Nokia out of smartphone competion? Not so Fast. With New N9, the game is on.

Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phone has been struggling a decline in mobile market share, vaulted by Apple, Google and other rivals including Samsung, HTC, and LG. Nokia enjoyed a long pride being a symbol of Finland’s corporate leader, which ended last year after iPhone became the best-selling smartphone device in Finland.

Nokia’s alliance with Microsoft followed by investors’ reaction has plunged Nokia’s share price by 40 percent. With tens of thousands of people at Nokia, this transition will eliminate 7,000 jobs replacing Nokia’s internal Symbian OS with a new mobile OS from Microsoft.

After the announcement of mutual endeavor, Stephen Elop, the chief executive who left Microsoft to lead Nokia in getting back to the game acknowledged that the job cuts and transition to Microsoft was considered necessary to restore competitiveness, have been challenging. However, the phase-out of Symbian would be gradual and Nokia still plans to introduce 10 new Symbian handsets over the next year. He said further that we are shifting a whole company in order to retool and better equip Nokia to compete and take back its corporate place in mobile industry.

Nokia introduced a shiny touch-screen smartphone named N9 in Singapore on last Tuesday. The N9 outshines with a new useful improvement missing in any competing device even in iPhone or Google’s Android phones. Optimized for one-hand use, the N9 allows users to switch between applications with a thumb intuitively, without requiring to return to a main menu screen or press a button which is a requirement on both Android and iPhone devices.
The N9 is a combination of sculptured four-inch glass screen and a polycarbonate plastic body made of solid color; cyan blue, magenta and black minimizing with barely visible scratches. It runs a variant of Nokia’s MeeGo operating system, a product of Nokia’s short-lived venture with Intel, the chip maker. It’s expected to come with 16 and 64 GB models with competitive pricing of $670 and $760 to challenge market rivals.

Stephen Elop relayed that Nokia might reveal one or more of the first Microsoft handsets in time for the holiday season.
This could be a breakthrough for Nokia in smartphone market and an affirmation that Nokia continues to innovate and does beautiful work.


Source: The New York Times!