Nokia aims to win back the smartphone market with new offers

LONDON – Mobile phone giant Nokia announced last week that it will take important steps to improve its online development tools with a host of new and improved smartphones in order to regain a foothold in the mobile phone market.

The mobile phone company held its annual Nokia World event in conjunction with its developer summit in London, where it announced a new and improved approach to catch up with other mobile phone brands such as Apple and Blackberry that have been successful in dominate the smartphone market.

Last year Nokia shipped over 364 million phones while selling around 260,000 smartphones a day, which is higher than any other mobile phone provider, but the company concedes that it hasn’t been so competitive than it should have been in recent years. Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Nokia Forum & Developer Community said that Nokia enables developers to create simpler, more lucrative apps for Nokia phone users in more than 190 countries who use the Nokia app store “Ovi store “.
“Our announcements will definitely bring more interesting applications (apps) to Nokia products, especially our new Symbian family of smartphones,” she said, adding that Nokia plans to ship more than 50 million new smartphones soon.

They also announced that some of the improvements made will include improvements to the Nokia Qt SDK, which will lead to a 70% reduction in the number of lines of code required during development for Symbian smartphones, while the Ovi Store will be also improved with a new look that makes finding apps faster and easier.

The developers are able to distribute their apps to around 175 million people who use Nokia Symbian phones and the mobile phone company has revealed that it has already taken steps to increase that number by providing affordable phones.

Speaking to the Business Times on the sidelines of the conference, Mary McDowell, executive vice president of Nokia’s mobile business unit, said affordability was a top concern for Nokia, especially when it came to markets in the emerging Asian region in which Sri Lanka with the fall of Bangladesh and Nepal.

“We need to carefully review the functionality and expand our services in these regions while promoting local applications,” she said. Nokia will look to an open innovation approach to tackle the rapidly growing market while cultivating local innovations as part of its plan to sell local and non-global in emerging markets such as Sri Lanka.

This approach has been successful in countries like India where locally developed Bollywood-related applications have been in high demand by a large portion of Nokia users. “At Nokia, we have decided to change our development techniques to more agile ones that have proven to be more user-oriented and user-friendly,” said McDowell.

She also added that Android technology which has provided fierce competition to the Symbian market will not be explored by Nokia developers as they believe Symbian technology offers more to developers and users. Niklas Savander, executive vice president of markets, said that despite new competition, Symbian remains the most widely used smartphone platform in the world.

“Our new family of smartphones introduced today includes the all new Symbian operating system, rewritten to be faster, easier to use, more efficient and more developer friendly,” he said. Among the phones presented by Nokia at the event were the Nokia E7, C7 and C6 which joined Nokia’s Symbian lineup with the previously announced N8. The show’s star, the Nokia N8, is designed for entertainment purposes only and was featured at the event where developers and journalists got their first glimpse of the phone that Nokia considers to be the ultimate entertainment smartphone. and the best camera in the world, featuring a 12 Megapixel Camera.

It is not yet clear whether or not Nokia will regain its previous leadership position in this market alongside its competitors, but attendees at their global event generally agreed that Nokia was moving in the right direction with the release of a line of smartphones that seemed much easier to use than any of its previous products.