Nokia: Late to the game, but working on a comeback!
Nokia are well known for their cell phones, they are after all the largest maker of them. They were however a little bit late at getting into the smart phone game. There are a few reasons that they were slow off the mark but they have pretty much caught up as they are now also one of the largest makers of smart phones as well.
Given that Nokia were the first to bring a cell phone to market it was a little bit surprising that they didn't really get into the smart phone market until fairly late in the game. They are one of the largest makers of cell phone handsets but they did not really start to produce smart phones until 2008. Once they did get into the market however they really took it by storm introducing some of the most innovative and best selling products. They have however recently seen sales decline and will need to work hard to address this set back.
When Nokia decided to get into the smart phone market they initially decided to compete head to head with Blackberry by being one of the few handset makers to offer a full QWERTY keyboard. However they have since introduced a variety of products with several different designs that are clearly aimed at different markets. While Blackberry has continued to focus mainly on the business market Nokia have been building smart phones that are aimed at the mass consumer while at the same time maintaining a line that are intended for business use.
One of the things that really helped Nokia to catch up after its late start was that it had one of the best operating systems. The Symbian operating system was created with several partners but Nokia has since bought them out. A lot of people found that the Symbian operating system was easier to use than the ones that were found on other smart phones; in particular that it had a better interface. Symbian also tended to be better at the things that most consumers wanted out of their smart phones like multimedia and social activities.
Over the last few months there has been a bit of a controversy surrounding Nokia as they have decided to change the operating system and go into partnership with Microsoft. A lot of people are not happy about this change since they prefer the Symbian operating system to the Microsoft one. The new products have not yet been launched so it remains to be seen how sales are affected but there has been a great deal of very vocal complaining about it. That being said it is quite likely that the new phones will sell well, Microsoft do know what they are doing after all, so the criticism may be premature.