AllThingsD » Symbian

Interview: Nokia's Head of Imaging on Extending Zeiss Deal, Preparing to Ship 41-Megapixel Cameraphone

Ina Fried — Wed, 02 May 2012 08:05:41 +0000

Nokia said Wednesday that it plans to start shipping its 808 PureView — the 41-megapixel cameraphone introduced earlier this year — by the end of May.

India and Russia will be among the first markets to get the PureView, Nokia said. The company also said it was extending its exclusive camera deal with Germany’s Carl Zeiss, its longtime imaging partner, whose lenses power the PureView and the N8.

“We are getting much more than just the optics components from Carl Zeiss,” said Nokia head of imaging Juha Alakarhu, in a telephone interview. “This is really a true partnership with Carl Zeiss. They have a big role throughout the development of our cameras.”

Nokia is counting on imaging to remain as one of its selling points as it shifts its weight from its homegrown Symbian operating system to building phones based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone software. Nokia reiterated that it plans to adapt the PureView technology to future Windows Phones.

The company still isn’t going into any details on that front, nor is it saying when the first Windows Phones with the technology will ship. Nokia plans to sell the Symbian-based PureView in markets beyond Russia and India, but has said it does not plan to bring it to the U.S.

“We will bring PureView to future smartphones — all the parts in the product, from great optics [to the] processing, the whole experience,” Alakarhu said.

During a visit to Finland in February, AllThingsD was among the first outsiders to see the PureView, ahead of the formal launch of the device at that month’s Mobile World Congress.

Since then, Alakarhu said he has been traveling a lot with the phone, taking it on various work trips, including a recent visit to Indonesia, and this week’s May 1 celebrations in Finland. Alakarhu said he gets lots of amazed reactions, adding that he is probably most pleased that his usually critical photography enthusiast friends are impressed.

“I was able to show the photos, and I was happy to see their happy faces,” he said.

Nokia has also promised it has more photo tricks up its sleeve, though Alakarhu wouldn’t spill the beans.

“I probably shouldn’t say anything about our future surprises,” he said. “We are working hard on imaging technology.”

Nokia spent five years developing the camera technology behind the PureView.

Nokia Dips Into Red as Q1 Sales Drop Nearly 29 Percent

Ina Fried — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:45:26 +0000

Finland’s Nokia had warned that its quarterly sales report would be a painful one, and the numbers released on Thursday back that up.

Nokia reported that quarterly sales were 7.4 billion euros, down from 10.4 billion euros a year ago. On the earnings side, the company lost 25 euro cents per share.

The company also announced on Thursday that top sales executive Colin Giles is leaving the company. His direct reports will now funnel to Niklas Savander, executive VP of markets.

Nokia had said last week that it would fall short of its goal of near-break-even results, and cautioned that things in the current quarter would only be about the same as they were in the disappointing first quarter.

“We are navigating through a significant company transition in an industry environment that continues to evolve and shift quickly,” CEO Stephen Elop said in a statement. “Over the last year we have made progress on our new strategy, but we have faced greater than expected competitive challenges.”

In particular, things have been rough at the low end of the market, where Android is gaining quickly on the kinds of feature phones that have historically made up much of Nokia’s profits. In both smartphones and lower-end devices, Nokia saw significant drops in both the number of phones being sold and in the average prices those phones were fetching.

“We have a clear sense of urgency to move our strategy forward even faster,” Elop said. “We have focused our efforts in the low-end of smartphones and feature phone asset to drive improved business results and conserve cash. We are confident in our strategy and focused on responding urgently in the short term and creating value for our shareholders in the long term.”

For the current quarter, Nokia said to expect its operating margins to be worse than the -3 percent it posted during the first quarter. Nokia still looks to reduce its operating expenses by $1 billion over the next fiscal year, as compared to 2010.

“Nokia plans to accelerate and substantially deepen Devices & Services cost savings, consistent with its strategic focus,” it added. “Nokia will share further details as quickly as possible.”

Nokia noted that it did receive $250 million in “platform support payments” from Microsoft during the quarter. Nokia said that while it also pays minimum software royalty commitments back to Microsoft, it expects over the life of the agreement for the payments from Redmond to exceed those it must pay to Microsoft.

Nokia Hit With More Debt Rating Downgrades From Moody's

Ina Fried — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:41:41 +0000

Moody’s cut its ratings on Nokia’s debt on Monday, citing concerns in particular about Nokia’s low-end phone business.

The credit firm cut long-term and short-term debt ratings by one notch. Moody’s also said its outlook was negative, meaning further downgrades are possible.

“While volatility by quarters is not uncommon, Moody’s believes that the structural challenges facing Nokia’s Mobile Phones segment may not be easy to address, such as the market share gains recorded by makers of very low-end phones or new phone promotions by Chinese carriers,” Moody’s said in a statement. “This precipitous decline is of particular concern considering that Nokia’s Mobile Phones segment was still the core income generator for the Nokia group in 2011, when it contributed 1.5 billion Euros to the group’s operating profit of 1.8 billion Euros.”

Moody’s also noted that the company’s shift from Symbian to Windows Phone-based devices “is proving more challenging than expected given that sales of Symbian-based devices are falling off very quickly while Lumia sales are only ramping up slowly.”

The ratings move follows Nokia’s warning last week that its business was weaker than expected and that it sees another rough quarter ahead. Nokia is slated to deliver its full earnings report on Thursday.

For its part, Nokia said it is “quickly taking action” to address concerns about its business.

“Nokia will continue to increase its focus on lowering the company’s cost structure, improving cash flow and maintaining a strong financial position,” CFO Timo Ihamuotil said in a statement.

