T-Mobile USA iPhone users can start rejoicing this summer – at least a few of them can. T-Mobile will complete its planned conversion from GSM to HSPA+ on 2,500 of its cell sites this July, T-Mo CTO Neville Ray revealed at the NGNM conference on Thursday. The upgrade will put its mobile broadband network firmly in the PCS band in 7 percent of its network, which makes it compatible with all current versions of the iPhone.
That doesn’t mean T-Mobile will start selling the iPhone directly, but some of the million-plus current unlocked or hacked iPhones on T-Mo’s network may soon start seeing a “4G” icon popping up on their notification bars, as well as find their current slow-poke Edge speeds jump up to multiple megabits per second. Any customer coming off an AT&T contract with an unlocked iPhone 3GS, 4 or 4S will be able to buy a SIM card and hook into the HSPA+ network where the upgrade is complete.
In a blog post, T-Mobile revealed more details about its ambitious spectrum refarming plans, which requires sunsetting a large portion of its 2G capacity. It is changing out gear in 400 of its cell sites this month as an initial test before its engages in a large-scale conversion next month.
Those 2,500 cell sites are only a fraction of T-Mobile’s 37,000-site network, so most of the country will have to wait before they can get mobile broadband at the PCS band. But T-Mobile will most likely target whole cities for the refarming, rather than upgrade a handful of sites in each market. So if you happen to leave in one of those select markets you may get close to uniform HSPA+ coverage. The first city on the list is most likely San Francisco, where T-Mobile has already tested the new network – not coincidentally during Apple’s World Wide Developer conference.
Apple won’t actually tap T-Mobile to be an iPhone retailer until all or most of its HSPA+ network is converted to PCS. That day could come as soon as this year or it may not come until well into 2013 right up to the point it launches its LTE network. My bet, though, is we’ll see a fully functioning and nationwide HSPA+ network on PCS long before we see LTE. T-Mobile needs to activate HSPA+ at PCS before it can start shutting down its current mobile broadband networks in the Advanced Wireless Services band, which is the spectrum that will host its LTE service.
The iPhone 4S can’t match T-Mobile’s theoretical 21 Mbps and 42 Mbps of T-Mobiles HSPA+ and dual-carrier networks, but it still has a substantial ceiling of 14.4 Mbps, providing an experience comparable to AT&T’s network and much faster than what Sprint and Verizon Wireless can currently offer on their CDMA networks.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
T-Mobile offers free 4G phones for Father's Day, with small catch - Los Angeles Times
T-Mobileplans to give away free 4G phones for two days as part of aFather's Daysale that begins Friday.
The sale includes all 4G phones supported by T-Mobile's network, but the phones aren't exactly free when you get them.
A spokeswoman for T-Mobile explained that anyone wanting to partake in the sale will have to sign up for a two-year contract and pay for the phone up front. T-Mobile will then give them a mail-in rebate card, making the phone free.
A bit tricky, but eventually it's free, assuming you send in the card.
Among the phones included in the sale are the HTC One S, the Samsung Galaxy S II, the Nokia Lumia 710 and the BlackBerry Bold 9900. The T-Mobile Springboard tablet is also included in the sale.
“We want to say thanks to fathers for all they do and keep them easily and affordably connected to family throughout the entire year,” said Andrew Sherrard, senior vice president of marketing for T-Mobile, in a prepared statement.
It's a great sale, but it's only available through T-Mobile's stores, not online. Also, the sale will not include the heavily anticipated Samsung Galaxy S III, which T-Mobile begins selling June 21.
Existing T-Mobile customers can take advantage of the sale, but unless you've had your phone and plan for at least 18 months, you'll have to pay a migration fee.
ALSO:
Samsung launches TecTiles, NFC-enabled stickers
Move over helicopter cat, Hovercat video goes viral
How Nokia went from mobile powerhouse to Windows Phone maker - zdnet.co.uk
It's no secret to anyone in the tech world that Nokia is in some degree of trouble. Sales have been plummeting through the floor, and revenues have dropped along with them, though this was mitigated until this year by performance in emerging markets.
