I don't know if they will ever drop out of sight because they still sell a lot of feature phones and low specced smartphones, but I wouldn't want to put money on them doing anything except losing market share at the top end of the smartphone market. Apart from a slew of new Android handsets, there is also the rumoured iPhone 4, and no doubt a few other surprises in store in 2010!
I really don't know where they are going with Maemo. They would have been much better off developing a better UI for Symbian (which is essentially a very solid and performant OS designed for mobile phones) about 12 months ago and ditching Series 60, which was ok until touch screens came along.
The N900 has a number of notable shortcomings that make it less phone and more tablet... no MMS, no apps in portrait mode (at launch) except the dialler, no ability to do simultaneous voice and data and hardly any apps. Plus it's like a brick and has worse battery life than the Milestone. I've just got rid of an N97 and the build quality was average at best. The big N is going to need to increase it's advertising budget because word of mouth isn't going to do them any favours if my experience is anything to go by!
@celios
Some quotable comments today from Nokia's Capital Markets day presentation were somewhat disappointing:
1. Symbian would remain the key software platform for its smartphones,
2. made significant improvements to the next version of the Symbian user interface,
3. a higher proportion of its smartphones--the one area of the handset market that has continued to grow during the recession--will have touch screens or full QWERTY keyboards compared with previously,
4. would focus on stabilizing the average selling price of its handsets to increase revenue.,
5. to differentiate its products from rivals, Nokia has increasingly focused on applications such as navigation, its Comes With Music phones, and the Ovi online portal,
6. noted competition from Apple and Android and the Bada platform to be released next week by Samsung, and RIMM.
7. said it would use Maemo for high-end "mobile computers," Symbian for cheaper smartphones, and the S40 interface for the low-end of the market.
8. introducing more systems, such as Android, would hurt the benefit of scale.
So it seems that they are planning 2 notable device releases for Symbian and one notable device release for Maemo 6 in 2010, with emphasis on software and services. They are chosing not to release using the Android OS, which had been a rumour some months ago. They expect R & D to be 10% of sales which seems low for what they are trying to do. I guess with their expectations of 300 million Nokia users and 39% of market by 2010, it would have been too humbling to reorganize around Android like Motorola has done.
Comments?