Nokia was hit with downgrades last year after announcing its plans to focus on Windows Phone.

Moody’s did note that Nokia “has maintained a strong liquidity position and capital structure” and had about twice as much cash and marketable securities as it did debt as of the end of March.

Nokia Warns on Q1, Q2 Earnings Amid Rough Transition

Ina Fried — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:24:02 +0000

Nokia on Wednesday warned that last quarter’s earnings will be lower than expected, and said that the current quarter’s business should be only about where things were in the first quarter.

The company said it expected negative margins of 2 to 3 percent for its devices and services business, as compared to its earlier expectation of roughly break-even results.

“Our disappointing Devices & Services first quarter 2012 financial results and outlook for the second quarter 2012 illustrates that our Devices & Services business continues to be in the midst of transition,” CEO Stephen Elop said in a statement.

Nokia cautioned that it will take “tactical price actions” in its low-end phone business, and also warned that further painful moves could be on the horizon.

The Finnish company said it “will accelerate planned cost reductions and will pursue additional significant structural actions if and when necessary.”

“We are continuing to increase the clock speed of the company,” Elop said. “The change is tangible, and we are proud of the way Nokia employees are quickly responding to the needs of consumers and partners.”

Elop tried to paint as good a picture as possible of things.

“Within our Smart Devices business unit, we have established early momentum with Lumia, and we are increasing our investments in Lumia to achieve market success,” Elop said. “Our operator and distributor partners are providing solid support for Windows Phone as a third ecosystem, as evidenced most recently by the launch of the Lumia 900 by AT&T in the United States.”

Of course, even there, things have been bumpy. Nokia confirmed late Tuesday that a software glitch is causing some Lumia 900 customers to be unable to connect to the Internet. The company is rushing out a software fix and offering a $100 credit to all early Lumia 900 buyers.

Nokia said that it sold more than two million of its Lumia phones in the first quarter, at an average selling price of 220 euros. It added that the number of Lumia phones being activated has continued to grow each month, although that’s probably to be expected as the company brings its Windows Phone products to more markets.

Windows Phone Overtakes Symbian in U.K. … With 2.5 Percent Share

John Paczkowski — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:03:26 +0000

Nokia’s Windows Phone effort is begining to gain traction in Europe, particularly in the U.K. There, Nokia Windows Phone-based handsets have begun to outsell handsets running the company’s old mobile OS, Symbian.

Research outfit Kantar Worldpanel ComTech reports that Windows Phone has captured about 2.5 percent of the U.K. mobile market, edging out the dusty Symbian line, which captured just 2.4 percent — down from 12.4 percent a year ago. Driving its push into the market: Nokia’s Lumia 800 smartphone, which accounted for 87 percent of Windows Phone 7 sales in Europe.

Encouraging news for Nokia, in that there are now signs that adoption of its Windows Phone handsets is on the rise — albeit slowly. That said, 2.5 percent is a piddling portion of the U.K. market. Less than that, considering that Nokia is believed to have sold only 900,000 Windows Phones during the fourth quarter of 2011.

And then there’s that 10 percent drop in Symbian market share, which certainly isn’t providing any help for Nokia’s brand awareness or finances.

So, in the end, it’s great that Nokia appears to be making some headway with its Windows Phone strategy, but it needs to make a hell of a lot more, and soon, if Symbian usage is dropping off so precipitously.

The Inside Story of Nokia's 41-Megapixel Camera Phone: Five Years in the Making

Ina Fried — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:25:22 +0000

If it were easy to put a decent zoom lens in a camera phone, Nokia might never have come up with its biggest breakthrough in imaging in years.

The technology in the 808 PureView phone introduced on Monday was the result of Nokia engineers struggling over the fact that optically zoomed lenses just don’t work well in tiny spaces like phones.

“We had been working for a long time [on] optical zooms and had learned the hard way how difficult it is to achieve good performance in smartphones,” Nokia head of imaging technologies Juha Alakarhu said in an interview last week. “Their structure is very complex and hard to manufacture.”

Plus, Alakarhu says, when zoomed in, such lenses let very little light in, meaning they don’t do well at night and suffer from a lack of sharpness.

Quite late one night, Alakarhu, Eero Salmelin and other colleagues were struck by another method. If a big enough sensor could be fitted into the phone, the camera could just zoom digitally and throw away the unneeded pixels.

“We were aware that it is possible to do zooming by very high resolution image sensor, but the idea of putting such a large and high resolution image sensor into a smartphone felt completely crazy,” Alakarhu said. “That was five years ago, and I guess it still feels like that.”

That said, Nokia has done it with the 808 PureView — or Hyperion, as it was code-named during development.

As Alakarhu and colleagues showed AllThingsD the camera technology last week, they were practically bursting at the seams. After all, they had been working on the technology in secret for the last five years.

Part of the challenge now will be explaining to the consumer why anyone needs that many megapixels.

One of the key advantages is it lets you zoom in three or four times in either photos or video and still have a sharp image. The picture of the camera, here, for example, is taken from the same wide shot of the camera and its sensors. In videos, the technology allows one to zoom in close while still maintaining an HD resolution.

Another plus is that the camera uses so-called “oversampling” to shrink the image while still making use of the information in the large number of pixels. Nokia said it can create a better five-megapixel image by using the data in the seven extra pixels to inform which single pixel it uses.

To illustrate the imaging quality, Nokia’s development team has quietly been traveling the globe and taking pictures at the full resolution of the camera. From the shots, the team has created massive prints rivaling those from professional cameras.

Alakarhu was in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and wanted to get a few shots. But he was in a city filled with reporters and competitors.