Given the news today that it is laying off up to 10,000, the Finnish handset maker will have to work harder to avoid slipping further into decline. And company chief Stephen Elop had more bad news for investors, revealing Nokia expects its second-quarter smartphone losses to be larger than predicted.
"During the second quarter 2012, competitive industry dynamics are negatively affecting the Smart Devices business unit to a somewhat greater extent than previously expected," the company said in a statement. "Furthermore, while visibility remains limited, Nokia expects competitive industry dynamics to continue to negatively impact Devices & Services in the third quarter 2012."
Can Nokia get back to the top with its Lumia phones? Image credit: Ben Woods
It hasn't always been this way. Cast your mind back to 2007, when Nokia was doing well — really well: it had just under 38 percent of the market by total number of mobile devices sold, according to Gartner figures. Now this has slipped to just under 20 percent, and if you exclude feature phones, it makes even more depressing reading, with its smartphone share tracking globally at around 1.5 percent to two percent.
It seems that Nokia just doesn't 'get' the smartphone section of the market right now. Also on Thursday, it agreed to unload its luxury Vertu handset brand to EQT VI, part of the private EQT equity group, which cements its short-term low-end ambitions.
The 10,000 staff redundancies will happen at some of Nokia's research and development centres, along with some at manufacturing centres. The cutbacks are an effort to stem the tide of several billion euros in lost revenue seen in the last 12 months, but are also just the latest in a long line of restructuring and profit-warning announcements.
In February 2011, Elop sent a memo to Nokia employees warning them of the bumpy road ahead, saying the company was "standing on a burning platform". And platforms are something that Nokia doesn't seem to be able to get its head around, even though Elop recognised at that time the importance of the development ecosystem.
"Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem," Elop said in the memo.
Changing operating systems
Back when Nokia started out, its handsets used the Nokia OS, sometimes referred to as NOS. This was later replaced with the Symbian platform in a string of incarnations, and this OS is still used on Nokia's lower-end Asha handsets.
At the same time, Nokia pursued an open-source platform called MeeGo, developed in tandem with Intel, which later became Tizen. In autumn last year, the company decided to put Tizen on the back burner and funnel its open-source OS work on Meltemi, aimed at low-end handsets.
However, with the removal of the Uln R&D facility in Germany, home of the Meltemi project, its future can be assumed to be in serious jeopardy. So that leaves Nokia with a single platform — Windows Phone — and it's not even one it owns.
Given Elop's astute recognition that Nokia was being eaten alive by faster-reacting competitors and their accompanying ecosystems, the company's decision to stop building its own OS and rely on an outside platform suggests it is in pretty dire straits.
Now, Nokia is essentially just another OEM smartphone manufacturer that uses the Windows Phone platform. This is all well and good until Microsoft's platform gets more support from other device makers, at which point Nokia might find it harder to make its devices stand out from the competition.
Enter Windows Phone 8
On the other hand, slimming down and putting all its resources behind one OS might be exactly what the ailing company needs to survive for now, until it becomes clear whether Windows Phone 8 has the features to woo more buyers to the platform.
– Stephen Elop, February 2011
Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem.
Dominating the smartphone market might be a faraway dream for Nokia right now. However, getting a stronghold in emerging and low-end markets isn't inconceivable. After all, from 1998 until March this year, Nokia was the biggest seller of mobile devices in the world. It just happens that in the last few years, the highly visible — and desirable — smartphone category wasn't one of them.
Indeed, Elop himself said on Thursday that Nokia is keenly anticipating the next Windows Phone OS release, describing it as an "important catalyst date" for the Lumia range. At the same time, he was keen to emphasise that the company is focusing on bringing devices to market at lower price points than its current cheapest Windows Phone handset, the Lumia 610.
"We will be bringing devices with price points lower than the Lumia 610," Elop said in a call with investors and analysts. "We need to compete with Android aggressively, and the low-end price point war is a part of that."
For Nokia, which started life as a paper-manufacturing and electricity-generation business, the road to recovery might not be what people expect. But it's unlikely to get easier if the company is forced to keep cutting its R&D budget and facilities.
