Speaking at the company’s Mobility Conference in Monte Carlo last week, Anssi Vanjoki, executive VP and general manager of Nokia’s multimedia group, said the CDMA market, or more specifically the CDMA2000 1x market, was difficult for Nokia to enter with its smartphones, both in terms of its business model and the technology.
We’ve no solutions for 1x CDMA standard at this time. Nokia has always been for the open market and the CDMA market is not open. We have certain issues with that market, said Mr Vanjoki.
While Mr Vanjoki did not expand on his assertion, it is reasonable to suggest that CDMA creator Qualcomm’s almost total dominance of chipsets for the CDMA handset market may be at least partially responsible for Nokia’s reluctance to take its successful GSM products into a new arena.
Mr Vanjoki also alluded to the technical difficulties in supplying CDMA operators with Nokia smartphones. Our CDMA products have all been developed with our embedded [platform], not with our multimedia platforms.
Where the GSM equipment suppliers have managed to create a very high level of interoperability between their systems, the networks of CDMA operators remain largely proprietary and require proprietary terminals.
This complexity has not dissuaded Nokia from offering conventional handsets to CDMA operators, albeit in considerably less variety than to GSM operators. However, Mr Vanjoki’s remarks suggest that Nokia does not currently consider viable the additional work and investment required to port its smartphone technology to specific CDMA operator requirements, despite those operators accounting for about 30% of all mobile network subscribers worldwide.
The decision appears even less comprehensible in light of Nokia’s stated intention to make smartphones a core component of its handset strategy going forward.
Meanwhile, rival device vendors such as PalmOne, whose Treo 600 has rapidly become established as the number one smartphone with North American CDMA operators, appears happy to make that investment.
It was a very hard decision for us to make [to develop the Treo 600 for CDMA operators], PalmOne president Ed Colligan told ComputerWire late last week. The [CDMA operators] work with us [to define specifications] but as far as deploying the network technology in our devices we’re happy to make that investment.
While the Symbian mobile operating system that supports Nokia’s smartphone platforms (Series 60, 80, 90) is able to support CDMA and its variants, there has been little momentum among Symbian licensees to create smartphones suitable for CDMA networks.
PalmOne is one of a number of hardware manufacturers to target CDMA markets with smartphones, among them LG, Samsung, Kyocera, Audiovox, and HTC. However, such devices typically employ either Palm OS or Windows Mobile, despite the fact that both LG and Samsung also license Symbian OS.
Nokia’s decision to sidestep the CDMA smartphone market continues a tradition going back to its earliest smart devices. Even the successful 9200 series Communicator devices never spawned a CDMA variant.
The company has produced and will continue to produce conventional handsets for CDMA markets but its level of commitment to the technology has always been lower than that in its GSM heartland.
