After dismissing the need for a slim cell phone that is too easily lost in the pockets of a Finnish parka, Nokia finally seems to be awaking to the fact that its phones are no longer considered cool.  In a decade long role reversal, Nokia has had the tides turned on it to learn that its phones are not thin enough to be considered cool unlike Motorola.

It seems like just yesterday that Nokia was showing up Motorola (the cell phone leader of the day back in the mid 90’s) with cooler phones that had that amazing DIGITAL capability that was all the rage with the kids and more importantly with cellular carriers.

Now Nokia has brought on a new design chief, Alastair Curtis, and they are hoping to take some actions to stem the bleeding from thin phone sales spurred on by Motorola and copied by Samsung the respective number 2 and three market share leaders in cellular handsets.

It remains to be seen if Nokia can fend off this onslaught and bring to bear their strengths of solid software and ease of use, nifty but functional catchwords that are important, but don’t get units sold in the store.  Nokia current slim phone the E50 (note the catchy slim sounding name) is 15.5mm thick as compared to the 8mm Slivr(not a very slender sounding name at all!).  Samsung clocks in with the slimmest phone of them all the X820, but it sacrifices many other cool looking features like a nice outer shell and attractive buttons to offer up that size factor and win the title.

So far Motorola’s in between size seems to be winning the day, despite a history of software problems and ease of use complaints.  Motorola has been playing catch up and working to fix its problems for a half dozen years, while Nokia has apparently lost site of its roots and how to hold onto popularity by being cool!

Page Popularity for Site: 10% [?]