Sad news for Canadians looking to purchase Nokia’s X line of Android-powered handsets, which were announced this week at Mobile World Congress. According to Jussi Nevanlinna, VP for Mobile Phone Marketing, in an interview on Nokia’s corporate blog, the X family will appear “pretty much everywhere except North America, Korea, and Japan.”
The reason? Quite simply, these regions are too established for Nokia’s target markets currently making the transition from feature phones to smartphones. As Nevanlinna explains in the interview:
“We’re the number one manufacturer in growth markets in the ‘entry-level’ and ‘feature phone’ categories. But a lot of those people are now aspiring to smartphone products. There are a significant number of users worldwide who are about to experience the Internet through a mobile device. As you can imagine, we want to be ready for them. We have a particular focus on growth markets – for example, India and China, Thailand and Indonesia then over to Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria, and South America, especially countries like Brazil, and Mexico. They are all places where we’re seeing this big shift from feature phones to affordable smartphones.”
While Nokia, like MobileSyrup, believes the X family of devices will be a winner, its obvious from the questions asked in the interview that the company is a bit defensive about the decision, so soon after its acquisition by Microsoft. Throughout the post, Nevalinna fields carefully worded questions regarding strategic tensions with Nokia’s new corporate parent, app store confusion, and the shelf life of the X family itself. The only real way for Nokia to answer these questions, however, is to deliver strong sales results during its next earnings report.
[source]Nokia Conversations[/source]
