Nokia Comming To The US!

If you are looking to buy a new smart phone you may consider phones made by Apple, HTC, Motorola, Samsung and the list could go on but one phone manufacturer that probably won’t be on the list is Nokia. Nokia completely dominates the smart phone market everywhere in the world except for in the United States. Why is this and what are they doing about it? Read on to find out!

Nokia is a multinational communications company based in Finland. They are the world’s largest smart phone manufacturer employing over 132,000 people in 120 countries and selling their products in over 150 countries. As of May 2010, Nokia held 37% of the global market compared to Apple’s 3%. Nokia is also continually voted as one of the most admirable companies in the global market. So why is such a big and respectable company have no place in the US markets? Well there are multiple reasons.

 First off, there are two types of communication standards, CDMA and GSM. Nokia doesn’t focus on their CDMA phones which are most common in the US. Nokia is heavyset on GSM primarily because almost everywhere in the world GSM is the most prominent. They have converted a few of their phones to CDMA but they have refused to convert their higher end phones.

Secondly, Americans expect more from their phone than it just making calls. We expect our phones to have apps and multimedia features like the iPhone and Android phones have. Nokia saw this and decided to release their own version of an app store called “Ovi” which had apps, games, videos and other media. Unfortunately many users had problems accessing it and it crashed more often than not. Nokia blamed this on “extraordinarily high spikes of traffic” but that was not a good enough explanation for consumers. Besides the fact that it didn’t work half the time, when compared to Apple’s app store or the Android Market, the volume of apps is quite pathetic.

Next, Nokia has a problem with partnering with cell phone service providers in order to provide phones at cheaper prices with contracts. A few of Nokia low end phones are avail bile for low prices with a two year contract but all of their nice phones are only available unlocked for their full price which is usually around $500-$600 which puts it well out of the budget of the average American consumer.

Next, Nokia phones are not aesthetically pleasing to Americans. Since Europe and Asia are Nokia’s largest market, they design their phones to what they want. Unlike Americans, Eurasians do not demand their phones to be as thin as possible or either be a flip phone or have a touch screen.

Finally, one of the biggest put offs about Nokia phones was their “Symbian” operating system. Symbian is well known for being very slowly and complicated. To change something as simple as the ringer volume you have to navigate through a maze of menus which to the current generation of consumers is completely unacceptable. But if you noticed, I said “was” not “one of the biggest put offs about Nokia phones IS their “Symbian” operating system”. Thankfully Nokia has just announced that they are going to get rid of Symbian completely and go with either Android or the Windows 7 mobile platform to try and enter the US markets.

In the end, Nokia ended up deciding to switch to the Windows platform as their first move to enter the American market.  Many see this as suicide as Windows has already been marked as a failure compared to iOS and Android but there are a few reasons why Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO, chose Windows.

One of the biggest reasons is that Nokia has a tradition for being different and standing out; If Nokia was to go with Android, they would just become another of many manufacturers selling an Android phone. Nokia has always been able to distinguish themselves because of their phones’ build quality and the amount of features available. With manufacturers such as HTC and Motorola, Nokia would be hard pressed to stand out.

One of the biggest problems with Windows is that their app store is quite pathetic compared to iOS’s and Android’s. This is because developers who make apps, make apps to make money. If they think a certain operating system (OS) has a large market share (ie. iOS and Android) they will make apps for that OS because there is more of a chance that someone will download their app. With Nokia onboard with Windows, many developers may start making apps for them because of the amount of phones that Nokia cells worldwide. As I mentioned before, Nokia is the world’s largest cell phone manufacturer selling nearly twice as many phones as its biggest competitor, Samsung, in the global market. Since all future Nokia phones will be Windows based this opens a huge market up to developers.

This transition will take a few years but hopefully Nokia’s plan works out and they become a major competitor in the smart phone market. This may be bad news for Apple and Android phones but for us the consumers, more competition will only mean better phones for cheaper prices!