is really hard. Apple’s iTunes/MobileMe/OS integration has been developing over almost a decade now. Google’s cloud almost as long. MS Live/Azure/whatever is still a mess after an even longer period of efforts. Ovi is still in start up mode, while everyone already has all their media configured in some other program (so why switch?). and trying to merge 3 different product OS’s within it services package is bound to be complex. but Nokia does have a strong base in Europe to work with, which connects language-wise with Latin America and a lot of Africa too. So Ovi might become the leader in those regions one day. but Asia and the US? very unlikely.

I agree that the iPhone has a better shot at the Japanese market than other phones. The 3GS has started off quite well – let’s see if the success continues.

One other unrelated thought. After reading a little bit more about Nokia’s Maemo roadmap, I am thinking that the N900 release might be due to some panic on Nokia’s part. As per the roadmap, the next version of Maemo, due at the end of next year, is the one optimized for smartphones. It also uses Qt as its application development framework unlike the current release which is GTK-based. The N900 (and other Maemo phones that will be released in the coming year) seem to be something of a stopgap between now and the release of the Qt-based next version of Maemo which is due at the end of 2010 or early 2011. Possibly, Nokia did this as a measure to counter the iPhone until the actual smartphone version of Maemo arrives.

– HCE

> There is no indication that Nokia, Palm or even Android will ever come
> close to matching the Mac OS X iPhone in meeting the Asian market
> needs that Nokia and Palm both abandoned many years ago.

Asia is a lot bigger than Japan. Nokia may have abandoned the Japanese market but they are a huge player in Asia overall. As per the Canalys report that Daniel posted about (a couple of posts prior to this one), Nokia has an almost 60 percent share of the Asian smartphone market. Japan is a really quirky market which requires manufacturers to tailor features specifically for that market alone. Hence, in general, Japanese cell phone makers pretty much own the market there – which is probably the reason for Nokia pulling out.

– HCE