Marketing Nokia in the US
Last week I posted a ‘rant’ of sorts about the s60.com Applications Wishlist that opened a good dialog with Phil about the current state of the wishlist and gave us a bit of insight as to where s60.com will be taking it in the future. I think that everyone walked away from that post pretty happy with the outcome - the Wishlist is a tool that has the potential to be of great value internally (to Nokia) and externally (to third-party developers and consumers) and they are currently working on the next phase to help facilitate that.
Well we all know about s60.com’s enthusiasm when it comes to apps, but what about Nokia in general?
Earlier today I thought to myself, “If I was a brand new Nokia customer and I wanted to know about apps for a Nokia N80IE that I just purchased, what would I do?”. So being in the US I went to Nokia’s US site and took a look around. It was surprising to me how scarce any information on apps is! After about 20 clicks I finally came across the first mention of any kind of installable mobile software - in the support section. These were downloads for the SMS accelerator patch and the time-zone patch. No luck.
So I continued to click around. Maybe another 15 clicks later I found myself bounced over to the Nseries site where I found mention of my first app after five clicks - a tiny news blurb at the bottom of a page entitled “Gizmo Project on N80 and N95″. This lead me to the news section where Ricky’s post about Gizmo was highlighted and linked, along with a blogroll to the right and latest stories to the left.
So if I had clicked through to the Symbian-Guru blog and read around for a short while, I would have finally learned that there are in fact applications that can be installed on my N80IE. I would have learned this of course, on a blog that is not affiliated with Nokia.
If you take a look at their list of phones on the Nokia US site, six of the first 10 devices listed run S60 3rd. Two of the first 10 are Internet Tablets, one is the 9300 and the last is the 7380. This means that nine out of the first 10 devices support enhancement by way of non-java applications.
What does it all mean?
Going back the the Nokia US site I still haven’t found any mention of the Nokia Software Market, or any apps for that matter. That’s not to say that this information isn’t there (maybe I’m not looking in the right place?) but if it is then it’s buried. Nokia is pushing all of these smartphones here in the US but they don’t even begin to explore the true possibilities of these devices on their site. Once again, wrong approach Nokia. Great, so now I’ve read about the N80IE and I know that it can browse the internet, take pictures and play music. So if I’ve never read about this device before, I’m basically thinking that it’s a $500 RAZR without the cool form-factor at this point…
Nokia needs to use the tools at their disposal to sell their products. A few three-sentence marketing blurbs about internet, Orb and Snapfish aren’t going to sell me a $500 device. Neither is this interesting little snippet found on the bottom of the main N80IE product page:
“Downloadable ring tones, games and graphics are not
yet available for the Nokia N80ie Device. Please check back.”
I’ve yet to come across a person who hasn’t walked away from me amazed after asking the simple question, “So what’s so cool about that phone?” - and I’m not even paid to market Nokias! God forbid I was, because then Motorola might actually have something to worry about…
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