Kids today! You just can't satisfy them. Well, Apple and Google can't--but, apparently, Nokia can.
According to the Nokia Director of Portfolio, Product Marketing and Sales, Niels Munksgaard, the youth of today are fed up with Apple's iPhone and confused by Google's Android platform. Er…yeah, okay.
"What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones," Munksgaard told Pocket-lint in an interview Tuesday. "Everyone has the iPhone. Also, many are not happy with the complexity of Android and the lack of security."
Sure, Niels, because what kids today are really interested in is…smartphone security. That's why people who jailbreak their iPhones or root their Android devices are usually middle-aged.
Munksgaard goes on to say that the youth that "wants to be on the cutting edge and try something new are turning to the Windows phone platform." This of course explains why everyone is jumping on the Windows Phone 7 ship and totally rejecting phones that offer little "cutting edge" improvement, such as Apple's iPhone 4S. And why Android has such a small, shrinking percentage of the smartphone marketshare.
That's all sarcasm, of course. While Windows Phone 7 sales have been dropping precipitously, the iPhone and Android OS continue to shine--Apple sold over 1 million pre-order iPhone 4S's in less than 24 hours, while Android has been the best-selling smartphone OS since the fourth quarter of 2010.
Still, Munksgaard believes that Nokia has something different to offer the market, such as the brightly-colored designs of the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 710, Nokia's first Windows Phone 7 phones. Munksgaard says that Nokia wants to deliver services and phones that are different--"The marketplace is extremely crowded. I refer to it as a sea of sameness. When you walk up to a retail shelf at Phones4U and see the number of black mono-blocks sitting on the shelf, it is very confusing to the consumer."
Nokia also plans to offer different services, such as Nokia Mix Radio,Nokia Drive, and Nokia Maps. Nokia Mix Radio, for example, will deliver 15 million music tracks, sorted by genre or taste, that can be downloaded for offline listening. With Nokia Mix Radio you can skip six tracks per hour--so it's a lot like a built-in Pandora. The good news, of course, is that it works out of the box and costs nothing extra.
Pcworld.com
