Nokia on Wednesday launched its new high-end business smartphone, the E7, in SA, and used the event to reaffirm its commitment to the Symbian platform.
“There are 200m existing Symbian users [and] we will bring to market another 150m Symbian devices,” says Mark Strathmore, manager of business-to-business customers at Nokia SA.
Nokia’s support of Symbian comes in spite of its wide-ranging agreement with Microsoft, announced last month by Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that would result in the Finnish handset manufacturer introducing smartphones based on the US software company’s Windows Phone 7 operating system.
“We are looking at a multi-year strategy for Symbian,” says Strathmore. “Symbian as a user experience and as a platform will be even more fantastic and will be so in the short term.”
He says Nokia will continue to bring out Symbian devices, despite the alliance with Microsoft.
The first Nokia smartphones running Windows Phone 7 are only expected to reach the market later this year or early next year. Nokia forged the alliance with Microsoft after Elop warned in a now-infamous memo to staff earlier this year that the company was standing on a “burning platform” after it had a “series of misses” and hadn’t delivered innovation fast enough.
However, Strathmore stresses that Symbian will remain a key focus for Nokia for the foreseeable future.
He says Nokia’s strategy is to deliver a wide portfolio of devices that are largely similar in function but diverse in form factor. “Nokia’s key strength is we don’t have a single device but a portfolio of devices delivering a similar experience across them,” Strathmore says in a clear dig at Apple, which has only one smartphone product, the iPhone.
Ahead of the launch of Windows Phone 7-based Nokia smartphones, Strathmore says the company will continue to work closely with Microsoft to deliver business services on its phones, including products such as Mail for Exchange and Microsoft Communicator Mobile. In time, the company will also ship Microsoft Office on its smartphones, he says.
Already, the E7 and other Nokia products can open and edit Office documents using Quickoffice.
The new E7, which is effectively the successor to the popular but now outdated E90 Communicator, comes with a 640×360-pixel 4-inch capacitive-touch Amoled screen, a 680MHz ARM processor with graphics accelerator for gaming, a slide-out keyboard, GPS, maps, an 8-megapixel camera that can shoot 720p high-definition video and an HDMI port. It’s expected to retail for R5 999. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral
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