News - Nokia issues sales warning – shares spanked

[HEXUS]

More bad news for the Finnish phone giant as margins plummet.

Read more.

[aidanjt]

Hands up if you're as blind as a bat and didn't see that coming!






No? Anyone?

Strategy transitions are difficult...

And some strategies are just incompetent.

[TheAnimus]

And some strategies are just incompetent.

What are you saying they should have done? At the point elop came around I mean.

They had seen nothing on their mego platform. Symbian was just a turd, it in a way makes programming iOS look pleasant, there is no worse insult for a dev platform than that.

If they had gone droid they would have been head to head with these big Chinese firms, the ones who are making the nock off nokias right now.

I think they way they announced it was silly, they should have just dicked over their partners and not told anyone until it was more imminent.

[OilSheikh]

They should have brought out Touchscreen phones years ago!

They didn't and LG and Samsung and HTC gained the market.

[3dcandy]

Been saying this for years...Nokia phones just aren't fashionable anymore! I don't know anyone with any tech knowledge that has been pleased with their Nokia for years compared to the competition..

[aidanjt]

I do. But then she has actual tech knowledge, and being a dwm user, her N900 suits her..

Sadly, now that Nokia are WP7 exclusive, Nokia has neither sex nor geek appeal any more. They're just finished. No doubt the vultures are just waiting for their stock to hit rock bottom before snapping it up.

[zoozoo]

I hope Nokia And Microsoft will definitely give us surprising super phones in future.

[crossy]

Been saying this for years...Nokia phones just aren't fashionable anymore! I don't know anyone with any tech knowledge that has been pleased with their Nokia for years compared to the competition..

Granted it's not "fashionable", but the 2330 I use for work is actually pretty decent, it just does the call/text job I bought it for with no complaints. Ye olde N95 was actually okay (good call quality, some good features, but the smartphone bits were - ahem - in need of some TLC).

If anyone wants my opinion, I think Nokia screwed up by having too many platforms and especially not looking for a Symbian exit strategy when the iPhone came out. I'm really unconvinced that Meego will be a good phone platform, so unless Nokia come out with an N770,N800 etc successor then it's not really for them.

I also think that we're going to see bad news after more bad news from Nokia until they've managed to ship WP7 product for a while. And I'm also hoping that they manage to add some Nokia tweaks to WP7 - otherwise why buy one rather than an HTC?

Although if they do start a crash dive into terra firma, then I'd hope that Google would be waiting to try and pick up some of their IP, as it'd be a great way to protect themselves from Apple etc. Plus, although it kind of contradicts what I said about platforms, I really would have like to have seen Nokia do a high-end Android phone.

[TheAnimus]

Sadly, now that Nokia are WP7 exclusive, Nokia has neither sex nor geek appeal any more. They're just finished. No doubt the vultures are just waiting for their stock to hit rock bottom before snapping it up.

You know I'm just not so sure.

I don't think they are finished per say, depressed, probably going to get a bit worse, but they may well find their place in the market again.

That would be mid level phones. Something better than the $100 andriods we are being promised will be flooding the market in 2012, not competiting with the chinese factories that are currently churning out the nock off nokias which are so popular in the 3rd world.

I doubt they will do anything to compete directly with iPhone in the next 24 months. But there could be quite a cash cow amoungst the $250 bracket.

Myself I'm tired of phones that cost £500 and aren't built to tackle my daily life. Ok that latter part applies only to the iPhone, the HTC Desire I had was very well made, but it just cost too much. WP7 runs smoothly on low cost hardware. It will provide a better user-experiance than any andriod device on the same or slightly better hardware, I had a 2.2 andriod, snapdragon, and the Omnia7 feels like newer hardware.... It isn't, its just better software.

So if they can get something in that cheaper bracket, which does pretty much everything, they might well be on to something. Fighting andriod at the $100 bracket is hard, and thin on margins, fighting it at $250 should be quite easy.

[crossy]

You know I'm just not so sure.I don't think they are finished per say, depressed, probably going to get a bit worse, but they may well find their place in the market again.

Agree - think Nokia know too much about the phone market to just disappear (as has been touted on some of the Apple-leaning blogs I've seen). They're still shipping so many dumbphones that it's surely likely that this'll keep them ticking over until the higher margin stuff is ready.

Myself I'm tired of phones that cost £500 and aren't built to tackle my daily life. Ok that latter part applies only to the iPhone, the HTC Desire I had was very well made, but it just cost too much. WP7 runs smoothly on low cost hardware. It will provide a better user-experiance than any andriod device on the same or slightly better hardware, I had a 2.2 andriod, snapdragon, and the Omnia7 feels like newer hardware.... It isn't, its just better software.

Hmm, agree with that first sentence, not so sure about the rest. By the time that Nokia get their WP7 phone(s) out then Android will have had a couple of minor updates by then (perhaps even ICS). A lot of the "problems" with the Android front-end can be laid at the door of the manufacturers - they add value with their front ends, but some/most of these aren't the best, and actually make a pretty good device feel poor. Personal experience - replaced my stock X10 UI with the one from the Arc (thanks to Cyanogen) and it's a whole new ball game.

So if they can get something in that cheaper bracket, which does pretty much everything, they might well be on to something. Fighting andriod at the $100 bracket is hard, and thin on margins, fighting it at $250 should be quite easy.

Personally I think there's three markets here - personal, business and cross-over. Apple and Android seem to be going for the personal market (lots of "shiny, shiny"), HP/Palm and Blackberry are business oriented (three question integration with MS-Exchange, VPN, etc), but Nokia with WP7 could fit nicely in the cross-over category. A Nokia phone with MS software surely MUST be a dead cert to slot neatly into any corporate environment (mail, im, etc), and the XBox/Zune features will be nice for when the working day is done. That's not to say that you can't use iPhone for business (as seems to be de rigeur for marketing departments), nor use Blackberry as a personal phone.
As you say, Elop & co would have to be stark, staring mad to go for the low-end market, stick to the mid to high-range. And here's hoping that the Cassandra's who fortold that the smartphone market will be iOS and Android are proved wrong. (Oh, and that Nokia come up with designs that are more imaginative than the black-plastic-slabs that seem to be in vogue at the moment - kudos to SonyEricsson for being different).

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I think a lot of the Nokia phone hardware is actually still quite decent and it is the software which lets it down.

The N8 is a lovely piece of hardware and if shipped WM7 or Android it would have been a much more viable piece of hardware.

[crossy]

I think a lot of the Nokia phone hardware is actually still quite decent and it is the software which lets it down.

Funnily enough, that's the comment that's repeated (frequently) on the SonyEricsson site concerning their SE's Android phones...