Sauna Penkki

With the official announcement of the N900 Nokia now has a 3 pronged OS platform attack:
– S40 for the low end
– S60 mid & high end (old fashioned?) smart phones
– maemo to cover the new emerging market of internet oriented devices i.e. iPhone, Android, Palm pre

Nokia in recent history has been all about segmenting the market and having at least one handset that competes in every segement.

By extending their experiement in the MID platform area to also include GSM capabilities Nokia should be able to get similar benefits to Apple i.e. a very small number of hardware platforms to support.

They can also expose the work they have been doing over the last few years with the Open source community, which is not to be under-estimated.

The other thing Nokia seems to have taken from Apple is to have the device available a month or two after the event it was announced at, rather than a half year (as was the case with the N97)

You can see a marketing type video here, and a more “human” version here
The Hardware specifications are listed on the site, but the really interesting thing is that Nokia seems to have listened to the information around the iPhone and seen it is all about the software, for example see this review over on maemo-guru.

The thing that may get ignored/glossed-over in all of the geekgasms happening all over the place (examples here and here) is Nokia’s moves to provide services targetted at the developing world.
I think at least some of this has to be caused by Nokia employing people like Jan Chipchase who was talking about something similar to Nokia Money over two years ago. It is also a nice complement to Nokia life tools.
These are HUGE markets that California (home of all the Web2.0, Social Media hype engine) currently does not seem to understand or want to work with, and while the margins may be very small, they are there!
Over the past few years Nokia has shown it understands how to work a very high volume, low margin business (at least for hardware) and it will be interesting to see if they can do the same with services.

The Nokia Booklet announcement resembles the begining of the partnership announcements made with Intel and Microsoft. I am guessing that although this product was being worked on before the announcements were made and may have even helped them along.
Of course i can’t find the article now, but I remember reading an article recently that pointed out that Enterprise IT changes very slowly (something like 3-5 years per cycle!) and even then is not keen on the change. As pointed out in this article by Tomi Ahonen, many Enterprises are currently married to the Microsoft stack (essentially Exchange and Active Directory), and for many this has also meant moving to Blackberry.
I see the combination of a stylish netbook alongside a small handset (for example the E52, allowing the modern road warrior to do their job more effectively, than using the compromise device that is the Blackberry (screen is too low resolution, can’t connect to a project, etc). The inclusion of Quickoffice on E-Series devices is potentially yet another string to this bow.