<font color=blue>Verizon Wireless To Restart Sales Of Nokia 5100 Series</font>
Dow Jones Newswires
By Buster Kantrow
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
STOCKHOLM -- Verizon Wireless (X.VRZ), the largest U.S. mobile telecoms operator, said Friday that it expects to resume selling Nokia Corp.'s (NOK) 5100 series of handsets after resolving technical problems with the phones.
Verizon stopped selling Nokia's 5185i handsets earlier this year after discovering that they would not be compatible with its CDMA 1x digital system, which it expects to roll out this fall.
But Nokia said Friday that it now has added software to unsold phones to take care of the bug, and has developed a network "software patch" to address the problem for the phones that have already been sold. That software is being tested.
"We're confident that the solution has been worked through," said Verizon spokesman James Gerace, who said the carrier would begin selling the phones again in the next few weeks.
Analysts said the report may have contributed to a midweek decline in Nokia's share price, during which the shares fell almost 5%. Around 1625 GMT Nokia shares in Helsinki were at EUR36.85, up 1.2% or EUR0.45, from Thursday's close.
The performance of new phones is considered crucial to the success of the costly next-generation mobile networks that operators are planning to launch.
Nokia said it discovered the problem while testing phones on a prototype of the 1x system in late February. It alerted all 45 CDMA carriers who are customers, spokeswoman Megan Matthews said.
No carriers have yet launched 1x systems, so subscribers would not have experienced problems, she said.
The problem, if not fixed, also would have affected the 2100, 5100 and 6100 series of phones, she said. Nokia no longer manufactures some of those phones.
Matthews said Nokia is not aware of any other carriers that stopped selling the phones.
The 5185 phones have been on the market since the third quarter of 2000, she said.
The problem was disclosed about a month ago, Gerace said, but an investment bank drew attention to the situation again in a research report this week, without reporting the progress in resolving the issue.
Matthews said resolving bugs with new products is "part of the normal course of business. It's an issue that happens all the time with the rollout of new technology."
In January, Verizon expressed frustration with delays in resolving an earlier bug with Nokia's 5185 CDMA handsets that prevented them from sending short text messages. Gerace said the problem had been fixed.
Last month, BT Wireless, a unit of British Telecom (BTY), suffered an embarrassment when an intended demonstration of its next-generation GPRS network went awry because it could not get the phones to work. Those phones were made by Motorola Inc. (MOT).
Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications (VZ) and Vodafone PLC (VOD). |
