Nokia will be focused on three things in the coming year. We expect the company to make progress on its N-Gage platform, perhaps even bringing the service to market. We expect to see more advancements in multimedia phones, with new capabilities pushed by improvements in chip design, as well as some borrowing from the E-series family. We also expect that Nokia will make a push toward universal network services, available to any Nokia phone on any carrier, worldwide.
We’re not ready to call the newest incarnation of N-Gage a flop just yet, because it hasn’t quite developed to the point that it can flop. The service, which was supposed to be a trial-and-download over-the-air gaming platform, has missed a few deadlines, to the point that we’re seeing far more demonstrations than promises these days. While backward compatibility with most N-series devices has been promised, new devices are introduced every month, and we wonder when even impressive older devices will be left behind.
We’re most skeptical about the hardware requirements. The trial downloading and payment structures aren’t revolutionary, so we’re sure Nokia could pull them off. We could even be convinced that advanced N-series phones, like the N95 and the N82, could handle advanced gaming graphics, though new chipsets from companies like Broadcomm should alleviate some of the load. We’re most skeptical about controlling a game on a phone. We don’t think the experience of using a phone’s keypad and d-button will be enjoyable, and we don’t think the idea will catch fire, until phone’s develop control schemes that are more adapted for gaming. If anyone can lead the market in this design, it should be Nokia. We hope they used the original N-Gage device as a lesson in what not to do, if anything. Still, we don’t think serious gamers, meaning gamers who will regularly pay for a new game, will tolerate even a nice looking game on a normal cell phone, with no analog or advanced controls.
For multimedia phones, user-generated content was the name of the game in 2007, but no real winners emerged to thrill potential customers. We think that 2007 will shake some of the lower-hanging fruit out of the market, and we’ll see more phones from Nokia that are made to specifically support the winners, like YouTube and Flickr. In terms of hardware, we think that 5-megapixels should be enough for a camera phone, though we wouldn’t be surprised to see 8-megapixels and higher in the coming year. Still, the statistics to watch will be in video. We wouldn’t be surprised to see more DVD-quality cameraphones hit the market, maybe even something nicer.
Of course, we suspect these phone will let you upload directly to YouTube or your favorite video sharing site, but what Nokia really wants is to be the portal for your digital online diary. To this end, they’re developing sites for video blogging, photo sharing and music buying, all from your phone. We don’t think these services will make much headway against the U.S. carriers, who traditionally spearhead these sorts of services on thei own network. But, there have been rumblings that Nokia will be going after a revenue-sharing model in the European marketplace, just as Apple is rumored to be taking a slice of the pie for every iPhone customer on AT&T. With a lot to offer brand loyalists, we’re curious to see what the carrier’s stance towards Nokia will be. The power of the U.S. carriers is dwindling, which may be the right time for a vertically-minded manufacturer like Nokia to gain some ground.
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