Get the latest technology news and analysis, blogs and reviews delivered directly to your inbox with ZDNet UK's newsletters.
Nokia to cut 10,000 jobs worldwide, Canada affected - Calgary Herald
Nokia Corp. will lay off 10,000 jobs globally by the end of 2013, the company said Thursday, in a further drive to save costs and streamline operations.
The company will shut some research and development projects, including facilities in Burnaby, B.C., and Ulm, Germany.
Nokia will also close its core manufacturing plant in Salo, Finland, while maintaining research and development operations there.
"These planned reductions are a difficult consequence of the intended actions we believe we must take to ensure Nokia's long-term competitive strength," Nokia CEO Stephen said. "We are increasing our focus on the products and services that our consumers value most while continuing to invest in the innovation that has always defined Nokia."
Nokia also gave an updated outlook, saying that "competitive industry dynamics" in the second quarter would hit its smartphone sector to a "somewhat greater extent than previously expected" and that no improvement was expected in the third quarter.
The company's share price plunged more than seven per cent to $2.63 in morning trading in Helsinki.
Although the Finnish cellphone maker said it plans "to significantly reduce its operating expenses," it will continue to focus on smartphones as well as cheaper feature phones and intends to expand location-based services.
Nokia also announced that private equity group EQT VI had agreed to acquire Vertu, its global luxury phone brand, but that the Finnish company would keep a 10 per cent minority shareholding. No financial terms were announced.
Nokia said that two members of its top leadership team will leave - Mary McDowell, the head of the struggling mobile phones unit and Niklas Savander, head of the markets sector.
The loss-making company has been struggling against fierce competition from Apple Inc.'s iPhone and other makers using Google Inc.'s popular Android software, including Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC of Taiwan. It is also being squeezed in the low-end by Asian manufacturers making cheaper phones, such as China's ZTE.
In April, Nokia announced one of its worst quarterly results ever, blaming tough competition for a €929 million net loss in the first quarter as sales plunged, especially in the smartphone market. Boston-based Strategy Analytics said Nokia had significantly lost market share to Samsung, which pushed it out as the world's largest seller of cellphones by volume, grabbing a 25 per cent global market share against Nokia's 22 per cent.
Last year, Nokia was still the world's top cellphone maker with annual unit sales of some 419 million devices, but in the last quarter of the year it posted a net loss of €1.07 billion, a marked reverse from the 745 million profit a year earlier.
It has fared even worse in the smartphone sector against Samsung and Apple by dropping to third place in the first quarter of the year, dropping to 12 million units against Samsung's 44.5 million and Apple's 35 million.
"Nokia is significantly increasing its cost reduction target for devices and services in support of the streamlined strategy announced today," said CFO Timo Ihamuotila. "With these planned actions, we believe our devices (and) services business has a clear path to profitability. Nokia intends to maintain its strong financial position while proceeding aggressively with actions aimed at creating shareholder value."
Last year, Nokia announced more than 10,000 layoffs, aimed at cutting operating expenses by $1.31 billion by 2013.
Nokia calls time on 10,000 jobs - Management Today
By Michael Northcott Thursday, 14 June 2012
The struggling consumer electronics giant Nokia has announced 10,000 jobs will go by 2013 as it tries to clean up its act.
Nokia today announced a new strategy for reviving its profitability that will include dispensing with around 10,000 posts globally. The company is attempted to soothe investors’ nerves, promising to reduce its operating expenses from €5.32bn in 2010 to less than €3bn by the end of next year.
This year has been a tumultuous one for Nokia, with credit rating downgrades, a profit warning, and technical issues with newly released phone models, and a continuously falling share price.
The firm was once the unbeatable juggernaut of the mobile phone market, with its iconic 3310 handset and in-phone games (remember Snake?). But Nokia has suffered an inexorable decline in recent years thanks to tough competition from Apple’s iPhone and manufacturers using the Android operating system. In 2011, the firm reported a loss of €1.07bn on sales of €38.6bn. Shares in the company have slumped 70% since February 2011, and more than 90% since the iPhone was launched.