To provide some cover, Alakarhu wrapped the phone in a thick rubber case to mask its design. Meanwhile, he tried to keep the phone literally close to his vest, lest anyone look too closely at the screen and notice things like a 41-megapixel resolution.

“I guess I felt a little bit like James Bond with a very special new gadget in a secret mission,” Alakarhu said. “It was fun, of course, even though I had to be very careful.”

One of the areas where Nokia is bound to be criticized — especially in North America — is the fact that it is bringing the camera technology first to its bound-for-extinction Symbian platform rather than to Windows Phone, which is its future. Nokia doesn’t even sell Symbian phones in the United States any more.

Developing the 808 for Symbian was necessary for a few reasons. First, as mentioned, Nokia has been working on this technology for five years and only gotten to know Windows Phone over the past year. Also, because it controls Symbian, it can craft the camera app and operating system fully to its liking.

That said, Nokia is promising the technology will eventually make its way to Windows Phone as well. It is not, however, giving a time frame.

In an interview, Nokia smartphone unit head Jo Harlow declined to say if the PureView technology would show up in Windows Phones this year, but said she is not worried about any technical hurdles involved in making the move.

“I’m not at all concerned about work that needs to be done to bring it to Windows Phone,” Harlow said.

For his part, Windows Phone head Terry Myerson said he is looking forward to the day when his wife stops carrying a high-end digital camera and uses a PureView-equipped Windows Phone instead.

Here’s a picture of part of the 808 team, also taken with the 808.

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With Lumia 610, Nokia Aims to Take Windows Phone to a New Low (Price)

Ina Fried — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:20:51 +0000

As hard as Nokia has been working to improve upon Windows Phone, it has been working perhaps even harder to find ways to bring the phone further downmarket.

That’s because it badly needs models that can fill the spots occupied by its waning Symbian platform to sell in strongholds like China and Indonesia.

With the Lumia 610, introduced on Monday, Nokia is not only hitting the lowest price for a Windows Phone but also going into new languages.

“The expansion of the portfolio downwards in price points is obviously quite important,” Nokia VP Ilari Nurmi said in an interview last week at Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland.

The 610 is made possible in part by a new version of Windows Phone that has lower memory requirements, but also through lower-cost display and processor technology.

As a result, Nokia says it can sell the Lumia 610 for 189 euros unsubsidized ($252), roughly $100 less than it charges for the Lumia 710, and less than half the price of the Lumia 800.

Despite the cost-cutting moves, Nurmi insists that the core of the Windows Phone experience is preserved, something he said is not always the case with low-end Android phones.

It is true that its lower amount of memory means that not all Windows Phone apps will run, but Nurmi insisted that “a supermajority” of programs will run.

Nokia is also announcing global availability for the Lumia 900, announced for the U.S. with AT&T at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The global version of the device, however, will feature an HSPA+ modem, as opposed to the LTE one being used for the U.S.

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IPO Mafias, BODM and Brands Born From the U.S. Election: Three Mobile Trends Starting to Unfold

Dinesh Moorjani — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:20:05 +0000

With more than one month of 2012 down and still two weeks to go until the largest mobile and gaming industry trade shows — Mobile World Congress and Game Developers Conference — here are three trends that are starting to unfold and should define the year of mobile technology.

The rise of BODM (build once, deploy many) platforms

Mobile platform fragmentation is growing — the broad range of platforms currently encompasses iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Bada, Symbian, Kindle and Nook, just to name a few. The result has been a wave of “build once, deploy many” platforms to create and distribute mobile applications, which will continue to grow in popularity as developers and content creators simply forgo the onerous task of building something unique for each mobile platform.

According to a 2011 Nielsen Smartphone analytics report, Android users spend nearly an hour a day interacting with apps and the Web on their phones, with apps (67 percent) accounting for nearly twice the amount of time as the Web (33 percent). Bearing this consumption profile in mind, the economics of mobile content doesn’t encourage investment in new mobile development platforms as long as monetization doesn’t scale with these costs. In other words, developers won’t want to spend more on developing their app while the revenue they bring in is modestly incremental or flat.

Among the most well-known platforms are PhoneGap, Spaceport.io (a.k.a. Siblingz, Inc.) for games and Appcelerator, the latter of which has already had more than 30,000 apps built using its platform. The approach of some of these services is that they enable developers to unlock the value of mobile web development with native app wrappers. However, a more challenging platform fragmentation problem has been largely ignored: unlocking app development for non-technical consumers and independent content creators through a compelling graphical user interface (GUI).

Presently, non-technical content creators are disenfranchised from mobile app development unless they invest, usually unprofitably, in mobile web and app development services, or they learn to code outright.

One company, kleverbeast, is tackling this challenge. Having already signed up prominent beta enterprise customers and non-technical content creators, kleverbeast is empowering digital app publishing across iOS, Android, and other emerging platforms with a compelling native user experience for their app owners’ audiences. The unique technology and market strategy has helped kleverbeast address mobile platform fragmentation, not just for developers, but also for the benefit of the average consumer.

This new breed of BODM companies will proliferate in 2012, and I expect more than a million apps and game titles will choose this path.
Angel funding valve tightens and IPO mafias move into the picture
Angel investing has risen in popularity over the past two years, but the long tail of unproven individual angels will wane as two events unfold: (1) Many angel-funded start-ups will go belly-up, unable to secure Series A financing or a bridge loan, and (2) institutional investors will adroitly strong-arm early, passive investors.

Angel dollars widen the capital base available to entrepreneurs in early tech start-ups opening the door to tech innovation. However, many of these new angel investors don’t realize that frequently they will be squeezed down on their ownership percentage in subsequent rounds of financing and face less favorable terms. Many fresh angels have assumed greater risk than is commensurate with their early ownership and expected more upside than they end up getting. Subsequently, some angels won’t have the capital to diversify their portfolios or participate in follow-up rounds of financing.

