Nokia’s hope to regain some relevance in the post-iPhone, post-Android mobile world has just taken another blow as the company decided to push back the release of its coveted E7 smartphone to next year.
The E7, which will include a four-inch touch-screen and the latest operating system from Nokia, had originally been planned for release one week before Christmas.
Analysts are saying the delay probably won’t do anything to affect holiday sales. The E7 is targeted mainly as a business phone. However, any sort of delay still compounds the hurdles of obstacles Nokia has to overcome.
Nokia is a phone manufacturer, but like Apple, it requires all of its devices to run on its own proprietary software. As such, it doesn’t have any phones running on Android; they all use the proprietary Symbian platform, which is looking more and more outdated every day.
Nokia also licenses out its Symbian software to other manufacturers, but that well is drying up too as those manufacturers turn exclusively to Android. It’s kind of like the Blackberry scenario.
The E7 will debut for more than $650 at full retail price, with no word yet on what sort of carrier subsidies it has attracted.
Nokia remains the #1 seller of mobile phones on a worldwide scale, but that’s because it does extremely well in developing nations where smartphones or feature phones are used in place of computers. However, it is struggling big time to keep up-to-date with the rest of the world, and as such its once dominating command on the global market is in fact diminishing quickly. [[Nokia]]