The company has already announced lay-offs totalling 24,000 since the new chief executive Stephen Elop took over in September 2010, but its fortunes have not improved. Nokia’s most recent model, the Lumia range of handsets, has enjoyed moderate success, but ironically, the company still makes more money licensing out patents to Apple for the iPhone than it does from selling anything in its own smartphone range.
Nokia’s statement also described the possibility of divesting certain products and services, the first of which to be confirmed is Vertu, its line of luxury diamond-encrusted mobile phones that offer on-call concierge services to wealthy individuals. The sale is rumoured to be on the verge of completion to Swedish private equity firm EQT for around €200m. Not a massive amount when Nokia is talking about trying to make saving in the billions, but no doubt a welcome chunk of cash.
Competition in the fast-paced smartphone industry was always going to threaten Nokia’s position as the pioneer of ‘calling, texting and gaming’ phones. But whether or not the company can pull itself back from the brink against giants like Apple…? Your guess is as good as ours…
Nokia doubles down on Windows Phone and Series 40 in refined platform strategy - All About Symbian
Key points
- Additional investment will be made to create product experiences that differentiate Nokia devices from their competitors.
- Windows Phone will be pushed to lower prices faster than previously anticipated.
- Nokia will refine the way it approaches markets (sales in a given country), with more resources in key markets and a push for more big partnerships with operators and retailers.
- Customers are responding favourably to Nokia's Lumia products when they have them in their hands, but the company faces a challenge in breaking through the dominance of Android and iOS in the sales channel.
- Nokia's low end mobile phone devices will continue to be based on Series 30 and Series 40, with renewed investment in the platform.
- The software engineering project, code named Meltemi, that looked to create a Linux-based OS, with a Qt-based UI and application runtime, for low end mobile devices, appears to have been cancelled.
- The future role of Qt within Nokia is unclear. The strategy of using Qt to "connect the next billion" no longer appears to be viable.
Windows Phones and Markets
The press release that Nokia published this morning brought two items of interest with regards to Nokia's Lumia device strategy. Firstly, the company aims to further differentiate Lumia devices from competitors by making investments in product experiences, and secondly, there is an intention to widen the portfolio by making Lumia devices available at lower price points.
The acquisition of technology from Scalado is an example of the way Nokia hopes to create product differentiation. In the case of Scalado, the technology will be used to further enhance Nokia's leadership in the mobile imaging space. We are likely to see future Lumia devices with smart camera experiences, such as the ability to choose facial expressions of individuals in a group portrait and removal of unwanted people from cityscape photos.
In a conference call today, around today's news, Stephen Elop, Nokia's CEO, noted that Windows Phone was Nokia's competitor against Android and that, as part of this strategy, Nokia "will broaden the price point range of its Lumia portfolio", something it is able to do thanks to specific engineering support from Microsoft that "allows us to achieve things we did not previously have line of sight for". Asked about timing and pricing, he said "we are absolutely going to make Windows Phone [devices] cheaper than the Lumia 610", but did not offer a specific timing, instead observing that "in broad ecosystem terms, there are some important dates ahead and we are excited about those", a clear reference to the forthcoming announcement of the next version of Windows Phone.
Elop also said that Nokia would be refining the way it approached sales with increased focus and investment in key markets such as "the USA, China, UK, and certain other European and Asian [countries]". These markets will receive the maximum investment and attention because "they are big signalling markets or are big markets overall". Other markets will be put into tiers, with some receiving more attention than others. Furthermore the first six months of Lumia sales have provided some important lessons for the company; the most successful markets have been those where Nokia has aligned with a big operator or retail partner (e.g. AT&T and T-Mobile in the USA), more so than markets where a "broader brushstroke approach" has been tried.
Elop described how consumers are responding very positively to Nokia products, when they have them in their hands, but a continuing challenge is breaking through the dominance of Android and iOS in the sales channel. Elop explained that "the challenge is how to break through... how do you get the attention of a retail channel associate... how do you get a preferred spot on the shelf in retail store". The strategy of focusing on a number of key markets aims to help Nokia break through this sales channel barrier.
