“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.]