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Well, you may have noticed by your twitter stream that Nokia is up to something this week. That’s because once again, like every year in October, Nokia is hosting their annual Nokia World event, an event where Nokia brass entertain developers, customers, partners, and bloggers giving them a look at what’s ahead and reminding them what’s transpired over the past year.
As could be expected, this year the event is all about the Nokia Windows Phone, a device that many have been waiting almost a year for, some convinced this will be the savior, spring boarding Nokia back to the top in the smart phone market.
Nokia Lumia 710 – Source: Nokia Connects
Indeed Nokia did deliver and today announced 2 new Windows Phone devices and as expected, you won’t be seeing these in North America until sometime in 2012, much later than other geographic markets.
I can’t help but think, “Oh Nokia” when will things change. To the tech crowd, developers, and early adopters in America and Canada Nokia is a non-player in the smart phone space, mainly because these markets are pretty much isolated from Nokia. There’s a faithful following of tech geeks, bloggers, and Nokia faithful, many of them touting around loaner devices that the average person on the street has never heard of or never seen. The buzz is generated but in all reality, most people here simply couldn’t tell you where they could get a Nokia device (actually, here in Canada you can snag a Nokia N8 for $29 + contract at Rogers Wireless… a great deal) and the clerks at mobile kiosks and working for the carrier stores couldn’t begin to tell you if they even have Nokia smart phones for sale or if they plan on having any.
I have to admit, I think much of the issue lies in the number of devices available and the confusion on the part of the consumer or would-be consumer. Just look at the range of devices, the naming, the numbering system, and then the OS (I try to recall some of the devices I’ve used over the years and can’t for the life of me keep the numbering sorted out). We’ve seen the S series, N, and E series of devices, jumping from single digit naming like the N9 then to triple digit naming like the N800 or N900. Techno references about the Symbian OS, S60, MeeGo, Qt, Belle, Anna and the like confuse the user, many have nor would they have any idea what operating system powers the device. Services like Ovi come and go, the sites flip flop from Ovi Store to Nokia store, Ovi Maps, Nokia Maps, some confused as to if NAVTEQ maps are found in the service or with a new cozy relationship with Microsoft will Bing Maps be the new service. Heck, there’s even been confusion over what the Windows Phone OS is actually called, is it Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, WinMo, WinOS or ?? My God, makes me think of the old saying… Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS)?
Back to today there’s 2 new devices that are running Windows Phone OS, the “Lumia” series (sounds like the make of a car to me) so now there will be references simply to Lumia (on a side note, I already saw one tech blogger screw up the name and is calling it the Lumio) – again, so many choices, so many names, so much confusion. Enter the Nokia Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 – we have 2 new devices in a lineup range called Lumia (whatever the hell a lumia is) and we jump right into a 700 and 800 series, one of them already at .10 (what happened with the Lumia 700??). Of note, I couldn’t help myself and curiosity got the best of me so I did a search on Lumia and found that the word doesn’t exist according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. When these Nokia Win Phones hit the North American market Nokia may as well simply rebrand and start from scratch over here. Forget all the various series of devices and name flopping, how about simply the Nokia WinPhone 1, a year later come out with Nokia WinPhone 2 etc… once smartphone, one choice, forget all the various form factors, styles, devices for specific genres, crazy naming, bizarre numbering – just ship a killer smart phone! Consumers want one killer smartphone, make it available in Black and in White, use a name that will stick, and number them logically (how about we start off at 1 for a change), bring us the Nokia WinPhone 1
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