Blackberry might bounce back (depending on how good BB10 is) but Nokia, I doubt, unless they adopt multi OS strategy and enter the tablet space. Ofcourse from the manufacturers side only Samsung and Apple remain. HTC, LG, Sony all can be beaten no matter whatever Android junk food version they are on, their phones/customizations are not just good enough. Thats where Nokia and BB should see a chance.
Will Windows 8 alone help Nokia? I doubt. The OS design is not good enough to make a big shift in what the consumer like now. Right from the aesthetics. Minimalist design, multi screens, good color combinations vs Tiles (post-it notes on a screen that hides everything) and 2-3 screens are not good enough for me. Symbian looked better.
Prediction:
Next year : Nokia will go down or will be acquired (may be by HTC or MS)
Google HW will surge, Blackberry will make a very strong comeback (I will buy one!)
Apple will lose market share
Windows 8 will join Windows Vista as a failed attempt.

WP8 is pure garbage and BB10 is FASTER then iphones and SG3…YES BB10 will have the FASTEST web browsing. QNX OS is a POWER OS that NASA uses in the SPACESTATION and space shuttle. QNX OS is also does on speed trains and in auto , power plants and one could go on and on. Now this POWERFUL OS will be in phones. No wonder google and apple pay these so called tech sites to misinform. Shame on you and your PATHETIC site that misinforms. You are a paid SHILL …nothing more nothing less.

Define “pure garbage”.

>Surface could have been Nokia tablets.

Why does Nokia have to “be on the tablet bus”? It has no track record or proven skill in tablets, and would be up against stiff competition from Samsung, ASUS, Acer and Lenovo. Nokia could make an impact in the WP7/8 world as they were entering as known players with quality products, and leveraged their existing mobile assets. Blackberry, HTC and HP all got whupped by trying to get into the tablet game. Perhaps it’s not a good idea to rush in.

>The business might not have flown initially, but if the tablet space flourish will Nokia ever be able to enter?

There is ALWAYS place for another player, however a late entrant they may be, if they have a compelling offering. Case in point: iPhone. Another example: Android. Both late entrants into a market everyone said would crush them.
In fact, I think it’d be better for Nokia to get in later – let Samsung, ASUS and Lenovo do what they do best – get the numbers up, drive the hardware prices down, break the back of the iPad/Android tablet market, educate the world about Windows 8, and then enter with a product that stands alone in design and quality.

>To me minimalistic simplified yet intuitive GUI is what that matters.

You just described Windows Phone? That’s kind of the entire concept behind it. I understand it might not be intuitive to you, but my 4 year old daughter has no problem navigating it and playing her favourite games.
By the way, what are the “multi OS” you are talking about? I assume it’s WP8/Win8 for Phones/tablets respectively?

Multi OS : Have WP8, Android Symbian smart phones. If we can take the analogy of a fruit juice vendor, Nokia is a juicer who sells only apple juice, but its competitors sell all juices including apple juice. The additional problem with Nokia juice (:-)) is that the apple they source is not of good quality (ofcourse they sell it cheaper), so only apple juice aficionados or price sensitive guys buy from them, even though they have the best juicer/blender/tables/glasses in their store. Its competitors make huge profits on orange and pineapple juices, but sells apple juice as well just to be complete in their offerings.
Now Nokia has two choices. Sow a better quality seed for good apples and wait till it grow, blossom and ripe, or start selling other juices to compete effectively and may be the best infrastructure they got in store might help them beat others.

Tablets: If MS has windows tab offerings I dont think anyone else would be successful in that space. Even if it is Samsung. Who will buy a samsung made laptop that runs Apple OS X? My point was Nokia could have leveraged on the relationship that they have with MS to make WIN8 tablets..may be exclusively. That would have aided the 3rd ecosystem that MS and Nokia are talking about. RIght now it will be an MS ecosystem, not Nokia one. (I can buy a windows phone from Samsung, windows Ativ from Samsung..why go for different brands?)

GUI is purely subjective. Only time will tell. Lets wait one more year and see where Nokia will end up.

Every quarter right up until last quarter NOKIA’s Symbian devices continued to outsell their WPx devices despite Lumia’s having huge marketing budgets lavished on them by NOKIA, Microsoft and AT&T. Symbian on the other hand has no marketing budget and Symbian devices are not even available any longer in many of NOKIA’s traditionally strong markets so they could potentially have sold even more.

Last quarter NOKIA’s gross margin in smart devices was minus 3.5%, so they were giving their handsets away at less than cost. Before adopting WPx NOKIA had a very healthy gross margin on smart devices. At the start of this quarter NOKIA were having a fire sale of the Lumia 800 so we can expect poor margins again.

