NOKIA STORY
Is There A Final Twist
In The Tale?
Don’t write off Nokia just yet, the once-popular phone brand is bracing for a comeback
IT DOMINATED the world to the point that almost everyone’s first phone was a Nokia; it then staged the greatest and most spectacular debacle as a brand and a company to the point that almost no one owns a Nokia phone today!
Microsoft
bought Nokia as well as its Lumia, Asha and X series brands for a
sensationally undervalued deal. After having paid all that money to
buy the brands, Microsoft killed off the iconic Asha and bludgeoned
the X series to death right away!
Nokia
sold off its name and its brands for Microsoft to use for a certain
period of time; Microsoft dropped the Nokia name even though it
could have used it for a long time and rechristened this division as
Microsoft Lumia!
Nokia,
the brand, is effectively dead; Nokia announces its brand new tablet
and calls it the Nokia N1!
Confused?
Well, join the queue! For a company that has been known to be the
most rock-steady in approach and manner, Nokia’s last few months
have been the most turbulent, baffling and perplexing of all
companies in the tech field. Let’s see if we can deep-dive in here
and try and get some perspective.
A
STUDY IN HOW NOT TO DO THINGS
Nokia’s
move to the Windows OS, its dizzying loss of market share in
smartphones, its steady deterioration to becoming a fringe player in
the mobile business, its shocking sale to Microsoft – all of these
are subject to a great amount of speculative analysis and will go
down in the annals of history as how to run an iconic brand to the
ground. But it is what happened after the sale to Microsoft that is
by far the most perplexing.
THE
FINE PRINT
The
brand sale deal with Microsoft is a little ambiguous, but in essence
it boils down to something like this. For smartphones and for the
Lumia series, Microsoft can use the Nokia brand for marketing till
December 31, 2015 and for feature phones they can use the Nokia
brand for 10 years. Thus dropping Nokia off the Lumia series this
quickly did come as a bit of a surprise, but what has been even more
amazing has been the swiftness shown on the part of Nokia to
announce their own tablet (surprisingly not covered under the
branding deal for mobile devices). Thus it seems that the
speculation that has been boiling that Nokia may stage a huge
comeback with smartphones in early 2016, may well be correct too.
THE
CHURNING OF THE NEW NOKIA MIND
That
might not be easy as almost everyone that mattered in Nokia’s
smartphone division has moved to Microsoft. But in a world of
contract manufacturing (even Apple’s iPhone and other products are
more or less contract manufactured in China), this new Nokia may
well be leaner, meaner and smarter. Let us take a quick look at the
Nokia N1 tablet (contract manufactured by Foxconn in China) to see
what’s ticking inside Nokia’s brain right now.
THE
NEW NOKIA N1
Nokia
started the tease with a hashtag #thinkingahead and then revealed
the tablet with a surprisingly candid comment: “The world doesn’t
need yet another tablet, but the N1 is for anyone who hasn’t found
the right Android tablet yet”. The N1 is remarkably like the iPad
Mini but even thinner at 6.9mm, all-aluminum single frame,
2,048x1,536 7.9 inch display screen, 8-megapixel rear camera,
5-megapixel on the front, 2GB RAM, 32GB of storage, a USB C Type
port which basically is a reversible USB slot, a 2.4GHz Intel Atom
64 bit processor, runs the latest Lollipop edition of the Android OS
with Nokia’s own Z1 launcher home screen that learns from your
usage pattern and customises the look and feel. It is specced heavy
and high and the product is priced low and easy at $250. That would
translate to about Rs.15,000 or so in India. That’s a fantastic
product at a fantastic price and does beat the competition fair and
square.
IF
YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME
But
this is a tablet. A low number game now in a very cut -throat
business. Yet, the swift move by Nokia to get this to the market
fast shows that Nokia is all set to make a counter move and wants to
make sure that its brand and product range is right there in front
of consumers and isn’t forgotten in the next one year. Nokia could
even come out with a Macbook Air-like laptop with a 4G LTE built-in
slot (it did have a really good one at one time called the Nokia
Booklet 3G) and a few other products just to keep the brand momentum
going. And then, in early 2016, come out with a range of three
smartphones that blow the whole mobile world to small bits. Imagine
a phone with Nokia-level hardware and optics, its meticulous
attention to design, the power of its still very recognisable brand,
an ambitious new partnership with Android and a price point that
makes all others look bad... really bad! That could be a true
comeback.
At
the launch of the N1, Nokia’s head of devices, Sebastian Nystrom,
in an emotional moment commented “They said Nokia is dead, I say,
they couldn’t be more wrong.” He just may well be right. That
could be the real Nokia that stands up to be counted.
- -Rajiv Makhni is managing editor, Technology, NDTV, and the anchor of Gadget Guru, Cell Guru and Newsnet 3
No comments:
Post a Comment