Mobile Phones, Series 40 and Meltemi
In today's press release, Nokia also noted that it would "improve the competitiveness and profitability of its feature phone business by further developing its Series 30 and Series 40 devices". The bland statement hides larger underlying changes to the company's mobile phone strategy.
Over the last year, there's been a lot of interest around Meltemi, a code name for a rumoured Linux and Qt-based platform that would be used to power the next generation of Nokia's low end mobile devices. Nokia executives made a variety of references to reusing assets from MeeGo in future Nokia products and this was generally assumed to be a reference to Meltemi.
When directly asked about Meltemi in today's conference call, Stephen Elop said that he would not be "commenting on specific engineering efforts", but did note that "we have cancelled certain specific engineering projects".
The existence of the Meltemi project has never been officially acknowledged by Nokia, which means there will be no official confirmation of its cessation. Meltemi attracted a wide array of public interest, in part because it was regarded as the surviving remnant of Nokia's old software strategy. It therefore became emblematic for those dissatisfied with Nokia's switch to Windows Phone, but that attitude rather missed the point, and did a gross disservice to the project. Sources close to Nokia suggest Meltemi had not met key performance targets and was running behind schedule, suggesting it was not ready for its intended role, an echo of the issues faced by MeeGo.
What is clear from today's announcements is that Mary McDowell (executive vice president, Mobile Phones), under whose auspices the Meltemi project would have fallen, is stepping down from the leadership team and leaving the company at the end of the month. The announcement of the closure of Nokia's offices in Ulm (Germany), which was one of the main centres for both Qt and the Meltemi project, provides further evidence that Meltemi has been cancelled, as do a number of tweets from Nokia employees.
Meltemi had an undeniable technical allure, especially for open source advocates, but in the end it seems the Nokia leadership team did not think there was enough space for it to occupy between a mature Series 40 and a Windows Phone platform that is dropping through the price tiers much faster than expected.
In the context of Nokia's strategy the question you need to ask is what benefits would running on a Linux/Qt platform bring over running on Series 40? There's no doubt there would have been benefits, especially around a fresh UI, the elegance of the developer story and the ease of device creation, but what's less clear is how much these factors would have translated into positives in the end user experience. That's important because, ultimately, it is user experiences that provide the differentiation that sells a product.
The termination of the Meltemi project leaves no clear role for Qt within Nokia; it will no longer be part of "connecting the next billion" strategy. While it remains the primary developer environment for Symbian smartphones, that role is ultimately limited, given the switch to Windows Phone and the projected end of life of Symbian in 2016. It is possible that Nokia may look to utilise the Qt asset on Series 40, Windows Phone, or Windows 8, in some way. However, at this point, a more likely option is divestment to an interested third party. Either way, many of those working on Qt and QML are expected to make up a proportion of the 10,000 employees who will lose their jobs by the end of 2013.
Nokia's existing external developers will be furious that the promises around Qt have been broken, which may leave them questioning whether to invest in any Nokia platform. Stepping away from that issue, the question becomes whether Nokia was really in a position to build, from scratch, an ecosystem around its new low end platform? The switch to Windows Phone meant there would have been no big-sister, high-end platform, trickling down apps and content, as there might have been if the MeeGo strategy had remained in place. More tenuously, there's also a sense that, especially on lower end platforms, native apps may have a closing window of opportunity in the light of the rise of web technologies. The example of Samsung's Bada platform provides a salutatory lesson in trying to build an app ecosystem around a low end platform. This (app) ecosystem viability question is important because it was one of Meltemi's raison d'êtres.
With the death of Meltemi, Nokia's low end mobile devices will now continue to be based on Series 30 and Series 40. These platforms have been largely under-appreciated and under-rated; they are comfortably the most successful mobile platform ever, with Series 40 running on more than 1.5 billion mobile phones. At the height of Nokia's Symbian era, Series 40 was held back for fear of canalising Nokia's own smartphone platform, but in more recent years it has seen increased investment, and, consequently, has added features and functionality. That now looks set to continue, with the recently launched Nokia Asha 311 and its "smartphone-like" user experience, pointing the way and looking a lot like a lite version of the vision Meltemi was supposed to fulfill.
