Nokia's annual Nokia World event kicked off in Germany today. Last year, the company
used the event to launch the N97
, which seemed at the time like
a pretty major new push for the company
.
But oh, we were young then, young and naive. The
N97 turned out to be a harbinger of doom
, a great piece of hardware paired with a hopelessly outdated operating system. Nokia has had almost a year since the N97 announcement to juice up their Symbian OS for the 21st century, and have started showing off
their new internet tablets powered by Maemo
, which seems from the demos to be a pretty interesting little handheld internet OS.
So what happened on day one of Nokia World this year? Not that they invited me this time around (no bitterness here, I swear...), but from what I can tell, not much.
First, we have two new handsets, the
and the
. Both look like beautifully designed music phones, complete with giant hard drives and the great Comes With Music service (which is yet to come to the Middle East). These phones will probably sell by the millions, but lets be honest, solutions to Nokia's core OS / services problems they are not.
What else was pushed today at Nokia world? There is t
he N97 mini, a smaller version of the N97
, whose €450 pre-tax price tag means we can expect it to go for at least Dh2500 here. That is too much. And then we have the
Booklet 3G, a pretty nice looking, €550 netbook.
It seems pretty clear that if this is the best Nokia have to deliver during the keynote morning of their flagship yearly event, it is a company in a whole ton of trouble.
(Pic: The gorgeous new Nokia X6, courtesy Nokia)