When NOKIA had Symbian as their primary platform they sold more smart devices than Apple and Samsung combined, they were by far the biggest smart device manufacturer on the planet, now they are in danger of slipping out the top ten. Their WPx induced collapse has been astounding.

Since publicly deprecating Symbian and announcing they would exclusively offer WPx smartphones their sales have plummeted, their margins have plummeted, their share price has plummeted, their credit rating has plummeted, they have lost carrier support, they have lost retailer support and they have lost key functionality in their smart devices because WPx is lower functioning than Symbian.

The reason Android is so huge is because it’s currently the only viable replacement to Symbian, the only available OS that compares in terms of functionality. The reason Samsung is so successful is because it’s hoovering up all the business that would have been NOKIA’s if NOKIA hadn’t exclusively adopted a proven failure of an OS.

WPx has proven itself as a failure and an albatross to every manufacturer that’s tried it. It’s market share is laughable for an OS that has had such an enormous marketing budget lavished upon it and its sales feeble when you consider the quality of the hardware Samsung, LG, HTC and now NOKIA have provided it.

Symbian is out because Mr Elop killed it. Not that it was great in 2008, but with some massive updates (likes of Anna, Belle and all the other pretty lady ones that dint happen) and promise to support and develop Symbian it wouldnt have met with this horrible slow death. Elop sold off Qt as well. Not to mention Meego, with my N9 I am totally satisfied and the out of support OS is still almost comparable to the latest Android, it falls behind terribly only on the app side, but thats Mr Elop’s strategy to give away everything for the MS partnership. Though it is a lil late to rejuvenate Symbian, if Nokia can still adopt Android on different product line (say midrange to low end, keep WP8 on premium), they must do it. Right now they have all their phones in one basket and even though they speak of ecosystems they concentrate only on one component of it (phones) which to me is a very weak strategy.

Tablets are important part of the ecosystem and are extension of your phones rather than extension of the notebook/PCs. That’s why mobile phone manufaturers have a better chance to win that segment than conventional PC makers such as Dell and HP. That’s why I strongly feel Nokia has spoiled their first chance of entry

>Symbian is out because Mr Elop killed it

Actually, no – - I see this said often, and it’s just not true. Search for a smartphone marketshare graph and you’ll see the Symbian decline started long before Elop came along. Nokia’s problem is that they didn’t react earlier. By the time Elop came in, Android had already overtaken Symbian in sales, and Symbian had shed half its marketshare from its peak. Symbian was beyond saving. They needed a stable platform, and fast. Android and Windows Phone were their only realistic options.

>the announcement made by Elop in Feb 2010 (?) to shut down symbian caused millions moving to Android

PLEASE take the time to check your facts; I tool 30 seconds to do that. Sep 2010 was when Elop did his burning platform memo, and by that time Symbian had started on its downward trajectory. That trajectory has held constant; Elop’s announcement didn’t cause people to abandon Symbian any faster than before he came to the company. He didn’t kick out Symbian because he didn’t like it, he saw it was dying and planned a migration away from it (in his initial announcement he said he still expects Symbian to ship on 1 billion+ devices before it dies out)

> I think its all slowly getting clearer that Nokia (Lumia division )will end up as MS mobile division very soon

Now that the Symbian purge is going well, I think the Nokia smartphone division is close on break-even. The move to Symbian isn’t just about the OS, it’s an entire shift from the low-cost, low-margin Symbian phones, to the more expensive higher-margin premium smartphone market segment. WP7 will be used to displace Symbian at the bottom-end of the market where buyers don’t worry about upgrade paths (the fact people still buy dead-end Gingerbread Android devices in the tens of millions is testament to this)

>Feb or Sep, thats not the point

It’s exactly the point. You can’t brush aside the fact that invalidates your entire argument, and then start grasping at more incorrect facts. It’s the difference between it being Elop’s fault, and not being Elop’s fault. If Elop had taken the post in February, I’d agree 100% with you it’s his fault as that coincides with the start of the massive Symbian decline, but history shows another story.

>By the way did you know Nokia smart phone numbers had grown by 7% from Q3 2010 to Q4 2010

Where are you getting your numbers from? I’m looking at the historical graph on the “smartphone” entry on Wikipedia (Gartner report of actual sales). That shows a 5% per quarter decline in the 2 quarters before Elop came. That was with Nokia promoting Symbian as its main platform, with all its marketing might behind it.

The actual number of unit shipments might have increased, as it’s an expanding market, but you have to look at market share %ages to see the trends. Marketshare down = bad.

>Imagine if they have gone with Android..it would have been another story altogether.

Yup, I agree. Very different. It’d probably have been much worse. HTC, LG, Sony are all strugging in the face of Samsung.