However, Nokia also acknowledge that Series 40 can not compete directly with Android. The unanswered question is how viable is Series 40 and what role does it have in the longer term? Yes, Series 40 has already proved its flexibility and ability to evolve; you only need to compare the Nokia 7110, an intermediate product like the Nokia 3500, and any of the more recent devices to realise the platform has already gone through several successful transitions. But will this be enough? The answer lies in both how quickly Nokia can close the gap between Series 40 and Windows Phone and how the lower end of the mobile phone market evolves in the next few years.
Minor Nokia Social update, bug fix - All About Symbian
5 blunders that put Nokia in the hot seat - CNET News
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, showing off the Lumia 900 at CES 2012, inherited a lot of problems when he took over.
(Credit: Lori Grunin/CNET)If Nokia goes down, it won't be CEO Stephen Elop's fault.
The company appears to be in a nosedive after it warned again that its financial performance would disappoint. In addition, the company said it would cut 10,000 positions, or nearly 10 percent of its work force, by the end of 2013, as it reshuffles its management team and showed a few executives out the door.
While the clock is ticking, Elop still has a chance to pull the company out of its nosedive. Things don't look good, though, and they could get worse before they get better.
The seeds of Nokia's possible demise were planted long before Elop took the reins. A series of missteps turned the once dominating leader in handsets into a company barely alive.
Here are some of Nokia's biggest blunders:
1. It never jumped on the flip-phone bandwagon: One of Nokia's earliest and biggest mistakes was the failure to capitalize on the flip-phone trend that was sweeping the U.S. in the early 2000s. Prior to that Nokia enjoyed a lofty position in the U.S. Nearly everyone had a candy-bar-style phone from Nokia.
The Motorola Razr helped propel the flip-phone craze.
But a number of high-profile handsets from competitors began to push U.S. consumers towards the flip-phone model. Most notably, of course, was the original Motorola Razr, which became a runaway success and had Motorola actually challenging Nokia for market share at one point.
Nokia's response: make more candy-bar phones. Its dominant position -- the company at one time controlled two-thirds of the handset market -- meant it could afford to sell identical phones around the world, rather than customizing them for specific markets. Its reluctance to move into flip-phones early cost the company the U.S. market, a place where it hasn't had a major presence for more than a decade.
2. It continued to ignore the U.S. market: Nokia's inability to make custom phones for the U.S. market didn't win itself many allies among the local carriers, further accelerating its market share declines here. Nokia's "my way or the highway" approach with its handsets didn't sit well with the carriers, who were entertaining more nimble players like Motorola.
In addition, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics were more than happy to bend over backwards to accommodate the carriers, and it's no surprise their influence in the industry grew over the last decade.
Nokia instead receded into a niche brand with a few loyal fans. The company set up its own shops in major cities such as New York, selling its phones directly to consumers without a contract, which meant a high non-subsidized price that only a small set of hardcore devotees were willing to pay.
More importantly, Nokia's minimal presence in the U.S. meant it wasn't tapped into the market when it shifted to the modern smartphone.
3. It failed to recognize the threat of the iPhone: Apple's original iPhone shook up the market and changed the expectations of what people could do with a smartphone. Only, that didn't register immediately with everyone in the industry, many of whom were comfortable with older, clunkier platforms such as Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and Nokia's own Symbian.
Nokia was particularly blind to the threat of the iPhone. The company was still the undisputed leader in smartphones, something its executives would regularly tout when asked about the iPhone.
The initial iPhone was extremely pricey, making it more of a luxury item for gadget enthusiasts. But when Apple struck a deal with AT&T to lower the price to $200, it became a mainstream product and a legitimate threat to all major cellphone makers. Cementing its hold was the introduction of its App Store, which tied consumers into a world of apps that only worked on iOS.
Nokia had its own application store, but it was a pale imitation of what developers could do with iOS. At that point it was clear Nokia had lost a lot of the buzz that sustained its brand. Its still-strong position was a legacy of its past strength, and as a result, it began to see its market share slowly deteriorate.
