Finland’s Nokia launched its N series flagship smartphone, the N8, at a press conference in Istanbul on Tuesday, with company representatives outlining a “cultural change” in development strategy, focusing on devices delivering substantially better digital content.
Speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review on the sidelines of the meeting, Conor Pierce, general manager of Nokia Turkey, outlined the cultural shift represented by the N8. “The mobile phone industry has irrevocably changed due to the Internet. … The change has come and been adapted to very quickly,” he said. “The N8 will be a platform to launch our new strategy.”
Nokia has suffered heavily in recent years following the release of Apple’s iPhone, launched in January 2007 and currently trading in its fourth model. The iPhone has sold over 50 million units. With this leap, Apple revolutionized the smartphone market thanks to third-party developed software applications, or apps – small programs users can download from the Internet that are often utilities enhancing the principal functions of the phone. Some are also purely developed for entertainment or novelty value.
Apps arrived in the marketplace preloaded on the first iPhone in early 2007. By the middle of 2008, Apple opened its App Store, where apps developed by third parties, as well as Apple, can be downloaded – sometime at no cost. As of the beginning of 2010, there were over 200,000 Apps available on the App Store.
“Three billion applications have been downloaded in less than 18 months – this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs at the beginning of the year.
“The industry is moving more toward a digital economy and the competition is healthy,” Pierce told the Daily News, referring to the growing App market, and the dominance of Apple.
Nokia is still under pressure from rivals such as Apple and Research In Motion, the maker of the Blackberry phones.
Margins under pressure
In July, Nokia announced 2010 second-quarter net sales of 10 billion euros, shipping more than 111 million mobile devices, up 8 percent from the third quarter of 2009. However, as profit margins were squeezed due to robust competition, net profit declined 40 percent, down to 227 million euros from 380 million euros the previous year.
In September, Nokia replaced CEO Olli-Pekka Kalasvuo, who had worked with for the company since 1980, with Stephen Elop, formerly of Microsoft, Nokia's first non-Finnish CEO.
Nokia unveiled its own app market, the “Ovi Store” in May 2009. The store was localized to Turkey in December last year. “We now have almost 1.5 million downloads per day,” Salih Özkan, services and solutions manager for Nokia, said at an application developers meeting in July.
“The recent challenge has been executing the development of content, but we are humbly confident of a cultural shift,” said Pierce on Tuesday, referring to the N8 and the company’s new CEO.
The N8 will use the Symbian operating system. Officially made available in 2010, this is an open source operating system, allowing collaboration in development. It is funded and maintained by the Symbian Foundation, an organization funded by Nokia, Vodafone, LG Electronics and Sony Ericsson, among others.
“The next challenge is delivering the Internet to the next 1 billion people,” said Pierce, adding that he expects the Symbian platform to play a big role in this target.
The phone went on sale in Turkey on Saturday, with a price tag of 999 Turkish Liras.
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