On Mobile B-List Celebrity Status

It has been less than a month since I decommissioned my Nokia C6 as my principle business phone. After many years of carrying three devices, it felt a weird but slightly liberating to consolidate down to two—my personal iPhone and my backup “warhorse” BlackBerry. Having been a hardcore Nokia user for the better part of *gulp* 20 years, finally letting it go has made me come to a few realizations. Not only have I not missed my Nokia one bit, this will quite possibly be the last Nokia I will ever own. Moreover, I feel no sense of loss whatsoever (I achieved final closure while disposing of the drawer full of now defunct Nokia chargers amassed over the years).

In spite of the many endearing “come as standard” Nokia device attributes (reliability, great signal quality, battery life, camera, maps, general indestructibility etc.), looking through the current Nokia range, I do not know whether to feel depressed, incensed or a little of both that currently there is not a single device that I would be excited to buy. How can this be?

Next to the dazzling array of big-screen smartphones on display at my local Carphone Warehouse, Nokia definitely seems to be the ugly duckling. But are my negative feelings towards Nokia motivated by the quality of the product or something else? Am I just prejudiced? Have I become one of the ever-swelling population of “app addicted” victims of Apple’s Ministry of Spin, smitten with the glitz and glam of the iPhone and all the wonders of the vast iTunes universe? I am really starting to wonder.

Ordinarily I consider myself to be a creature of habit and I do not normally switch brands without a pretty good reason. The problem with Nokia though is that as much as I wrack my brain, I cannot really put my finger on a defining moment when it all went wrong for me. But, obvious ecosystem limitations aside, the fact remains that my love affair with Nokia fizzled out a long time ago.

Thinking back, when I unboxed my C6 a year ago I did get that same kind of sinking feeling you get when you buy an expensive pair of designer jeans, only to discover that the particular brand or cut went out of style five minutes earlier. The feeling got worse every time I used my C6 around my iPhone and Android totting peers.

So maybe my emotional shift away from Nokia is purely an image thing. Is the Nokia brand itself just uncool? If so, Nokia is in big trouble because, like the demise of flared trousers, being uncool is a brutal, unstoppable downward spiral. Being an industry insider, it really has become impossible to ignore the abundant positive media glam surrounding the iPhone and Android. It stands in stark contrast to the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of Nokia’s fall from glory, the demise of Symbian and the huge question marks hanging over the value and viability of the Microsoft collaboration.

It seems Nokia will need a nuclear powered marketing and branding team to reverse their negative image and to reinvent the winning brand needed to restore Nokia’s street cred to its former glory. So until the likes of Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and major tech circle influencers start being photographed using the latest Nokia Smartphones as their principle devices and lauding its praises on Twitter, I fear Nokia will continue to slip further into mobile B-List celebrity status.

In the meantime, I will be counting myself among the impatient masses fervently awaiting the launch of iPhone 5.

You can follow Geoff Casely on Twitter @geoffcasely

Tags: Apple, BlackBerry, Carphone Warehouse, Geoff Casely, Innovation, IPhone, iTunes, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Marketing, Nokia, Symbian

Funding extravaganza for NextWave Wireless

Image via Wikipedia

Let’s ask this question. If you burn through your funding and are nearly out of cash, what sort of reasoning do you give to a VC in order to get $100 million back into the old saddlebags? What is the magic formula for getting that type of funding if you can’t even get revenue going with the first round of funding. Okay, so this is debt financing which is different (see Kreos Capital, they know what they are doing in this department) but this story from Fierce Markets sounds sort of like the kid caught with porn on his school computer who is coming up with excuses for how he won’t do it again – our favorite is this line from the company that they “will conserve cash by divesting infrastructure units” Um, does this imply they weren’t conserving cash before?  Plus a guy named Murphy from the funders will work with them on “cost reduction strategies” which essentially means, “we don’t really trust you with the money so we will send someone to watch over you, but we think eventually you might one day make a lot of money” Okay good luck NextWave!

BTW, NextWave, according to their PR boilerplate, provides next-generation mobile multimedia and wireless broadband technologies to the world’s leading mobile handset manufacturers, consumer electronics manufacturers and wireless service providers. I guess those folks don’t pay too well.

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Tags: NextWave Wireless, WiMAX

Comcast continues it path to the dark side

I don’t even know where to start, except that we are very glad to see this Comcast story from IT Business Edge continue to get into the news. Comcast has decided that it really doesn’t care about its customers and continues to push its agenda with no respect for the users. After head to head combat with the FCC it now says it will limit its customers to 250 gigabytes a month! Well… the storm rages on with Om Malik in the ring – (geez there are a lot of sports references here) he thinks that Comcast is trying to protect its video-on-demand initiatives from Internet-based movie download sites such as Hulu, NetFlix and Amazon-On-Demand. But when will Comcast wake up? Clamping down will only make something leak out elsewhere. Some brilliant tech head is sitting his his mom’s garage right now coming up with the solution and then it will hit them on the backside. The tighter they squeeze, the more star systems will just slip through their fingers.