Oh lord, that’s a term by by that “Communities Dominate Brands” guy … sorry, he’s well known as an anti-MS blogger, without much substance. He’s just a troll. When I googled “Elop Effect” I found more links disproving it and pointing out how that blogger uses FUD, than sites supporting it.

And, no – it’s certainly not discussed in business schools, it’s just a term raised in a little blog post then shot down and disproven by the wider community as BS.

Word to the wise… don’t argue with Greg on this topic – he tracks this sh*t on a large spreadsheet!

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Of course Nokia stocks will bounce a few more times before its final demise. But the reality remains that it is a triple certified junk status stock with no future. It is a dead stock bouncing.

What makes it so attractive to shorting is that for the short term, Microsoft will pay large sums of money to try to prop Nokia stocks up while it tries desperately to prevent catastrophic loss with Windows 8.

This translates to a sure bet for hedge funds and they know it. They smell blood and when the bounce happens, the profit margins will be massive.

It well be a happy Christmas for many. Its time to put the Finns out of their misery.

if BB10 is so good, why does no one outside of the third world use it?

Symbian was publicly deprecated in Q1 2011, in that context it is doing incredibly well.

Right up until it was announced end-of-life Symbian’s sales were still increasing. In 2010 NOKIA’s smart devices sales grew 36% year on year, they had a healthy gross margin and the smart devices division was making healthy profits. In fact Symbian was the best selling smartphone OS is every single quarter ever and NOKIA’s smartphone division had never made a loss in any quarter ever.

Ever since that announcement NOKIA have collapsed. Their sales, margins, share price and credit rating have all plummeted. Last quarter NOKIA actually had a negative gross margin on smart devices. The smart devices division is now making substantial losses quarter after quarter.

So far Windows Phone has been an absolute and unmitigated disaster for NOKIA.

Those are verifiable hard numbers and facts.

>Ever since that announcement NOKIA have collapsed

I think this is where the disconnect is. Elop didn’t make the “burning platform” announcement because things were all peachy and he saw a great future carrying on like they were. Their sales might have been increasing slowly, but this is a rapidly expanding market and by the time the announcement you speak of happened, Symbian had been in its market-share death-dive for a year already. This was why the previous management was thrown out, the writing was on the wall. The market turned on Symbian in Q1’10. Android killed it. That’s a verifiable hard fact.

Nokia should have had Meego devices on the market in Q1’10 when Symbian’s goose became cooked, but they didn’t. They’re now trying to make up for that year they didn’t react fast enough, and we’ll know in a month if that’s worked for them, when they announce Q4’12 results.

Do you still live under the impression that Nokia should have stayed with Symbian and things would have kept going well for them? Blackberry’s going to have some AWFUL quarters next year while they push BB10 into the market, but nobody will be silly enough to suggest they stick with their current OS offerings!

Please check your facts: Burning platforms was Q1 2011, NOKIA’s sales of Symbian devices were growing right up until the end of Q4 2010. They had a healthy gross margin too.

In terms of sales there was no downward trajectory for Symbian until Elop publicly announced it end-of-life.

Since changing to Windows Phone NOKIA’s margins have significantly decreased. Last quarter it was minus 3.5%, the quarter before plus 1.7% Tiny margins on pitiful sales and quarter after quarter of losses.

NOKIA’s accounts are freely available on their web site, you really should check your facts.

NOKIA now only makes healthy margins on its Series 40 phones!

Much worse?

Again check your facts, NOKIA have collapsed so badly they are now only the tenth largest smartphone manufacturer

Sony, HTC, ZTE, etc… might all be struggling against Samsung but they are now all bigger than NOKIA.

You’re obssessing over market share which is meaningless.

NOKIA’s sales were increasing, they had healthy margins and they were profitable.

Now their sales have plummeted, both in money and units, their margins have plummeted and they are making huge losses.

NOKIA have gone with Windows Phone and Samsung HAS crushed them. If they’d gone with Android they might have had a fighting chance.

Windows Phone 7 was a proven failure, even Samsung couldn’t make it sell in substantial numbers despite giving it much the same hardware as their Android devices. Lots of other manufacturers also tried and failed – HTC, LG, Sony, etc..

Windows phone 7 was already a categorically proven failure before Elop sacrificed Symbian for it.

>You’re obssessing over market share which is meaningless

If you honestly believe this, and can’t understand the simple maths and market dynamics of a plummeting graph over time, I won’t even bother replying to you anymore. I hope you have a really fun time replying to all my posts with your anti-Elop waffle.

Good day.

The quality of the product is a moot point in the case of RIM. In the vast majority of countries (the exception being South Africa, where RIM are doing very well) you need to buy your Blackberry BIS/BES services on top of your unlimited data plan. This makes a BB significantly more expensive to use than any other Android or IOS device. Until the service providers change this model, RIM is doomed, no matter how good their product becomes.