Personally I'm baffled by the way "everyone knows" Nokia's problems are due
to not having clamshells. Just walking around London, I've seen countless SE
t610s (candybar) and virtually no SE z600s (identical spec clamshell). I
once had a professor who used to note down everytime someone claimed that
Louis 16th was the last king of France...
I think the real weakness in Nokia's portfolio has been their tendency to
sell trailing-edge products for leading-edge prices. They could get away
with that when it meant being late with triband or bluetooth, which no-one
really cared about. But for much of the last 12 months they've been selling
handsets with postage-stamp sized, muddy, low quality screens - for twice
the price of products from SE and Samsung with large high-colour TFTs.
This problem remains with Nokia's first clamshell, the 7200. To be honest,
it isn't competitive with any clamshell phonecam on the market that I can
think of. The specs say 64k TFT, but it looks like the murky STN screen on
my old T68, and it's running the obsolete series 40, which ought to be first
on the list for nokia to junk. The problem isn't whether the phone folds -
it's whether the phone is any good!
Incidentally, I'm curious as to why they've put EDGE in when there won't be
any usable EDGE networks in Europe until the end of the year, if then.
-BGE
Received on Wed Apr 21 18:05:13 2004