Thursday, April 19, 2012

Nokia woes should spur carrier rethink

Tony Cripps, Ovum Principal Analyst, Devices and Platforms

AUSTRALIA: Reuters' report highlighting a possible lack of faith among European mobile operators in Nokia's new Windows Phone smartphones characterizes the products as not good enough to compete with established market leaders from Apple and Samsung in particular. Such beliefs are clearly widespread - Ovum too has heard similar criticisms from carriers directed towards devices and platform that exist in the smartphone badlands beyond Apple and Android-powered products. And the beleaguered Finnish handset maker's latest financial results appear to bear this out.

But they are also missing the point. There's little objectively wrong with many of the products competing with Apple, Samsung and Google/Android that greater customer awareness and a big budget marketing drive could not cure. And that's something European carriers need to do a great deal more to assist the underdogs with if they aren't to be the engineers of their own self-fulfilling prophecy of handing all power over their subscribers to the duopoly of Apple and Google.

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