4. It clung to Symbian too long: Symbian was already showing its age when the iPhone arrived, but the cracks really started to appear when Google's Android took center stage.
Android gave other handset manufacturers a modern operating system they could use to compete with against the iPhone, and many were quick to jump on the bandwagon.
Nokia's N97 was a cool phone, but saddled with an old operating system.
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)Motorola, which faced its own struggles after the success of its Razr faded, adopted Android wholeheartedly and immediately got a big push from Verizon Wireless, which was looking for its own counter to AT&T's iPhone. HTC was quick to adopt Android and saw an immediate benefit. Samsung and LG followed more slowly, but in a big way.
Nokia, however, stubbornly clung to Symbian. Indeed, the company opted to double down on Symbian, initially acquiring the operating system with the intent to distribute it as an open-source license. In 2008, the company released Symbian as part of the Symbian Foundation, an effort to form a coalition of vendors and companies supporting the platform. It didn't work, and Nokia was forced to re-absorb the foundation two years later.
It wasn't until Elop showed up that Nokia had the guts to drop Symbian as its primary platform.
5. It chose the wrong next-generation platform to back: Nokia likely hung on to Symbian because its own efforts to create a new smartphone operating system was such a disaster.
Remember Maemo? Nokia probably doesn't want to. It was supposed to be Nokia's next smartphone operating system based on Linux.
Intel, ever eager to get into the smartphone business, was working on its own Linux-based operating system, called Moblin. In 2010, the companies opted to merge their work into MeeGo, a joint venture that only served to cause more delays.
It was evident that MeeGo wasn't ready for prime time after Elop shifted the company's focus to Microsoft and Windows Phone as its primary platform.
Nokia did unveil the MeeGo-powered N9 last year. But by then, the company had already shifted gears, turning the N9 into a novelty phone using a dead operating system. Still, the N9 lives on in a way; its chassis is the basis for the Lumia line of smartphones.
Nokia cuts 10,000 jobs to save costs - ninemsn
Nokia says it will slash 10,000 jobs and close plants as the ailing company fights fierce competition, and gave a grim outlook for most of the year, causing its shares to plummet 18 per cent to close at 1.83 euros.
The Finnish mobile phone maker also on Thursday announced personnel changes and said it has agreed to sell its luxury phone brand, Vertu.
The measures, aimed at additional cost savings of 1.6 billion euros ($A2 billion) by the end of next year, will shut down research and development facilities in Ulm, Germany, and Burnaby, British Columbia.
Nokia said it will also close its main Finnish manufacturing plant in Salo, with 850 layoffs, but will keep its research and development centre there.
Nokia updated its outlook, saying that heavy competition would continue to hit its smartphone sector in the second quarter, but to a "somewhat greater extent than previously expected" and that the downturn would continue in the third quarter.
Markets were disappointed, plunging Nokia shares to below 2.00 euros for the first time ever on the Helsinki Stock Exchange.
Nordea analyst in Helsinki, Sami Sarkamies, said Nokia's scale of the cost cutting took many by surprise and might not help to strengthen the company.
"When you make such drastic cuts you have to abandon a lot of things," Sarkamies said. "It may be that they just can't anymore afford to come up with innovative, new things."
The loss-making company has been struggling against fierce competition from Apple's iPhone and other makers using Google's popular Android software, including Samsung and HTC. It is also being squeezed in the low-end by Asian manufacturers making cheaper phones, such as China's ZTE.
Nokia announced that private equity group EQT VI had agreed to acquire Vertu, its global luxury phone brand, but that the Finnish company would keep a 10 per cent minority shareholding. No financial terms were announced.
The company said it would also overhaul its management team, with two long-time members of its top leadership - Mary McDowell, the head of the struggling mobile phones unit, and Niklas Savander, head of the markets sector - leaving the company at the end of June. Chief marketing officer and brand manager Jerri DeWard, who joined Nokia in January 2011 will also step down.
No comments:
Post a Comment