Why Nokia stays ahead of the game
19 June 2005 By Adrian Weckler
Why does Nokia sell more phones than anyone else?
Is it because of its phones' designs?
No: women and kids prefer flip phones, which Nokia missed out on until the middle of last year.
Is it because of low prices? No: Nokias tend to be a little dearer than other phones, especially the ones bought in bulk by operators and co-branded. No, Nokia still sells more phones than anyone else because it invents new things, takes research seriously and tries to move the market on.
Take the crop of models it showcased last week at an event in Helsinki. Its 770 ‘tablet' is basically a mini-internet and e-mail device which can also make cheap calls over broadband.
Its N91 model will store well over a thousand MP3 songs on a 4 gigabyte hard drive and should present a fresh challenge to the iPod.
And its N90 cameraphone will have a 2 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens attached, making it by far the best cameraphone yet seen on the market (Carl Zeiss doesn't lend its name to mediocre stuff).
With the exception of theMP3 model, these are relatively niche products.
Nevertheless, few other manufacturers are even close in their ambition for new features on phones.
It is true that some Nokia users stay with the brand because they can't be bothered adapting to other brands' operating systems. It is also true that business users (in Ireland, anyway) frequently set Nokia as their default mobiles.
But does any other manufacturer take the mobile phone's potential as a cross-media device as seriously as Nokia?
Take Lifeblog. Lifeblog is a feature on Nokia's higher-end cameraphones (the 7610 or 6630, for example) which stores all of the texts, pictures and videos made or received on the phones in chronological order in one application. But what do you do with pictures?
Everyone knows that it's murder trying to send them to other phones, with manufacturers and networks blaming each other for the fog of inoperability.
How about posting them onto the internet? This is exactly what Lifeblog does.
Nokia has done a deal with one of the main weblogging companies, Typepad.com.
So you send pictures (and notes or texts, by the way) onto the internet, onto aTypepad.com weblog account. (The account costs about €4 per month.)
This may sound unfeasibly nerdish: who's interested in keeping a weblog?
Normally, not me. But that's because keeping a weblog - effectively an online diary - normally entails a slavish devotion to a computer lifestyle.
It also frequently results in long, rambling political opinions that no-one is really interested in.
This isn't what's happening here. There's no PC needed (unless you want to checkout your own site).
It's just a brilliant way to keep friends or colleagues who you don't frequently see or talk to - abroad for example - up to date with things. Just point, click, send and the world (or your mates) sees what you've just snapped.
This is significantly ahead of what anyone else is doing in the mobile space. It's damn impressive.
Adrian Weckler is editor of Computers In Business, the monthly IT magazine published by The Sunday Business Post.
© The Sunday Business Post, 2004, Thomas Crosbie Media TCH
http://www.thepost.ie/post/pages/p/stor ... qqqx=1.asp
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