Is Nokia Heading For a Fall ?

June is here and all the top players in the mobile industry are talking about their greatest upcoming phones.

• Apple is about to launch their much anticipated iPhone HD /  4.0 and after seeing the iPad and it’s success ( sold 2 million  in 2 months ) high hopes are placed on it.
• Samsung just announced simultaneous launch in 110 countries of their Android based 4 inch screen flagship Galaxy S
• HTC has the WildFire aka Desire Mini a Euro 300 Android based phone
• Blackberry is showing off their  OS 6 on the upcoming 9850

Amongst all this excitement what Nokia is doing ?

Nothing ,

• N8 is all they have in  in store  , which was prematurely announced thanks to bashing by Eldar Mutezin ( a big drama over the leak ) and as per what I have studied and seen offers nothing more than a pretty face , sure it has a capacitive screen 12 MP HD Camera , HDMI support and all but at the back it’s still a s60 v5 phone with minor changes made .
• Symbian ^3 , as being reported the first device will be launched by an Asian handset manufacturer instead of Nokia so any mistakes they make will be automatically considered the flaws within N8
• N900 -  It was launched among much ( according to Nokia standards ) funfare ( in Apple standards it was nothing )  but according to latest Gartner report Nokia has managed to sell only 100,000 of them in first five weeks  .  N900 is not a mistake like N97 was but Nokia failed to work on it and make it a success , with Nokia’s interest lost even developer community seems to be loosing interest in it ( also they have shutdown access to extra untested repository)  . On OVI Store although now paid applications for N900 are available but they are for now limited to pictures , videos and some games no apps are being sold there as no one has the incentive to target the 100,000 users and N900 will forever be remembered as the big phone that could .
• MeeGo-  The child of Nokia and Intel’s union , where it will go no one knows , it was supposed to be launched for N900 but Nokia has pulled the plug on it , now it’s been said to launched for new intel based processor netbooks and also phones , which may or may not have ARM processors.

So guys Nokia is looking at a bleak future , their OVI Services are not picking up as expected ( evident from the lack of figures being given out )  OVI Music is proving to be a disaster ( check out the number of subscriptions )  OVI Store is working but why bother going there when much of the programs are already available directly through the vendor ( but I like the preferential pricing for low income countries offering more than 50 % discount )

My advice to Nokia is to gear up themselves see where they are heading and where they want to go .  They are sitting on so many boats from phones to services to OS that now even they don’t know which direction to take and the result is showing in loosing of market share , loose of repute amongst their die hard followers ( today worldofnokia.co.uk has called it quits )  and people moving to other phones and OS

All this had been from heart , as much as I like Nokia , love their phones , their future worries me and unless Nokia comes up with something of a breakthrough ( which they also materialize well in time ) Nokia is looking forward to lose their market share big time to the competitors.

Farhan