Investing can be risky for many fresh angels hungry to keep up with the Joneses and raise their social capital. As these lessons are learned, angel investing will swing back to some rational levels.

The flipside of this may be the next IPO mafias. Expect a new crop of angel investors to emerge from some of those who benefited from Groupon, Zynga and the much-anticipated Facebook IPO. These IPO angels will take over early-stage deals and fund employees from these successful brands that decide to go it on their own. Ex-Googlers fund ex-Googlers all the time, and the mafias of tech titans will continue to proliferate.
One great new mobile social media company will be born out of the U.S. election cycle of 2012
In 2008, President Barack Obama was widely praised for his mobile marketing prowess, which many political strategists evangelized as contributing to his victory in the election and igniting the youth base to get out and vote.

Campaign managers utilized a combination of social and mobile media vehicles, with several businesses benefiting as a result: from ad networks like Quattro Wireless (acquired by Apple in 2010), to start-up companies like CommerceTel, which powered the President’s interactive voice applications.

Adding weight to this trend are emerging consumer behaviors over social networks and the power of indirect, viral outreach. A study conducted by SocialVibe revealed that “94 percent of social media users of voting age engaged by a political message watched the entire message, and 39 percent of those people shared it with an average of 130 friends.” Powerful, period.

The power of social technology to empower and persuade won’t be ignored by today’s candidates, and we’ll likely see the emergence of at least one great company out of the 2012 election.

If the rest of this year is anything like the last one, we’re in for a wild ride of fragmentation, consolidation and innovation.

Dinesh Moorjani is the founder and CEO of Hatch Labs, a mobile start-up incubator creating new platforms and applications to improve mobility for the wireless generation.

What, Nokia Chairman Worry?

John Paczkowski — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:09:38 +0000

Nokia’s going through a challenging transition, but according to Jorma Ollila, it’s laid the foundation it needs to regain smartphone leadership.

Someday.

Though its Symbian platform is burning down to ashes and it has lost its title as the world’s largest smartphone maker, Nokia is going to be just fine, says outgoing chairman Ollila. In fact, with the help of Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 operating system, the company will remain among the top three players in the smartphone market, despite its plunging market share.

“Nokia will make it into the three,” Ollila told Finnish broadcaster YLE. “It’s completely obvious and the first signs are already there. None of the operating systems have taken off quickly. It will take time, as we have seen and as was expected.”

Well, not completely obvious — particularly after the horrendous 73 percent decline in fourth-quarter earnings the company recently reported. But Ollila says such financial tumult is to be expected from a big transition like this and the earnings slip doesn’t belie its potential for success.

“When looking at the bigger picture, it shows that three operating systems will dominate in the near future and each of them will have one strong manufacturer, with Nokia having a very good chance to be one of the three,” he said.

Nokia Sells a Million Windows Phones, but Symbian Dropping Faster Than Expected

Ina Fried — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:41:55 +0000

The key financial question for Nokia is whether it can ramp up its Windows Phone business faster than its existing Symbian sales tail off.

The company’s results on Thursday showed that Nokia had better hurry.

Although it managed to ship one million of its Windows Phones last year, the company notes that its Symbian business is declining faster than it had predicted.

“Specifically, changing market conditions are putting increased pressure on Symbian,” CEO Stephen Elop noted in comments accompanying Nokia’s earnings release. “In certain markets, there has been an acceleration of the anticipated trend towards lower-priced smartphones with specifications that are different from Symbian’s traditional strengths.”

In other words, expect low-cost Android to be a strong competitor across the globe. Elop had held out hope that cheap Android phones would prove to be underpowered and less popular.

“Just because there is a version of an operating system at a price point doesn’t mean that it is a great experience,” he said in an interview last year.

But that experience appears to be plenty good enough for a bunch of the customers that Nokia had hoped would continue to buy Symbian devices.

When it announced its plans to move to Windows Phone a year ago, Nokia had said it expected nonetheless to sell a further 150 million devices.

“As a result of the changing market conditions, combined with our increased focus on Lumia, we now believe that we will sell fewer Symbian devices than we previously anticipated,” Elop said.

The company didn’t provide a new estimate, but did say that it took a charge last quarter for excess inventory and purchase commitments that it had made. It also declined to make an overall financial forecast for 2012, in part because of the uncertainty over future Symbian sales.

Nokia's Dying Symbian OS Still Rules the Mobile World

John Paczkowski — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:45:59 +0000

How ironic is this? Symbian, the mobile operating system that Nokia is slowly abandoning as it refocuses its smartphone strategy around Microsoft Windows Phone, is the leading mobile OS worldwide.

December StatCounter metrics, compiled by Pingdom, show Symbian with a 33.59 percent share of the global mobile OS market. That’s more than Apple’s iOS, which claimed a 22.56 percent share that same month. And it’s more than Android, as well: Google’s juggernaut mobile OS accounted for just 21.74 percent in December.

Remarkable. More so when you note that Symbian’s market share actually grew about 3 percent over the course of the year, rising from 30.25 percent at its beginning to 33.59 percent at its end.

Of course, Symbian has long been among the world’s most popular mobile operating systems. It still dominates the Mideast and most of the developing world, thanks to the affinity of those regions for Nokia’s cheap mobile phones. And evidently it will continue to do so for a while. According to these metrics, there’s certainly quite a bit of life left in it still.

Microsoft Releases More Mobile Apps for Other People's Devices

Ina Fried — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:01:58 +0000

Microsoft on Monday released an iPad version of OneNote as well as versions of its Lync corporate communications program for iOS, Android and Symbian.

