Anyone got one? Anyone? Is there a single reader out there who could legitimately email me with an message that starts ”I’ve got a Nokia N97, it’s the best phone on the market, and here’s why”.

I didn’t think so, I certainly don’t expect to get that email. Remember when everyone had a Nokia phone? I don’t really know how well they did in the US but in the UK there was a time when you just wouldn’t consider getting a phone that wasn’t a Nokia. Now you’d be crazy to get one. I keep seeing lots of sales charts that say Nokia is still the world’s number one smart phone producer. What? Really? Who’s buying them? While office after office are crying out for iPhones and Android phones, I doubt there is a single company on the planet who are making all their staff move over to the Nokia E72 or some other Nokia excuse for a phone.

Let me be clear, Nokia do sell an absolute boat load of phones. It’s just that they’re what we class as feature phones, which is a bit of a bad name because we’re referring to phones that don’t really do much. You know, the ones for people who say they just want to make calls. Surely this market can’t be long for this world. I noticed today that you can get the HTC Wildfire for free, on a £15 per month contract. Why would anyone in their right mind buy anything by Nokia.

I’d like to suggest that all Nokia need to do is release some decent hardware or a better operating system, but the problem is well out of their control now. We only need to look at the computer market to see what’s going to happen.
At one point in the 80′s there were over 600 computer companies in the UK alone. That’s 600 types of computer, most with their own operating system, and most of them doing pretty much the same things. As time went on Microsoft released their BASIC operating system and the number of computer companies began to plumet. They just started making computers that ran the OS that everybody wanted to use. Now we have two. A main one that most people use, Windows, we have one for people that don’t like Windows, OS X, and we’ve got one for people that don’t really like using their computer, Linux (but that doesn’t really count). I’m only messing you Linux people.

In any case I hope you can see my point. What we really need as consumers is a couple of competitors. Somebody to make something good, and somebody to make something sightly better so that the other guys up their game a bit. And, it looks like those two are going to be Android and iOS. Most people will carry some sort of Android phone. Sorry iPhone supporters but that’s the way it’s going to be. Android phones are available for free and on cheaper contracts than the iPhone. As good as the iPhone is, it’s not £300 better than Android. However, I think the next largest group of users will be iPhone people. RIM and their Blackberry will probably represent the Linux which is mainly used on company servers around the world, with their penetration into the corporate market. It’s fair to say that as Android and iOS get better at the corporate stuff RIM might find themselves in trouble.

Where does all that leave Nokia and their Symbian OS? Nowhere. Looking at everything Nokia have released in the last three years it’s clear that they don’t let their engineers go on the internet, into shops, or anywhere they might see what other people are doing with phones. If you do a quick search for the upcoming Nokia N8, their new flagship phone, you can’t help but feel that they haven’t got a clue what’s going on in the world. It’s a shame that they haven’t come close to keeping up with the times, but I can see there being a time in the next ten years when you can say “Remember Nokia?”

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