Products & Services
More to come for the USA
By James on 06 May 2008
ESPOO, Finland - We wrote last week about how Nokia is tackling changes in the USA but yesterday, head of design at Nokia, Alastair Curtis told Finnish paper Helsingin Sanomat that in the next few months “US operators will carry a lot of new products from us”.
This seems to have sparked a flurry of activity online, with plenty of outlets picking up on the story.
With such a public commitment, it’s pretty clear there must be plenty of projects in the works (and no, we don’t know what they are!). Exciting stuff for anyone living in the US who as we’re pretty sure this will only be the beginning, with plenty more new products yet to come.
Meanwhile on Reuters, eQ Bank analyst Jari Honko said
Even Engadget got in on the action, with some degree of enthusiasm…
“Bring it on, Nokia. We’re ready to see these phones from you, say, in the form of an E71 or Tube?”
It goes to show the level of interest in anything US related. We’ve already seen some brilliant feedback from readers commenting on our US story last week.
We’ll be bringing you news on these new devices as they’re announced. Along with the reaction. Meanwhile, let us know what kind of features you’d like to see on US-focussed devices.
No related posts.
Tags | Alastair Curtis, Nokia, products, usa
May 6th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
i’m interesting, because here in Mexico we have a strong dependence of the tech trends in USA, and also the main operators in Mexico Telcel, Movistar & Iusacell have a delay on time and quantity of models, thanks to the nokia flagship store in Mexico me (and a couple of friends) we can get the models like the n95 or n82 and 5610 a lot of months before or wonderfull gadgets like the N800 (i have one and i wait for the N810 wimax edition, in december 4 companies will buy the frecuencies to offer wimax here in Mexico), one thing i suggest to follow is the lack of updates to the nokia phones attatched to the local operators (not my case, since i get my phones from the nokia store) but a lot of my friends suffer with this situation, and another ones, the 5610 xpress music is a beatiful phone, it rocks, but we wait the firmware upgrade that resolve the aleatory re-starts issues with the mp3 playing, and the sms issue in music mode, this model begins to offers in mexico via telcel (and two months before on nokia store) this month and believe if we gets this upgrade this model will become equal o more popular here in mexico than de 5300 or 5200 series, its relative cheap, has 3g (i used a lot like modem with my n800, because my n82 3g frecuency it not avaible in mexico), long music play…. thanks a lot for create a site like nokia conversations
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May 6th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
@Nodens.
Regarding updates - Yeah, I’ve noticed that some folks seem to never get them since they are tied to an operator variant. I see it in Europe too. But I have no idea how to overcome this. I think it’s really up to the operators to decide when their variants have an update.
And thanks for visiting.
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May 6th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Gizmodo’s reaction: “Nokia’s Plan to Conquer the U.S.: Product Spam”
http://gizmodo.com/387177/nokias-plan-to-conquer-the-us-product-spam
In a way they are right. Flooding the market with phone no one wants won’t help. But if the flood of phones is really the backlog of non-US phones that don’t seem to ever make it to the US, then we’re talking honey ham.
Let’s hope this isn’t a ‘throw it all at the wall and let’s see what sticks’.
Any other thoughts on this?
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May 6th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Charlie - I’ll have my full thoughts up on Symbian-Guru.com soon, but my reaction to the Gizmodo piece was that they’re silly.
What manufacturer *doesn’t* spam the U.S. market with phones? How many different Samsungs, LGs, and Motorolas are on the shelf of not just AT&T, but Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile? And most of them are the same guts, just a different form factor, or a small difference.
I for one would be happy to see Nokia step it up in the U.S., specifically with the S60 products. I’m not asking for N95s on every corner. There are *several* low- to mid-level S60 handsets that would do well on the U.S. carriers. Heck, even the N73 would sell like gangbusters, and it’s how old?
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May 6th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
The news of more U.S. handsets in the second half of 2008 is consistent with what we’ve been told for the past several months internally.
Not only is stuff coming through the carriers–no surprise there–but Nokia products are starting to be increasingly present in more retail outlets.
One of the reasons Nokia is so successful as a handset maker is the number of different phones that appeal to a wide range of consumers. One person’s “product spam” is another person’s “useful product.”
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May 7th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Thanks for the update on the Nokia USA situation. Sorry I didn’t jump in on your post last week in a timely fashion, but I was on a business trip.
I’m glad to see Nokia USA is making some moves toward improvement. That said, it strikes me that so far all of your plans focus on product issues. And that’s missing the point.
I’d like to know what, if anything, Nokia USA plans to do to improve its service for its US customers. Right now, that appears to be your most immediate vulnerability in the US market. Anything you do on the US product front could be undermined or made moot if Nokia continues to offer such inadequate service for US customers.
In a new post to contentious.com (http://urltea.com/35t6), I reiterate 2 measures that could immediately help rescue Nokia’s reputation on the service front, and encourage more mobloggers, journalists, and other high-end consumers to purchase and use (and blog about) your N-Series devices:
1)TIMELINESS. All repairs and replacements will be handled within seven days, including shipping. Don’t make us wait a month or more to get our phones back, as is now the case.
2) RESPONSIBILITY. All phones damaged by Nokia’s firmware update process (which Nokia has acknowledged is flawed and has damaged phones) will be replaced for free, no questions asked, within seven days.
…Again, those are just suggestions. But they seem to me to be more practical and helpful NOW than what Nokia USA has proposed so far.
What exactly is Nokia USA planning to do to improve its US service? How fast can you act on that? If there are barriers to those improvements, what are they? Many current would-be Nokia N-Series have a strong incentive to help you solve those problems. Please bring us into that process. We want you to succeed in this market.
- Amy Gahran
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