It’s part of the difficult balancing act facing Microsoft in mobile. While Redmond does its most extensive work for its own Windows Phone operating system (and did so for Windows Mobile before that), the company knows it can’t afford to ignore the more dominant operating systems.

Microsoft has a number of iOS apps, including PhotoSynth and Bing, among other titles. It recently added an Xbox Live app, though its features are considerably more narrow than the Xbox Live capabilities available on Windows Phone.

Android apps from Microsoft have been less common, though it does have a handful, including Halo Waypoint and a Chinese version of Bing.

In addition to bringing OneNote to the iPad, Microsoft is also updating the iPhone version and now plans to charge users once they have more than 500 notes on their mobile device.

The real question is when will Microsoft bite the bullet and deliver a full-fledged version of Office for a rival’s mobile platform. OneNote aside, Microsoft has continued to keep Office for itself rather than do a version of iOS or Android. The company has pledged to do a version for Symbian, as part of its broader tie-up with Nokia.

Why Microsoft Might Yet Need to Buy Nokia

Ina Fried — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:45:56 +0000

Conventional wisdom says Microsoft got everything it wanted from Nokia when it struck its deal in January to make Windows Phone the Finnish company’s smartphone operating system of choice.

Even if it is forking over a few billion dollars in marketing aid, technical help and other incentives, that’s still a fraction of what an outright purchase would have cost. For that price, Microsoft managed to get one of the biggest names in cellphones to commit to a Microsoft-centric future.

And yet, there’s a case to be made that Microsoft might still need to bite the bullet and buy Nokia.

Here are a few reasons why a full-on acquisition might be necessary.

Windows Phone is still growing very slowly
It’s getting nice reviews and customer satisfaction numbers, but Windows Phone is falling further behind Android and iOS in market share every day. Even CEO Steve Ballmer admits sales aren’t where they need to be.

The benefits of the Nokia deal depend on Nokia remaining healthy through the transition
The company has already issued one earnings warning this year and it’s not clear that sales will stay strong enough through the transition to keep Nokia the healthy partner that Microsoft needs.

Aside from Nokia, Microsoft is still getting sloppy seconds
Samsung and HTC — two of the biggest names in smartphones — are doing Windows Phones, but the vast majority of those companies’ resources are devoted toward Android devices.

Microsoft would be able to offer truly integrated phones
Perhaps that happy medium between Apple and Android isn’t so happy after all. If it isn’t going to get the diversity of devices that Google has, Microsoft could decide it needs to handle everything itself.

All that being said, there are still plenty of downsides that make a deal very much a long shot.

A deal would be expensive, even by Microsoft standards
Nokia would make Microsoft’s biggest previous acquisitions — Skype and Aquantive — seem small by comparison. Nokia is measured in the tens of billions of dollars.

Nokia has a huge low-end phone business
A good chunk of the company’s revenue comes from feature phones and other devices that are lower in cost than even the least expensive Windows Phones. (Microsoft could always sell off that part of the business)

The challenges of integration
Nokia and Microsoft are miles apart — and not just geographically. While Nokia’s CEO is an ex-Microsoftie, the two companies are still very different beings. Nokia is a hardware manufacturer at heart.

[ATM photo via Shutterstock]

Having Shifted to Windows Phone, Nokia Wants Developers to Do the Same

Ina Fried — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:00:43 +0000

With Nokia getting its first Windows Phone devices out the door, it is now shifting some of its attention back to wooing the developers it will need to make the move pay off.

To help make that case, the company has hired Richard Kerris, a veteran developer relations executive who has led efforts at Apple and, most recently, for HP’s WebOS. The company is also aiming to get Nokia devices into the hands of as many developers as possible, announcing last week that it will give out 25,000 devices in the coming months.

The biggest challenge, for both Nokia and Microsoft, is convincing developers that they need to bother developing for more than just Android and iOS.

“They are looking at two rather successful platforms in terms of the numbers and so forth,” Kerris said. “The challenge will be to show them … the opportunity.”

Nokia faces a particular challenge in North America, where it has been all but absent for many years and where the company’s Windows Phone products are still not yet available.

In an interview, Kerris and his boss, Marco Argenti, talked with AllThingsD about the challenges and opportunities facing the Finnish phone giant.

One of the ideas that the pair are kicking around are ways to offer developers help in building their business — not just their code.

“A lot of one- or two-man shops, they may know how to write an app but they may not know how to get their businesses off the ground,” Kerris said.

Kerris said it is all part of convincing developers that Nokia has something unique to offer them.

“It’s not just about great technology,” he said. “That’s one piece of it. If you don’t have all of the other pieces figured out you are not giving them the full opportunity.”

Kerris said that Nokia wants the big developers, for sure, but also has its sights set on emerging application creators.

“You want to definitely have them but the real opportunity is going to come from the next generation of developers,” he said.

While much of the outside attention is on Windows Phone, Argenti and Kerris stressed that the company also has a case to be made for developers to create new apps for Nokia’s existing platforms.

“There’s actually still quite a bit of an opportunity for developing on the non-Windows Nokia architectures,” Argenti said.

Nokia Hopes Services, Design Will Make Its First Windows Phones Stand Out

Ina Fried — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:06:19 +0000

While the hardware that Nokia introduced in London on Wednesday was pretty much as expected, the company threw in a few services that could help distinguish it from its Windows Phone rivals.

The high-end Lumia 800 will be familiar to anyone who has seen the Meego-based Nokia N9; its entry-level Lumia 710 is designed to have a “no-nonsense” look and feel. The more surprising introductions at Nokia World came on the services side, where the company announced its Nokia Drive turn-by-turn directions service, and Mix Radio, a free, global, music streaming service.

