Speaking to ComputerWire last week, Openwave president and CEO Don Listwin said he believes Nokia’s recent 3% decline in market share is the result of Nokia failing to embrace so-called feature phones rather than a lack of clamshell designs, as such.
Feature phones layer a rake of sophisticated applications on top of conventional handset operating systems rather than relying on computer-style operating systems for deploying these services, as do smart phones. But in other ways, such as their tendency to offer larger-than-usual color displays, they are similar.
However, in Listwin’s eyes, this focus has led Nokia to take its eye off the ball in terms of the fast expanding handset mid-market.
The industry transformation that’s going on is towards the feature phone category at a time when Nokia has been obsessed with the smart phone category. LG, Samsung and Motorola have been working much harder to get this right, said Listwin.
In this light, Nokia’s concentration on one-piece candy bar handsets, while often held up as the reason for its current troubles, is actually a symptom of them rather than their cause.
The clamshell form is representative of the feature phone, said Listwin. It allows a bigger screen and a decent-sized keyboard. If you try and put these things into a candy bar all you get is a bigger candy bar.
The relative size of Nokia’s Symbian handsets compared the feature phone offerings of its rivals appears to bear this out, as does the cramped real estate of its conventional phones.
Listwin cited the case of Vodafone, which has had considerable success on its Live service with feature phones from Sharp Electronics Corp, based on Openwave’s handset software. With Sharp, the operator has been able to specify the phone’s software, and to an extent its hardware, to its exact requirements.
Unsurprisingly, given the perceived need for a large display and keypad, Sharp’s range of feature handsets for Vodafone have been clamshells. I don’t think Microsoft offers their key competition. It’s the operators wanting their brands back, said Listwin.
To date, Nokia has been the most prolific developer of smart phones. The company has already brought six basic models using Symbian OS to market (not including variants) and several more have been announced.
The comparison in this market is generally made with Microsoft, whose own Windows Mobile for Smartphones is comparable with Symbian OS. And here Nokia so far has a quantifiable lead. But so far the company has made few concession to the emerging feature phone market, either in software or design.
While Nokia does offer a number of applications on its non-Symbian handsets, Openwave appears to have gained the upper hand in terms of extending functionality and improving user experience in lower-priced phones.
The latest Phone Suite Version 7 includes a powerful mobile web browser, multimedia capability from Real Networks, Microsoft’s MSN content and, as of last week, a new suite of messaging applications from the company’s purchase of Magic4. Listwin said the company is looking to extend this capability to include tight integration with Microsoft Outlook.
