Talk about procrastination. My final Nokia review for the Smartphone Round Robin should have been up last Friday, but here it is a week late. Everytime I sat down to start writing it, I always managed to find a distraction compelling enough to pull me away. This one is definitely tough for me to write. For every other platform I've looked at over the past 6+ weeks that the Round Robin has been on, it has never been difficult for me to find something to say; in fact, I have had the problem of always having too much to say (apologies for some of those lonnnng articles). But writing is easy when you have strong opinions and I definitely had my viewpoints on the Droid, iPhone, Palm's WebOS and even Windows Phones - both for specific devices looked at and the platforms and where they fit into the Smartphone Hierarchy of Needs and the greater smartphone market.
Coming into the event, Nokia was the platform I knew least about. Though Nokia sells oodles of handsets around the globe, in the North American market their smartphone penetration is still pretty non-existent. Being unfamiliar with the devices, I had no preconceived notions. And after getting to know the devices and spend some time on them, I definitely leave the Round Robin with a better appreciation for what Nokia has done to date with their smartphones, but I'm still really sort of lost as to where they fit into the current landscape (especially in NA) and can't help but wonder what they're going to have to do in order to get some sort of piece of consumer mindshare and momentum. Read on for more Nokia thoughts!
