Nokia: regular WinPho handset releases through 2012
New kit every 2-3 months
Nokia could be punching out Windows Phone handsets at the rate or one every two months, the company has said.
That seems excessive, but it's what Jo Harlow, Nokia's executive vice president of smart devices, said this week. Specifically, "we should be launching new devices in a rhythm that might be every couple of months, every three months, something like that".
Pushing new releases on a quarterly basis is what Nokia - and many of its rivals - have been doing for the past decade, so it's no great surprise the upcoming WinPho smartphones will follow the same cadence.
Nokia is pinning its future success on the Microsoft OS - which is due its first major update, Windows Phone 7.1 'Mango' in September - after effectively abandonning the ailing, behind-the-times Symbian. The Finnish phone giant's first WinPho handset will be out toward the end of this year.
After that, "[Nokia is] going to keep coming with new devices in order to have something to talk about", Harlow said, PC Magazine reports.
Nokia's support for WinPho will help drive the Microsoft OS' market share beyond Apple's, some analysts reckon. ®
COMMENTS
Also...
"Nokia's executive vice president of smart devices,"
Not to be confused with "Nokia's smart executive vice president of devices", coz apparently, they don't have one of those.
Someone ought to tell Nokia...
that the problem is not the number of handsets available. The most profitable smartphone maker only really has 5 SKU's available, and 4 of those only differ in capacity and colour (and that's only black or white). AFAIK Nokia's hardware has been OK, quite good in fact. The software implementation on their smart devices has just been extraordinarily poor. I'd also suggest that they should stop trying to full an nerd's checklist of features and only implement what works and works well. I'm still surprised that they chose Microsoft's offering over Android (other than it is a former MSFT employee at the hem), which would have allowed them to keeps some of the feel of Nokia products (fonts, UI elements etc.). Instead Nokia look set to become another MSFT commodity manufacturer. What do I know though, I'm not a successful manufacture of smartphones, but then neither are Nokia!
Why should they have any motivation?
After all WP7 is still just as useless as feature phone OSes. However it costs more. It's a huge step backwards from Windows Mobile.
Choice Overload
"Pushing new releases on a quarterly basis is what Nokia - and many of its rivals - have been doing for the past decade" - Oh for god's sake, when Nokia started doing this is when they jumped the shark, though it took Blackberry, the iPhone and Android to hammer the point home.
I remember the days when most people in my peer group, and not just the geeks, could name at least a few model numbers of Nokia phones, which they preferred, and the differentiating factors that led to this choice. Despite these factors, impressive battery life and a very intuitive UI were consistent across the range.
Then Nokia expanded their range massively, but without obviously useful differentiating factors (and in some cases terrible design choices - 3650 anyone?), whilst the battery life decreased and the UI became increasingly fragmented and complicated. This rapid expansion could have been interpreted superficially as a sign of innovation, but then RIM, Apple and Android came along and demonstrated otherwise.
Did they learn?
Is that an old Nokia policy that stuck? Flooding the market with a gazillion models that fail to differentiate from each other, and confuse the customer?
I want few good models with one clearly standing out of the crowd to meet my specific requirements. I don't want a bunch of mediocre options which do pretty much the same thing and only vary in terms of case colour and butttons shape.
Mind you, I don't care, I'm not a Nokia customer anymore, so they can do whatever the heck they want, as long as they don't drag us all down in the process.
