Devin Ballentina from The Nokia Guide asked a highly pertinent question a few days ago: Should Nokia get more advanced S40 phones? His post made me stop for a while and ponder. Sure, he is absolutely right, but then again he isn’t… I’ve been thinking about this question for a few days, and I still don’t know whether I agree or disagree with him. Here are my reasons:
S40 handsets should sport better hardware
Today, I celebrate my one month anniversary in Paris. Ever since I came here, I’ve been spinning my head right and left, trying to catch the trends, see which devices are most prominent, and make connotations between devices and owners’ style. I was surprised to see so many N95s and N95 8GBs around, mostly carried by young men, hip or businessmen at the same rate. I guess the N95 still totts that iconic halo around it. Yet, aside from the N95s and N95 8GBs, I have barely spotted any other N or Eseries. One E71, two E65s. That’s about it. What other handsets do people carry? Well, most middle-aged people carry old Nokias, you know, old S40 “dumbphones”. As for teenage girls and women aged around 20 to 30 years, the most frequent handset is any Samsung or LG slider. It’s a crystal clear victory for Samsung/LG with the female audience. Of course, this is just the big picture.
I visited the operators shops, looking for clues and explanations to this trend, and noticed that amongst the cheap offerings (1-10 euros with a contract), there are a lot of Samsung/LG sliders. These don’t run on Windows Mobile or on S60, they are just superbly well-built and compact handsets, that have some pretty decent hardware specs to back them up, and don’t scare people away with an overcomplicated key cluster like that swirly button (Menu key on S60). It’s clear that Samsung and LG have nailed this demographic segment. They understood that decent hardware is NOT NECESSARILY supposed to be featured on a smartphone, and that some people would want a 3.2MP or 5MP camera without the bells and whistles of WM or S60.
As for Nokia, their most decent proposals in this category are the 5610 and the 6500 Slide. There is no S40 handset with a 5MP camera or with GPS and very very few S40 handsets with WiFi for example. This is why I am keen to believe that it would make sense somehow if they took the E66′s exterior and hardware features and put S40 on it. With an extremely decent price unsubsidized (EUR200 maximum) and almost free with operator contracts, that handset could kill!
Instead of making the smart cheaper, let’s make the cheap smarter
Nokia knows where they came from and that their greatest sales reside in the S40 category. They also know that although Nseries and Eseries don’t generate as much sales as S40, they play an immense role in S40′s own sales. I have heard a lot of people tell me “I buy Nokia handsets because they have the best handsets out there, but I can’t afford them, so I get their cheaper offerings”. This leads me to think that S40 is highly tied to S60 in Nokia’s portfolio, even though for us, S60 fanatics, the difference is huge.
This tight relationship is something I have been pondering about ever since Nokia bought Symbian and decided to make it Open Source. What becomes of S40? Does it survive the Symbian Foundation, or does it get dropped out steadily and slowly? I am more inclined to the 2nd answer because Nokia has done a lot of moves recently to higher the resemblance between S40 and S60: I recently bought my mother a 7310 Supernova and found the interface more similar to my N82 than to my old 6610. Another reason is that if Nokia wants to focus on software & services right now, as much as on hardware, they would need all their arsenal to be services-ready, and N-Gage, Nokia Maps and Share Online only work on S60. Has Nokia been working in the background for a few years now to prepare the doom of S40 and ease up the transition for S40 users to S60? I don’t know, but probably yes.
So where does that leave us from the better hardware on S40 debate? Well, I tend to disagree with Devin, and think that instead of bringing better hardware features to S40, Nokia is about to let go of S40 progressively in at least 3-4 years time, and hence negate the reason for the debate. There will be cheap smartphones with fewer hardware specs, and expensive smartphones with cooler features, but all will be smartphones. In the meantime, it would be reasonable for them to make a few higher-specc’ed S40 handsets.
This is my two cents, what’s yours?