On the hardware front, both Nokia phones feature a 1.4GHz processor, but are priced quite differently and aimed at different parts of the market. The Lumia 800 is priced at 420 Euros (before any taxes or subsidies) and includes an 8 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera. The Lumia 710 is priced at 270 Euros and lacks the sleek look and high-end camera.

“Eight months ago, we shared our new strategy and today we are demonstrating clear progress of this strategy in action,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said in a statement.

The company made a huge bet earlier this year when it announced it would make Microsoft’s Windows Phone the centerpiece of its smartphone strategy. It has been working to develop those phones while muddling through further market-share losses as it makes the transition. Nokia has also posted losses and earnings warnings, and has laid off staff.

With these first Windows Phones, Nokia is hoping to start a new dialogue and to see its fortunes improve. In shipping its first phones, the company did reach the goal that Stephen Elop had set out in announcing the shift.

Nokia is being selective about where it launches the products, promising both phones to only five markets before the end of the year: Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan. The high-end model will also ship in six European countries next month: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom.

The company plans to have the products in other markets, including the U.S., early next year, with mainland China targeted for sometime in the first half of the year.

The first group of products are somewhat limited in the types of networks they support, but Nokia said it planned to introduce LTE phones as well as those that work on CDMA — the type of network used by Verizon and Sprint.

Along with the new phones and services, Nokia announced a line of headphones jointly developed with Monster, as well as a deal to work with New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority to develop an NFC-based smartphone ticketing solution. The effort will be piloted on regional commuter trains before the end of the year, Nokia said. Finally, the company noted that its maps, in addition to being adopted by Microsoft, will also power Yahoo Maps, beginning with the U.S. and Canada.

Smartphone Snapshot: Still a Two-Horse Race

John Paczkowski — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:57:58 +0000

The latest metrics on the U.S. smartphone market from comScore, published Wednesday, are about what you’d expect. Google’s Android OS and Apple’s iOS continue to gain ground at the expense of pretty much everyone else. For the three-month average period ending in August, Android claimed a 43.7 percent share of the U.S. smartphone platform market, a 5.6 point gain over the previous period. iOS snagged 27.3 percent, a gain of 0.7 percent.

The remaining platforms in the top five all saw declines, with Research In Motion tumbling to 19.7 percent from 24.7 percent, Microsoft slipping to 5.7 percent from 5.8 percent and Nokia’s Symbian falling to 1.8 percent from 2.1 percent.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans who owned smartphones rose 10 percent in the three-month period, though that increase seems to have benefited only Google and Apple.

Sony Ericsson's Strategy: Get Smart

Sven Grundberg — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:59:02 +0000

Ten years ago, Japanese consumer electronics giant Sony Corp. and Swedish mobile-network vendor Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson put their mobile-phone units into a joint venture, creating Sony Ericsson in an effort to grab a profitable share of the booming global handset market.

It has been a bumpy ride. While the Swedish-Japanese hybrid enjoyed initial successes with its line of Walkman-branded music handsets and Cybershot camera phones, it has struggled to build major market share around the world, and, like rivals such as Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and Nokia Corp., has recently struggled to compete with Apple Inc. in the fast-growing smartphone market.

Sony Ericsson underwent a management shake-up two years ago, appointing Bert Nordberg, who previously headed Ericsson’s operations in Silicon Valley, as the company’s chief executive, replacing Sony’s Hediki “Dick” Komiyama. Mr. Nordberg made some radical decisions: He dropped the Symbian operating system, introduced a smartphone strategy using Google Inc.’s Android platform, and gave up Sony Ericsson’s presence in the low-end market.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Nokia Remains Top Handset Maker, but for How Long?

John Paczkowski — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:58:14 +0000

Nokia’s platform may be burning and the company may be rushing to bring its first Windows Phone handsets to market, but it remained the leading mobile phone manufacturer in the second quarter.

New metrics from research outfit Gartner, which measures handset sales to end users rather than handsets shipped into the channel, show Nokia selling 97.9 million mobile devices in the second quarter, for a 22.8 percent market share. That’s down from the 30.3 percent share it claimed in the year prior, but still far more than the 16.3 percent held by its nearest rival, Samsung. LG and Apple trailed far behind the pair, with 5.7 percent and 4.6 percent shares respectively.

The smartphone market, however, was another matter entirely. There, devices running Google’s Android OS hold a commanding lead with a 43.4 percent share of the market, up from 17.2 percent in the year prior. Nokia’s share is a little more than half that, with handsets running Symbian claiming 22.1 percent, down from 40.9. Meanwhile, Apple’s iOS holds an 18.2 percent share, up from 14.1 percent; and Research In Motion’s Blackberry OS has an 11.7 percent share, down from 18.7 percent.

So Nokia managed to hold some of its ground in the second quarter, despite ceding a lot of it to rivals. But it’s growing increasingly more difficult for it to do so, as that year-over-year drop — 40.9 percent to 22.1 percent — shows.

“The sales efforts of the channel, combined with Nokia’s greater concentration in retail and distributors’ sales, saw Nokia destock more than 9 million units overall and 5 million smartphones, helping it hold on to its position as the leading smartphone manufacturer by volume,” Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza said. “However, we will not see a repeat of this performance in the third quarter of 2011, as Nokia’s channel is pretty lean.”

[Image credit: visionshare/Flickr]

Exclusive: Nokia to Exit Symbian, Low-End Phone Businesses in North America

Ina Fried — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:25:24 +0000

Nokia plans to stop selling both feature phones and Symbian-based smartphones in the United States and Canada as it tries to put all of its muscle behind the company’s huge bet on Windows Phone.

