Nokia recently announced something mildly surprising — on top of a tall skyscraper they held an event to show off the fact that they are offering Ovi Maps Navigation free of cost to Nokia handset owners. The catch? Apparently there isn’t one. They are probably going to bake the price into the handset but that is still better than having to pay a fixed amount for as long as you want to use a proper Assisted GPS navigation system. After all, they cannot charge too much for a handset without risking losing even more marketshare.
They have another ace up their sleeve and this one I like the best – the navigation system will work even without a data connection. That was the whole point of holding the event on top of an impossibly tall skyscraper — no 3G signal. So the result is that you do not have to ring up huge data bills when you are traveling out of your circle, i.e. when you are roaming. This will be of immense help to business users who are usually the ones to travel the most within the whole smartphone user demographic.
In fact, this move is one of the main ones taken by Nokia to save their marketshare, which is getting slowly but surely eaten out by Apple and Google. In fact, Google’s open and less then free strategy for Android has really ensured that Nokia is increasingly pushed out of the market by manufacturers who previously did not even show up on Nokia’s competitor radar. It is simple — most companies knew how to make hardware but lagged behind Symbian. Now that has changed forever.
Going with Android probably would’ve been the best thing to do for Nokia, since they already make some of the best handsets in the world but they wanted to go with another lightweight Linux OS – Maemo. Had Maemo arrived before Android or had Maemo been open and up for grabs like Android, it might’ve had a chance. But at this moment, it has slightly more hope than the WebOS, which is fast fading in the public memory. Maemo is likely to get more developer love from its segment of militant Linux developers but that cannot match Android, forget the iPhone.
That’s because you ultimately need some amount of money to maintain and further develop good apps. That money has to come from profits, which will be slim given the low number of handsets Maemo will be on. Android has now gone through multiple development cycles and is far ahead of Maemo and it is impossible to speed up this process because it involves getting into the market and gauging the usage and reaction and improving with that in mind.
The huge portfolio of handsets that the world’s largest mobile handset manufacturer has would’ve served them well had they changed them all into Maemo devices. But they are committed to keeping Symbian alive in their lower end handsets, which are the highest selling in terms of global sales volumes.
So Nokia’s strategy at this point seems to be quite flawed. It seems to be barely fit for third position in the mobile platform competition and that is mainly because there’s no other real competition to Android. And Android itself competes with the iPhone’s polished and exceedingly well-designed user experience. So Nokia is already at one-remove when it comes to competing with the best.
Hence, whilst this free navigation deal will definitely help them sell more high end handsets like the E72, the company needs to rethink their strategy to maintain their market. Google already has free navigation and they have a better way to generate revenue in place already — mobile ads. Apple is likely to come up with something similar and hence Nokia has barely gone close to competing and in no way ahead of it two main competition.
