By Saad Elkhadem
No doubt this will come as a shock to anyone reading this who's under the age of 20, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past when Nokia was the brand that ruled the mobile roost. Indeed, the vendor was so dominant in days gone by that those of us of a slightly older generation had our formative mobile years shaped by the brand, with Nokia's numerous iconic early devices touching all our lives in one way or another.
The vendor's phones came in all shapes and sizes, including its very first GSM phone, the Nokia 1011, and the sliding 8110 device made famous by Keanu Reeves' character in 1999's 'The Matrix'. There was also the interchangeable covers of the seemingly ubiquitous 3310 and 8210 models, the bizarre 'bat-shaped' 5510, and the BlackBerry-battling E71 that came complete with a QWERTY keyboard. And who can forget endless games of Snake on the famed 3210?
Another beast of a device in the Nokia arsenal was the Communicator 9000. A business-centric phone that opened in half to reveal a full keyboard and a full-length secondary screen, the device was in essence the smartphone of its time. The models mentioned here are merely the tip of the iceberg of what we saw from Nokia during its glory years, with new devices being launched at a rate that would make today's smartphone vendors seem positively bone idle in comparison.
Things began to change with the arrival of the iPhone and the proliferation of Android-powered devices. Once these started to gain real traction, it soon became clear that Nokia's Symbian OS was unable to keep up with the pace of the mobile market's constantly evolving landscape. In order to survive, Nokia had two options, both of which involved a change of operating system. Presented with a choice between Android and Windows Phone, the vendor made the fateful decision to go down the Microsoft route.
Then and now, the Windows Phone operating system struggles to truly compete, with or without Nokia under its wings. According to market intelligence and advisory firm IDC, Windows Phone accounted for less than 5% of the GCC's smartphone OS market last year, with Android pulling in a whopping share of 79%. When you see figures like that, you can't help but wonder what the future might have held for Nokia had it backed the winning horse.
We did see a glimpse of that potential future back in February 2014 with the short-lived release of the Nokia X line of devices. This was somewhat of a halfway house though, because despite using an Android-based OS and being marketed very much as Android devices, the Nokia X family didn't incorporate Google's Play Store. And crucially, the user interface bore no resemblance to the one that Android users had become accustomed to, with the devices sporting a tile-like design more reminiscent of Windows Phone handsets.
So what of Nokia now? Microsoft's $7.2 billion acquisition of the one-time handset giant's device and services unit finally went through in April 2014, having first been announced in September of the previous year. It’s still too early to really know the full story, but Microsoft is slowly but surely phasing out the Nokia moniker from its Lumia smartphone lineup, with a case in point being the Microsoft Lumia 535, the first Lumia device to lose the Nokia badge.
As for Nokia itself, there have been rumors that the vendor may return to the handset market in its own right once the agreement it has with Microsoft not to sell Nokia branded phones comes to an end in late 2016. An official statement from the vendor quickly quashed these rumors but speculation persists, primarily fueled by some highly unexpected news in late 2014 when the Nokia N1 was unveiled, a 7.9" aluminum tablet reminiscent of an Apple iPad Mini that runs Android 5.0 alongside Nokia's Z Launcher. The product is part of a licensing agreement with Foxconn that will see the device initially released in China during the first quarter of 2016, before it is steadily rolled out to other markets around the world.
This appears to be the future for the new Nokia, for the moment at least. Under this model, the company will no longer build or sell devices itself, but instead license the Nokia brand and its designs to other OEMs, who will then build, market, and sell devices themselves, paying royalties to Nokia in return. Could the vendor pursue a similar path in the smartphones space? It's certainly a possibility, despite Nokia's protestations to the contrary. In tech terms, 2016 is still a long way away so there is plenty of time yet for the vendor to change its tune and embark on what would be an intriguing new era for the once iconic king of the mobile world.
(The author is a Research Analyst, Handsets and Monitors, IDC Middle East, Africa and Turkey)
The Peninsula
