INBOX:NOKIA IS fascinating. In the 1970s it actually made more rubber tyres than anything else. But, in just a few short years, it became a leading mobile phone players. Now, however, in the space of just one year, a company that had never made a mobile phone has had the temerity to challenge its dominance. That company is Apple with its iPhone. So what will Nokia do next?
Nokia began in 1865 as a wood-pulp mill in Finland, by the Nokianvirta river, hence the name. It expanded into rubber and tyre production by the 1960s, then into the plastics around wire cables and from wires into telecoms in the 1970s. In 1984, it produced its first mobile phone.
Today it is a leviathan of the mobile industry. The problem Nokia has is not that it is a big company, but that the range of products it launches is almost an albatross around its neck. Nokia now releases 50-60 handsets every year. And yet one company, Apple, with just one product, the iPhone, has become the second biggest smartphone provider in the US in only one year (after Research in Motion's Blackberry).
Quite how that happened will be pored over by academics for years to come. For now what we can say is this: as electronics become cheaper and easier to produce, you can cram more functionality into a mobile phone. That means a player with a new take on an essentially commoditised business can come in from left field.
Nokia did it in the 1990s, creating a simple design and ridding the mobile of the annoying arial. In the iPhone's case it was a big screen interface.
This week, Nokia has hit back in the business market with a new phone aimed at the sector leader, the Blackberry.
The E71 and E66 were released with those essential two words in the business market: Microsoft Exchange for e-mail.
The E series E71 Qwerty phone is beautifully thin, at 10mm, but feels very solid. A 3.2-megapixel camera with flash and a front-facing camera tops the iPhone's 2-megapixel camera.
The new Nokia E66 is a business slider phone with similar features (HSDPA, WiFi, GPS, Accelerometer).
What we are talking about are consumer-friendly features in a business-end phone. The new calendar software is much more integrated, and Nokia is making a big play out of making e-mail easier on these handsets, with support for Gmail, Yahoo, Windows Live and 1,000 ISPs.
With a good talktime on 2G and 3G, 110MB of built-in storage and a microSD slot, it will be a pricey €350 without carrier subsidy, but that will come. It will launch in July in grey and white steel. This is all very well.
The phone is undoubtedly good, and with a full Qwerty keyboard it's clearly aimed at the Blackberry. But what about the iPhone? At the E71 launch executives rolled out the tried and trusted strategy that they are a solid mobile maker and a "10 million phone market" (code for the iPhone) was just "one" market Nokia will address. But they will bring out the big-screened "Tube" this year.
Whether it will be enough to bring Nokia back its edge remains to be seen. It's a long way from a timber mill by a river, but Nokia's watershed is about to arrive.
