It seems like everyone’s in on the tablet wars these days.
Nokia, however, is standing aside for now as it tries to figure out what it can bring to the table that would be new and different.
In a recent interview with a local TV station in Finland, where Nokia is based, the company’s CEO Stephen Elop said he is interested in making a tablet. But he doesn’t just want to make a standard run-of-the-mill Windows-based device.
“There are now over 200 different tablets on the marketplace, only one of them is doing really well. And, my challenge to the team is I don’t wanna be the 201st tablet on the market that you can’t tell from all of the others. We have to take a uniquely Nokia prospective and so the teams are working very hard on something that would be differentiating relative to everything else that’s going on in the market,” said Elop, according to a transcription posted on Engadget.
Nokia is in the middle of a huge transition right now as it scraps its legacy smartphone platform Symbian – which used to dominate the entire mobile industry – and instead rely on a third-party operating system for the first time in company history. The OS it chose was Windows Phone 7, partly because of a huge financial incentive from Microsoft and partly because Mr. Elop used to be a Microsoft executive.
So coming out with an entire new class of device is surely on the backburner for Nokia right now. But clearly it’s in the company’s line of vision in some way.
