Nokia gearing up for mass market touchscreens
Published: 18 May, 2009
READ MORE: Nokia
Nokia is rarely the strongest innovator in new cellphone ideas, with most of its success lying in its massive scale and efficiency. It is sometimes slow to play to those strengths though - its long resistance to the clamshell format at the turn of the decade still reverberates now in its poor US position. Last year it seemed in danger of making the same mistake around touchscreens, but just in time, it is taking the phone feature du jour seriously and plans to follow its usual pattern - not coming out with a rule-changing device like LG or Apple, but creating touchscreens for the giant midmarket.
Nokia hasn't exactly flooded the market with touchscreen models in the past year, though the ones it does have - the 5800 XpressMusic and the E71 - have performed well and the N97 superphone will get into consumer hands soon. But the Finnish giant took a new aggressive stance with the new year, with CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo promising "revenge" in the touchscreen market. Although the company is working on some advanced features - the 'Nautilus' project focused on a rumored mini-tablet, some enhanced vibration/haptics technology based on work with Immersion - its key focus is on the area where no other vendor can match it, scale.
Kallasvuo said recently that Nokia "intends to expand its portfolio by offering smartphones at lower prices to reach more consumers", and there are many reports issuing from Taiwan that Nokia has placed a range of orders with manufacturers there for components for high volume products.
According to Unwired View, these include capacitive panels from Wintek, which provides the resistive touchscreens for the 5800, and other elements from Synaptics, and the reports point to Nokia gearing up for far higher volume in touchscreens, and a push into the midmarket. If the Wintek leak proves true, it will show Nokia reversing its hostility to capacitive touchscreens, which are popular in the US and Europe, but do not yet support Asian character recognition.
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