In an interview with AllThingsD, the head of Nokia’s U.S. subsidiary said that the company will also focus exclusively on sales through traditional wireless carriers. In the past, Nokia has sold its smartphones at full price to consumers, after finding carriers unwilling to significantly subsidize or market the products. It has also had a significant — if low margin — business selling low-cost feature phones.

However, Nokia says it needs to put all of its efforts into its Windows Phone products, which are due out later this year.

“When we launch Windows Phones we will essentially be out of the Symbian business, the S40 business, etc., ” Nokia Inc. President Chris Weber said in an interview. “It will be Windows Phone and the accessories around that. The reality is if we are not successful with Windows Phone, it doesn’t matter what we do (elsewhere).”

North America is a priority for Nokia, Weber said, in part because it is a key market for Microsoft and also because Nokia sees it as a key to winning in the smartphone battle globally.

“We’ll develop for North America and make the phones globally available and applicable,” Weber said. “In fact, evidence of that is that the first Windows Phones that will ship are being done by our group in San Diego.”

Nokia plans its biggest-ever marketing push focused on reestablishing its presence in the U.S.

“Without getting into numbers, it is significantly larger than anything we have done in the past and the most we will invest in any market worldwide,” Weber said. “They are putting their money where their mouth is.”

T-Mobile did start selling a Symbian smartphone earlier this year — the Nokia Astound — but it’s launch came after Nokia had already announced its move to Windows Phone and sales have been disappointing, Nokia Weber confirmed.

The moves are part of a series of changes that Nokia has made since Weber assumed the top U.S. post in February. Like Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, Weber came from Microsoft, where he most recently headed enterprise sales.

As part of the shift, Nokia also said it has no current plans to bring its lone Meego-based phone, the Nokia N9, to the U.S., a fact reported earlier Tuesday by Engadget.

The company is moving its sales force to Sunnyvale, and Weber told AllThingsD that the company also aims to consolidate more of its operations in Sunnyvale, shifting away work now done in other facilities in White Plains, N.Y., and Dallas. Those changes are expected to be made by early next year.

Nokia Swings to Loss as Both Smartphone and Not-So-Smartphone Sales Dive

Ina Fried — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:34:00 +0000

Not that anyone was expecting Nokia’s second quarter earnings report would be sunny, but ouch.

The company’s sales of 9.275 billion Euros were down 11 percent from the prior quarter and seven percent from a year ago, with the company posting a per-share loss of 10 Euro cents, compared to a per-share profit of nine Euro cents in the prior quarter and six Euro cents a year earlier.

The Finnish cellphone maker said that net sales in its core devices and services business dropped by 23 percent from the prior quarter and 20 percent from a year earlier. Smartphone revenue and unit sales saw an even steeper decline, with both down more than 30 percent from both prior quarter and year-ago results.

While acknowledging the results were “disappointing,” CEO Stephen Elop offered up a positive take on the recent actions taken by the company, including cutting prices in some areas, changing leadership on the sales side and accelerating its plans to cut costs.

“The challenges we are facing during our strategic transformation manifested in a greater than expected way in Q2,” Elop said in a statement. “However, even within the quarter, I believe our actions to mitigate the impact of these challenges have started to have a positive impact on the underlying health of our business. Most importantly, we are making better-than-expected progress toward our strategic goals.”

Looking ahead, the company didn’t provide much in terms of long-term guidance “due to limited visibility,” but said that for the current quarter it expects its core devices and services business “to be slightly above break-even, ranging either above or below this level by approximately 2 percentage points.”

The company is hoping to have its first Microsoft Windows Phone devices on sale later this year, with smartphone unit head Jo Harlow suggesting in a recent interview that more than a single model is possible.

“I’m committed to one model this year,” Harlow said. “More would be great.”

But even if Nokia can launch those phones successfully sooner than later, it will still take at least a few really rough quarters like this one to show any difference from the WP7 phones.

In other words, strap in — it’s going to be an even bumpier ride.

Survey: Windows Phone to Gain Decent Market Share in Only, Um, Four Years!

Ina Fried — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:21:02 +0000

Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system is poised to grab a fifth of the global smartphone market by 2015, at least according to a new prediction from IDC.

The market researcher said it expects Android to gain just a few points of market share and Apple’s iOS and RIM to lose share over the same period, even as Microsoft rises from 3.8 percent to 20.3 percent of the market. IDC sees the gain coming largely at the expense of the Symbian operating system, which Microsoft is supplanting on Nokia devices.

It’s not the first time that IDC has projected Windows Phone would surpass Apple in market share. Nonetheless, the IDC numbers are bullish for a Windows Phone operating system that has yet to gain much ground, with a top AT&T executive recently confirming to AllThingsD that sales have been below both Microsoft and the carrier’s forecasts.

As for iOS and BlackBerry, IDC notes that their total shipments are expected to gain each year, but the operating systems are still seen losing share as other operating systems grow faster.

Overall, IDC is predicting a 55 percent year-over-year increase in smartphone shipments this year, to 472 million, from 305 million in 2010. By 2015, IDC projects the number will nearly double again, to 982 million.

“The smartphone floodgates are open wide,” IDC analyst Kevin Restivo said in a statement. “Mobile phone users around the world are turning in their ‘talk-and-text’ devices for smartphones as these devices allow users to perform daily tasks like shopping and banking from anywhere. The growth trend is particularly pronounced in emerging markets where adoption is still in its early days. As a result, the growth in regions such as Asia/Pacific and Latin America, will be dramatic over the coming years.”

