Nokia 5800: Reading Beyond the 1 million mark!

Nokia has not measured up well in Smartphone competition lately. The successes have been few and far between. The last major splash was E 71, which recieved a good response from certain parts of the market. The only other Nokia smartphone that has been on the scene is N 95 8GB. Apart from these two N 85, N 79, E 66 and N 96 have not been the major quakers of the Smartphone scene!

In line with the recession market, Nokia's results were a tad dissapointing in Q4, 2008 and apart from the market share loss, a major criticism it faced was the lack of a good smartphone portfolio. Understandably, Nokia would desire 5800 (code named Tube), its iPhone answer to do well! There has been some major marketing and PR effort behind the Tube, which was launched in late 2008! For Nokia, a lot rides on this phone before N 97, takes centrestage, in the summer of 2009.

It was in this context that i was baffled when i read new sreports of Nokia shipping out 1 million 5800 in 3 months of launch!

http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=12603&cid=9

http://www.mobilemonday.net/news/nokia-5800-xpressmusic-shipments-reach-1-million

http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1284621

http://www.slashphone.com/nokia-5800-xpressmusic-shipments-reach-1-million-milestone-284257

That is some feat, considering that 36.5 million Smartphones sold in Q3, 2008 (Gartner UK). A million phones is 3% Smartphone market share from one model! Nokia in Q3,2008 shipped a little over 15 million smartphones. A million 5800s is some number. If that be true, then one can expect Nokia upturning tables and smartphone market shares in Q1, 2009. It would be a tribute again to Nokia's ability to replicate a trend and making a platform out of it and selling it cheap to take it to the masses!

However, if this be a channel and customer upstocking gambit, then there are considerable risks involved. It would be walking back and undoing of Nokia's lean supply chain strategem. The channels and customers could clog up which would have a back lash specially in a downturn economy. Consider this, a quarter of the smart phone volumes come from US (9.2 million smart phones sold in US, 36.5 million smart phones world over). Nokia 5800 has no US footprint in terms of a carrier and would sell at $500 from stores! Demand world over is likely to slacken even more and there are more smart phone vendors out there trying for their piece of the cake!

So, while Nokia has shown confidence on the product by shipping a million units, there may yet be many pitfalls!It could be the make or break for the world no 1!

It took Apple 74 days to get to 1 million iPhones. If Nokia is to be believed, 5800 Tube is doing as much in almost same time. We will await the results!

Operating systems: The Big Squeeze

http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/02/09/06FE-shrinking-operating-system_3.html

Those huge operating systems are citadels of the past! Most of the major OS vendors are designing their next versions of OSs with a smaller footprint! So now, the software concept revolves around JeOS (pronounced "juice"), the Just Enough OS, even as hardware goes mobile like Celio RedFly, an 8-inch screen and keyboard device running applications off a smartphone via a USB or a Bluetooth connection. Thus, this is an era of squeeze for the massive operating systems!

The rationale behind the squeeze is simple: Why do you have to fit a Ferrari 10 cylinder 450 BHP engine when all you require is a Tata Nano in performance!

Reason 1. A smaller code base is easier to develop and manage than a larger one!

Reason 2. Computing has graduated from mainframes, desktops and lap tops to Smart phones, Notebooks and PDAs. Thus hardware resources are also limiting!

The two reasons stated above make the case for a smaller OS a difficult thing to ignore!

To quote Ephraim Schwartz, "Today, Microsoft's Windows Mobile is a separate code base from the desktop Windows, while Apple's iPhone OS is a both a subset of and extension of the Mac OS. In both cases, that adds a lot of work for their companies and for application developers. And it means that customers must support an unwieldy number of operating systems."

Reason 3. The other obvious advantage is that a smaller OS reduces the memory footprint. This reduces the number of applications opened at boot, it reduces memory space usage, reduces battery drainage and in consumer term is effective and fast!

Thus, major OS vendors are designing the next versions of their OS -- Windows 7, Linux in its many distributions, and Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard -- with a smaller footprint.

Reason 4: Mobile devices have a greater dependence on the browser! Thus the OS shrinks giving up much of its role to the browser!

Reason5: Web 2.0 is a liberating medium! There was a time when no one thought that feature rich applications would sit anywhere but the OS. (example Adobe Photoshop). However with Adobe Photoshop migrating to Photoshop.com and Photoshop Express (a web 2.0 application), do you really need to load Adobe on your system? Do you need that OS?

Interestingly, Microsoft is in denial over the seizure in dominance of the OS trend. However, the course of lfe and development, being Darwinian (evolution), companies will have to adapt or die as virtualization, cloud computing, the explosion of unique devices, and the desire for more efficient, less costly operating systems all drive the next generation of business users toward smaller, less costly, and more efficient operating environments