cos then my phone company won't be able to foist any more of their crap hand sets on me. After 20-30 years you'd have thought that mobiles would just work... In fact the ones I had 15 years ago did. My new nokia and my GF's new nokia don't.

DEATH TO NOKIA for this infernal, confusing, unreliable, unusable piece of crap my carrier "upgraded" me to.

Still it's got a nice metal case so I guess I can break it in half and use a piece of string to make a much more reliable phone

After several Windows Mobile phones (e.g. the TyTn) i've gone back to Nokia- I've got a 6120. It's one of the best phones I've had for years. It's tiny, but loaded with features. It's also a true smart phone - probably the smallest smart phone on the market.

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/10/npd-reports-iphone-was-top-us-handset-in-q3/

I've already forgotten who no-klea are

Jeez, never seen a company go self-inflicted tits-up so fast. Pity my ex-colleagues. IMHO, it's as buggered as Motorola, Benefon, etc. Sad. As an ex-colleague (culled in 2003-ish - Jaffa-you know who you are ;-) said "Nice party. Pity it had to end".

I saw this coming with 3G. Who the fuc*k wants TV, etc, on a fuc*king phone?? Daft Cunch of Bunts.

While cell phones were still emerging in Chirstmas-prezzy-giving-countries, you'd expect a boost in cell phone sales pre Christmas. It was an easy prezzy choice.

Now the kids all have phones, therefore much fewer Christmas phones (except maybe a few upgrades here and there).

The problem with many of these phone vendors is that they lose the plot. My family has a 1100 which is quite old now and is a basic phone that does regular voice calls pretty well. When we wanted another all we could find was the 1110 - the new bottom end phone which is confusing and harder to drive.

Perhaps dominance means that Nokia have forgotten how to listen to customers.

Hmmm...I'll second the 6120 comment, I'm typing this from my 6120 with 3mail(push email), Fring, Skype(on 3), Adobe Acrobat and MSN Messenger and TomTom all running flawlessly in the background...so i have 2 skype accounts signed into which i cant even do on my PC!!

Plus a 16gb sdhc filled with music....Far less buggy than the N95 which I had and chucked after a month....if only this baby had gps and a better camera....thats the 6220, but they screwed up the finis and it feels plasticky and bits fall off...... seems like the n96 is thier flagship which is a piece of crap....i remember nokias like the 8800 and first communicators.... they were objects of desire and looked like something out of star trek....made of titanium alloys and now their using plastic... so to anyone at nokia who wants to make up for sales figures, make a 6220 with the 6120's quality, chuck in a touchscreen and slide out qwerty and it will kill iphones...........but just to be sure give punters the option of a clean format/dual boot with linux....

... might just be that their older phones still work.

My 8 year old 5185iVD still works fine. On its original battery, no less. It works in places that newer phones that my wife experimented with did not. Bottoms of canyons, etc. The radios in these things are WONDERFUL, and the battery offers better than decent performance for my needs. It's been soaked many times (twice in the toilet; always remove phone from shirt pocket before flushing), and like keyboards, it seems to dry out nicely after flushing with clean water (don't try this at home unless you have the proper sized torx bits and know how to use them ...). My wife finally got sick of asking to borrow my phone when we were in out of the way places and got hers reactivated ...

It doesn't have a camera, but I have cameras (ranging from Canon A40 power-shot to a top of the line Hasselblad with a CF-39 back). It's not a computer, but I have computers. It can't browse the Web, but I don't want to browse the Web on a phone. I don't care about gaming. I don't even really care if it has an address book.

All I want a phone to do is be a phone. And to do it well. Maybe I've been using UN*X too long.

I'll upgrade when Nokia (or someone else) offers something better. Maybe.

Concerning that many IT companies are thinking this. Okay in some cases, especially the city banking sector, they are very expensive compared to permanent, but in other sectors and outside the city, some may be the same, if not cheaper than a permanent in a senior role. At least for short term hire when you consider the recruitment costs and time involved in hiring decent quality permanent, not to mention the extra overheads, and the cost of firing them when times are bad.

The latter is more likely the reason though. Contractors are the obvious quick solution to economic downturns as they are easy to fire. It's a double-edged sword with contracting. Easier to get work when times are good, but easier to be kicked out also.

A rephrase of an earlier posting that I made, but was rejected because the article author took the hump at being compared to a blogger...

Nokia's market share continues to grow and they probably are not going to sell fewer handsets this quarter than last year, though the industry as a whole will.

Nokia's biggest problem is that the vast bulk of the handsets they sell are at the cheap end with very low margin (1100/1200 series).

The higher end makes money and there they are losing market share to almost everyone.

If this trend keeps up, the high end will stop being profitable. Quite likely a lot of those cost cutting measures will be linked to reducing costs related to this swing away from top end phones.