by Alan Bonnici

Created on: February 13, 2010

The New York Times ran the story “Nokia Profits Rises on Smartphone Sales and Cost-Cutting”. The story said that Nokia had performed better than expected and had registered a profit. Researching further reveals that while there was an increase of 22 percent on the previous quarter, year on year the company is 19% under. You might say it's been a tough year for everyone, but has it? Apple has posted record sales. Suffice to say that Apple has doubled the sales of mobile phones over the span of a year. And RIM, the company behind the BlackBerry is fairing as positively as Apple if not better.

When we start comparing like with like, the Nokia story is no longer as rosy as it might appear at first. And one must remember that unlike Nokia, other players have not embarked on a focused cost-cutting operation. Without the aggressive cost-cutting how much would the profits have really been?

There are a number of areas in which Nokia are playing their cards incorrectly.

Nokia has too many phones.

When I logged into their site they had 114 models. It simply confuses people and is costing the company a lot of money to manage and track. Why should we have two models, same name but one with a music edition and one without? Does it make commercial and customer sense to have an N96 vs an N95 and a 2610 vs a 2630 vs a 2600 classic? You might correctly state that Nokia covers the entire mobile phone market spread from the cheap basic models to the whiz-bang models but 10 to 15 models would suffice to cover this spectrum.

Ovi is a bad decision.

Why chuck out a valuable name such as Nokia for Ovi? It confuses people and subtracts value from the mother brand itself. Up to a few months ago we had a password for Ovi and one for Nokia (this has been corrected) but we still have a Nokia PC Suite and an Ovi Suite competing for the taskbar. This doesn't add up. The dog should know what its tail is doing and should be in control of its rear end.

Patched up store.

I go to www.ovi.com and log in. I'm greeted with a “Good to see you Alan C.”. I click on the Store icon and am taken to a secure page (https://store.ovi.com). I am told I have an N97. No I don't. I look at the top right hand corner, why am I not registered? Why do I have to register again? I register. This time I am not greeted by my first name but by my login name.

A powerful model.

One of the critical decisions that go into the design of any mobile phone is the balance between weight, size, speed and

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