“Nokia’s bid to challenge the dominance of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android has failed to convince telecom operators in Europe, depriving it of powerful allies in its fight to regain the top spot in the mobile market,” Leila Abboud and Georgina Prodhan report for Reuters. “Four major telecom operators in Europe, where the phones have been on sale since before Christmas, told Reuters the new Nokia Lumia smartphones were not good enough to compete with Apple’s iPhone or Samsung’s Galaxy phones.”
“Nokia now faces a battle for the key U.S. market, where its former dominance has shriveled to 1 percent of the smartphone market,” Abboud and Prodhan report. “Skeptics among operators say the sleek, neon-colored phones are overpriced for what is not an innovative product, cite a lack of marketing dollars put behind the phones, and image problems caused by glitches in the battery and software of the early models.”
Abboud and Prodhan report, “Moody’s cut its credit rating on Nokia to one notch above junk on Monday after the company said it would post losses for the first and second quarters. Standard & Poor’s announced a similar downgrade in March. Nokia’s shares fell below 3 euros, a 15-year low.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Not good enough to compete with even a slavish copier’s pretend iPhones? Ouch.
Still, thanks to the glacial pace of the courts, Microsoft still has time to make Windows Phone a better, cheaper and more legal alternative to Android. Nokia, on the other hand, is rapidly running out of time. If Microsoft feels they need Nokia around for Windows Phone’s success, Ballmer might want to just buy them for real, instead of continuing the current charade of Nokia being an independent company.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “jeffgtr” for the heads up.]
As I’ve said before on this forum, if I had been Elop, I’d have hedged my bets and gotten Nokia to produce both Android and Windows phones. That way, if the Windows experiment didn’t take off, at least the company doesn’t go down the toilet. And if the Windows phones had taken off, then Nokia could have gently eased off Android. Moreover, there are other competitors such as HTC that seem to be taking this dual OS approach. Even Samsung is taking this dual Android-Windows approach. The only reason why Nokia felt it needed to limit itself to Windows was because Elop was ex-Microsoft. Herein may lie the seeds of Nokia’s disintegration and disappearance.
Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if you were a phone service provider and had previously enjoyed exclusive rights to sell the revolutionary iPhone, but then subsequently decided to choose the Lumia as your “Hero” phone ?
How ridiculously out of touch would you look ?
… businessman, looking at the businesses behind the technology, you may well be convinced that the Windows technology is the better. It has been around longer and is backed by a company with a good (depends on who you talk to) reputation, and it’s linked to software YOU use every day.
If you have the slightest technology chops, at least some of those halos may have dimmed. SHOULD have dimmed.
Two ways to look at the data: what’s the best-selling smart-phone? (the latest iPhone, followed by yet another iPhone) And what’s the best-selling smart-phone OS? (Android) So … which is more popular?
I think Nokia needs urgent to develop a new product and create (not a phone, not a tablet, not netbook!) a new market if they want to keep alive!
As should Samsung (after they lose in court), HTC and all the others. In that same vein, Apple should also come up with a revolutionary product to maintain their dominance. Kind of a silly statement…
Not so much, HTC and Samsung can still sell their products (even though they are also ran’s (and rip-off’s)) Apple DOES have an innovative industry leading product in the market (several actually) and is selling them like hotcakes.
Nokia is in deep dodo, they can’t sell their old tired crap and the horse they tied their (entire) cart to appears to be dead in the gates. ;;-) /p
I believe they already do have another product – snow tires.
Oh yeah, they spun that business off a few years ago.
Ballmer’s man, Elop, has certainly done his job well in reducing the value of Nokia. Time for Microsoft to finally swoop in and buy it on the cheap.
What’s really pathetic is a new series of ads claiming all smart-phones to date are *beta* phones, and the tens of millions who’ve used them have served as beta testers. At last, the real phone arrives, the one you’ve been waiting for – the Nokia Lumia!
Just who do they think they’re kidding?
Themselves?
That echoes of Rim’s “Amateur hour is now over” campaign. Or was that Motorola? So many failed ad blitzes that I can’t keep one straight from another…
starting with the name “Lumia” ¿would you buy a phone called that way?
it sounds lazy and boring. In spanish sounds like “momia” (mummy)
What about the Panasonic “Eluga”? again in spanish sounds like “pechuga” (chicken breast)