Exclusive: Nokia's Elop on Why Symbian Still Stands a Chance Against Android on Low-End Smartphones

Ina Fried — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 01:43:22 +0000

Nokia has endured a drubbing in the last couple of days after warning that the company’s quarter is going to be worse than expected.

However, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said the fact that Android is taking a bite out of Symbian in some markets today doesn’t necessarily mean that it will eat Nokia’s lunch in all segments.

“Just because there is a version of an operating system at a price point, doesn’t mean that it is a great experience,” Elop said in a brief interview after his on-stage appearance at D9 on Wednesday. Elop insisted that at the low end of the smartphone market, Symbian performs better than a bare-bones Android phone.

Nokia is counting on Symbian-based smartphones–especially at the middle and low end of the smartphone market–to tide the company over until its full lineup of Windows Phones are ready. The first model isn’t expected until the end of this year, while a broader lineup won’t be in place until 2012.

Here is an edited transcript of our chat:

AllThingsD: Does the fact that it is this hard this early in the transition–it would seem like that spells even harder months ahead?

Elop: It’s clearly difficult, but part of the difficulty–a substantial part of the difficulty–is also short-term mismanagement. I mentioned China. Clearly there were some things happening in China as it relates to the channel which hurt us badly.

Those are things we can fix. That will help. As well, we are right on the eve–actually we are just shipping our first dual-SIM products into India. We have a new set of Symbian products coming, new versions of operating systems.

We have new momentum activities still ahead.

Everything I hear tells me that Android is going to hit lower and lower price points.

Elop: We hit lower and lower price points and we have devices that range down very deep.

But if Symbian is having trouble competing against Android at the high end and now Android is at the low end, what is going to make Symbian better?

Elop: Just because there is a version of an operating system at a price point doesn’t mean that it is a great experience.

So you think Android is more competitive at the high end than at the low end?

Elop: Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Why Windows Phone Instead of Android? Nokia CEO Stephen Elop Explains.

John Paczkowski — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:48:07 +0000

One of Stephen Elop’s biggest moves after being tapped as CEO of Nokia was to dump its Symbian mobile operating system for Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. Why didn’t he opt for Android, which has far greater critical mass at market?

Speaking at D9 Wednesday afternoon, Elop said the answer is simple: differentiation. “The biggest question for us was what degree of influence could we have over Android to ensure differentiation,” he said, adding that in the end there wasn’t enough. “Is sustainable long-term differentiation possible with Android? We felt the opportunity for that was better with Windows Phone.”

With Windows Phone, Elop said, Nokia has the flexibility to differentiate over time, something that Android OEM’s don’t have. It also has exposure, scale and, potentially, a robust ecosystem. “This is no longer a battle of devices, it is a war of ecosystems,” he said.

Nokia Chooses Rhythm Method For Windows Phone Releases

John Paczkowski — Thu, 26 May 2011 11:45:10 +0000

We’re going to see a lot of Windows Phone hardware come 2012. Evidently, Nokia’s planning to flood the market with it.

After it brings its first batch of Windows Phone devices to market–perhaps even later this year, Nokia plans to roll out additional devices on a regular and frequent schedule, says Jo Harlow, Nokia’s EVP of Smart Devices.

“We should be launching new devices in a rhythm that might be every couple of months, every three months, something like that,” she told PC Magazine. “We’re going to keep coming with new devices in order to have something to talk about.”

Which may prove to be a wise move. In the first quarter of 2010 Nokia’s Symbian OS was running on 44 percent of smartphones globally, according to Gartner. A year later it was running on just 27 percent.

Pushing out a series of slick Windows Phone handsets in relatively quick succession might just keep the Nokia brand top of mind for a public obsessed with the iPhone and its Android rivals. Which could do much to help the company regain that lost market share and perhaps even enable the Microsoft-Nokia alliance to create a contender smartphone ecosystem.

“… The Nokia-Microsoft partnership [has] the best chance to create a third viable [smartphone] ecosystem,” Cannacord analyst T. Michael Walkley says. “… carriers and distribution partners worldwide will support a third ecosystem if volume sales to consumers are large enough, and Nokia still has the global distribution and brand to make this happen if the new smartphones are compelling.”

Smartphone Sales Jump in First Quarter, But Less So for RIM, Nokia

Ina Fried — Thu, 05 May 2011 21:55:19 +0000

As expected, worldwide smartphone sales enjoyed huge growth in the first quarter, posting a year-over-year increase of nearly 80 percent according to IDC. In all, nearly 100 million smartphones shipped last quarter, up from 55 million in the first quarter of 2010.

But that growth was not shared equally. Apple, Samsung and HTC all at least doubled their sales, while RIM and Nokia posted only modest gains.

Nokia held on to the top spot, with nearly a quarter of the market. But its share fell from 38 percent as the company managed only 12 percent unit growth, by far the lowest of the top players. RIM’s 31 percent year-over-year growth dropped it to No. 3 in the charts behind Apple, which now controls 18.7 percent of the worldwide market, nearly five percentage points more than RIM.

Samsung came in at No. 4 with 10.8 percent market share, a huge jump from the 4.3 percent it had a year ago, while HTC also gained huge share, finishing the quarter with 8.9 percent of the market, up from just under 5 percent a year ago.

The numbers reflect the strong growth for Android and Apple’s iPhone, while the BlackBerry and Symbian devices continued to lose steam despite the huge overall growth in smartphones.

“The rise of Android as a prominent mobile operating system has allowed several suppliers to gain share quickly,” IDC analyst Kevin Restivo said in a statement. “Also, the relatively nascent state of smartphone adoption globally means there is ample room for several suppliers to comfortably co-exist, at least for the short term.”