Nokia’s Smartphone Aspirations

Om Malik had an interesting blog post yesterday about an interview he did with Tero Ojanperä, Nokia executive vice-president of services. What caught my eye was how Om set up the interview by making outlining his criticisms of Nokia, “including its denial of competition from Apple’s iPhone, its hardware, and a botched launch of its Ovi store”.

It’s an interesting taken given Nokia’s bullishness during a conference last month in Helsinki about its progress in markets around the world, and how it’s put more emphasis of data services to drive sales. What went missing over the day-and-a-half event was any discussion about North America, and how Nokia’s smartphone efforts are lagging behind Apple and Research in Motion.

It was also a little curious that Nokia quietly announced at the conference that its much-anticipated N900 smartphone had started shipping, and then quickly moved on without providing more details or, at least, showing the N900 to the 140 reporters, bloggers and analysts.

To get a better sense of Nokia’s smartphone efforts, I managed to get an interview with Ian Laing, VP, marketing with Nokia in North America. While conceding Nokia isn’t as strong as Apple or RIM in North America, Laing contends Nokia has huge smartphone potential as its two OSs – Symbian and Maemo – are deployed in a variety of market segments.

“The perspective I have is the rising tide raises all ships and we are one of those ships raising the tide as the education of the consumers continues to happen in North America,” he said, adding that Nokia is seeing encouraging growth in other markets around the world for its smartphones.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview.

Q: What’s your take on the smartphone market’s growth around the world?
I would say that globally we are continuing to see the growth of the smartphone category, and it is starting defy definition. It is starting to get broad. It used to be phones with open OSs, phones with QWERTY keyboards, phones with smart screens. As we look at penetration around the world, more people are into their third, fourth and fifth generation device, and as is naturally the case in consumer electronics, they are moving up the food chain. More consumers are buying more feature-rich devices.

Q: What about Nokia’s presence in the North American smart phone market where the iPhone and Blackberry dominate?
In North America, the strength we see here with Apple and RIM is not quite the same in other markets around the world. When we launched the 5800 in Hong Kong a year ago, it was huge. We saw the kinds of lines going into stores that we saw her in the U.S. with Apple customers going into the AT&T stores. The world is not the same as New York, Toronto or San Francisco. In North America, we are seeing a really strong growth in the smartphone category thanks to all the work done by people such as Apple who are spending money on advertising, and talking to he consumer. The work Apple has done with AT& has helped the entire industry talk to consumer what these devices can do.

Q: There’s a lot of excitement about Nokia’s newest smartphone, the N900? Is this a game-changer for Nokia?
Let’s put the N900 into historical perspective. For some time, Nokia has been working on Internet devices – devices that have as its main purpose, making Internet access as powerful, easy and user-friendly as access on its PC. In previous years, we introduced the Nokia Internet tablet, the 800. These devices at first, they didn’t even have cellular phone capability – they were Wi-Fi devices to surf the Internet in a PC like way. I give you that context that Maemo comes from the PC world, version of Linux, open source OS; is the kind of OS that we believe belongs in very high-end internet friendly devices. From a strategic standpoint, what is the Nokia plan; Symbian is our bread and butter OS. Symbian is coming down the price curve from very highest end devices, now firmly ensconced mid-tier. Maemo, we anticipate deploying at the very top of the device range – the geekiest of the geek, who want the absolutely ultimate in mobile telephone.

While we are not the household name in North America like Apple or RIM, but we can bring smartphones into the mid-tier. Symbian will play in those parts of that portfolio; the very top of the portfolio is where you will have Maemo. The N900 is not the be all and end all; it is a nice device with multiple screens. But frankly that is just the beginning. You will see more devices running on Maemo.