Nokia’s smartphone strategy confuses

Rating: Meego for NZ but not UK, and wot about Android?

Photo from weibo.com

So Nokia has confirmed in a statement to paidContent:UK what we already knew. (See our previous story here.) Namely that it won’t be releasing the Meego powered N9 handset in the UK. It had already confirmed that it wouldn’t be releasing the N9 in the USA either. The official statement read, “As an organisation Nokia takes a market by market approach to product rollout and each country decides which products to introduce from those available.” Now the majority of industry watchers interpret this to mean that Nokia will only release the N9 in developing markets. As we have pointed out before, what about New Zealand? You will be able to buy one there! Oh, and BTW the UK grey importer of N9s has disappeared. But GoMo News rediscovered reports of a Nokia Android.The statement given to paidContent says, “Although we are delighted with the very positive reception that the Nokia N9 has received, here in the UK there are no plans to offer the Nokia N9 at present.”

It continues, “These decisions are based on a local assessment of existing and upcoming products that make up Nokia’s product portfolio and are intended to provide the best local portfolio for the UK market.”

The only conclusion you can draw from this that whilst Nokia knows it has a great little handset in the N9, releasing it would only confuse the poor British punters. They must be guided towards WP7 [Windows Phone 7].

If Nokia will be able to show its first WP7 handset – possibly codenamed Sea Ray – by next month [September 2011], then this does make sense as a stategy.

After all the grey importer of Nokia N9s we found on eBay UK, Fawad Tariq reckoned he wouldn’t receive the units until September 19th anyway.

The bad news is that his ad has disappeared and he is now classed as “Not a registered user.”

Curiously, whilst researching this piece, GoMo News came across comments from around June [2011] on the Mobile-Review site.

These comments appear to be written by somebody who used to work or still does work inside Nokia.

The site said here that, “The company [Nokia] is still researching Android (the company is still considering this possibility and all depends on the sales of WP7 in the first half of 2012).”

Subsequently, Mobile-review has added, “Nokia will have to survive without the leading market share, competitive technology and proprietary OS in high end segments.

Android products from Nokia will be a move of despair, but we cannot rule it out in summer or autumn of 2012.”

The site then makes mention of pictures which appeared on a Chinese site – labelled as on the Weibo.com/codegeass account – and reputedly showed a Nokia running Android 2.2 (Froyo).

GoMo News doesn’t think this was a serious prototype – simply a design exercise. However, the Mobile Indian here appears to have acquired some details.

This site says,” The unidentified Nokia Device carries model number NB72 and the hardware information entries had been wiped off.

Apparently, this might be one of the initial trails of using Android over Nokia hardware.

Nokia’s Android prototype device is said to have 4-inch display supporting 480 X 800 pixel resolution and it runs on Android 2.2 Froyo update. No other details about the mysterious device were available.

It is a possibility that the images could be fake but the source of this news is the same website that had earlier shown the leaked pictures of Nokia’s first WP7 device in May, which were same as shown in the recently concluded Nokia Connection 2011.”

So when Nokia realises that rivals such as ZTE and HTC can seriously compete with its own WP7 offerings, it may finally change its mind and introduce Android phones like all its leading rivals (except Apple, of course).