Nokia, Symbian to Pioneer Color-Screen Mobile Phones
By DAVID PRINGLE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A new color-screen mobile phone and personal organizer being developed by Nokia Corp. and operating-system ally Symbian Ltd. could beat similar products using Microsoft Corp. software to the market by at least several months.
Microsoft had hoped phones with color screens running its Pocket PC operating system would be available in the first half of 2001, but an official of the Redmond, Washington, software concern said last week that the first such products won't be released until the second half.
Nokia plans to launch its 9210 Communicator phone, which uses Symbian's operating system, in March or April in Europe and Asia. A U.S. launch hasn't yet been scheduled. In addition to a color screen, the device offers wireless Internet access, e-mail, a video player, personal organizer functions, word processing and spreadsheet programs.
If Nokia and Symbian are indeed first to the market with a high-end device, it would mark a setback for computer makers such as Compaq Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., which plan to use the Microsoft technology. These companies face a dramatic slowdown in the cutthroat personal computer market, so they are targeting the market for these kinds of hybrid devices in search of sales growth. U.K.-based research firm Strategy Analytics forecasts that in 2004 more than 78 million dual-purpose personal organizers-mobile phones will be sold world-wide, compared with just two million last year.
In an interview last week soon after Mitsubishi Corp. unveiled a monochrome Pocket PC phone, Dilip Mistry, Microsoft's mobility marketing manager in Europe, said: "We will have a workable [color-screen] product in six months." Microsoft's hardware partners are still developing batteries and screens light and cheap enough to use in a color personal organizer with a built-in phone, he said, since the color screens use far more battery power than do monochrome screens.
But Nitesh Patel, an analyst with Strategy Analytics, doesn't think the hardware is to blame for the delay. "The main issue here is that the Pocket PC [system] is relatively inefficient compared to the Symbian platform," he said, a conclusion that Microsoft rejects.
A spokeswoman for Compaq confirmed that a phone version of its iPaq organizer, which uses the Pocket PC system, won't be available until the second half of the year.
In any case, the launch of the 9210 should provide a boost for Symbian, the London-based consortium, which is vying with Microsoft and Palm Inc. to become the dominant player in the market for personal-organizer operating systems. Symbian, which is owned by Psion PLC, Nokia, Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, Motorola Inc. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., is hoping the color screen of the 9210 will provide an eye-catching showcase for its software.
Palm, of Santa Clara, California, the leading supplier of personal organizers, declined to say which companies planned to use its operating system for color-screen devices.
Tarmo Jukarainen, senior product manager at Nokia, said that the 9210 uses "power-management techniques" to enable a user to hold between four and 10 hours of phone conversations without needing to recharge the battery. Japanese phone makers have been producing sophisticated color phones for the domestic market for about a year, although these handsets generally don't include video players, word processing or other productivity features found on the 9210.
The Pocket PC phones envisaged by Microsoft would look like today's personal organizers. In contrast, the 9210 resembles a conventional handset, but it flips open like a laptop to reveal a keypad with 60 buttons and a screen running the length of the device. At a demonstration in London, the 9210's high-resolution display coped well with the fast action sequences in a video trailer for Walt Disney Co.'s Tarzan cartoon film.
Although the early arrival of the 9210 may suggest that Nokia has a technological lead on rivals in Europe, Peter Richardson, a London-based analyst with Gartner Group, a U.S.-based research firm, believes the device lacks an important feature. He says the 9210 isn't compatible with the GPRS, or general packet radio services, technology being deployed by most European mobile-phone operators to speed up wireless Internet access. Although other phone makers are rolling out GPRS handsets, Nokia maintains that this technology is still too immature. Some devices being developed with the Pocket PC system are expected to be GPRS-compatible.
Moreover, the 9210 Communicator weighs a hefty 244 grams and its predecessors -- which admittedly were even larger and had monochrome screens -- didn't have a huge impact. Although Nokia doesn't reveal sales figures for individual phones, Mr. Richardson estimates that the company has sold one million Communicators since they were first launched in 1996.
Although that is only a tiny fraction of the 128 million phones Nokia sold in 2000, Mr. Richardson points out that the margins on these high-end devices are much larger than on conventional mobile phones. Like other Nokia handsets, the 9210 will be sold by mobile phone operators with a wireless contract at a subsidized price, but Gartner estimates it would sell at $700 (735 euros) unsubsidized. |
