Nokia’s struggles in smartphones are well documented, and I’m not going to rehash them here. However, if you live in the U.S. it is easy to overlook just how huge and successful Nokia is. Even in smartphones, Nokia is the global volume leader, and when it comes to featurephones, Nokia literally sells about six dozen of them in the time it takes to read this sentence – every minute of every day.Most of those are basic voice phones sold in emerging markets like India and Africa, but Nokia is also the market leader in multimedia featurephones. Nokia’s latest entry in that category is the X3 Touch and Type (not to be confused with the X3, launched last year), which is a Series 40 phone with a touchscreen on top and a physical numeric keypad below. I find the X3 Touch and Type deeply disturbing.
First, a bit of background: Whenever I’ve gone to Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland (which looks like what would happen if you crossed an IKEA with an Apple store), I’ve been impressed by how humble, competitive, and damned smart the people are. Finland has some of the highest labor rates in the world, yet Nokia somehow manages to effectively compete with Chinese vendors on cost. Nokia is not just the largest handset vendor in the world, in most of the world the company retains a premium brand image – and in some areas Nokia has staggeringly high market share.
Nokia got this way by riding the GSM wave in Europe with durable, stylish phones that had wonderfully simple user interfaces. Nokia then built a supply chain and manufacturing capabilities second to none, and it pushed hard into emerging markets such as India, China, and Africa, where it maintains distribution advantages that rivals still have a tough time matching. Ever-conscious of creating economies of scale, Nokia split its line into three basic platforms: S30 for basic voice, S40 for mid-tier feature phones, and S60 for smartphones. However, with the strategy set, Nokia seemingly put its designers on auto-pilot.
Over the past ten years, Nokia has stood by while an entire generation of new form factors has passed it by; Nokia missed the clamshell, the thin trend, QWERTY messaging phones, and touchscreens. In each instance, Nokia half-heartedly introduced its own take on these designs a few years late, just in time to miss what’s next. The touchscreen feature phone has been around so long that, after dozens of iterations, LG actually has a uniform touchscreen UI, and Samsung decided to turn its RTOS (Real Time OS) into a smartphone platform. In contrast, the interface on the new X3 is just touch-enabled S40 without the benefit of a virtual or physical QWERTY keyboard. Nokia calls this “Touch & Type,” but that is misleading, as no typing is involved.
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