UPDATED 11:19 EDT / MAY 04 2011

Nokia Waiting for the Right Time to Enter Tablet Marketplace

nokia-siliconangle-tablet In a market that is saturated with basically all the same product what’s the best way to get sold? Stand out.

At least that’s what Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia, believes will be how his company will make their mark when they go to market with their first tablet. An article on PCMag picks out choice quotes from an interview with him running on mocoNews,

“There are now over 200 different tablets on the marketplace, and only one of them [the iPad] is doing really well,” Elop said in an interview on Finnish television this week.

“My challenge to the team is that I don’t want [Nokia’s] to be the 201st tablet on the market that you can’t tell from all of the others,” he continued, according to a mocoNews report on the interview. “We have to take a uniquely Nokia perspective. So the team is working hard on something that would be differentiated from the others on the market. We are in a hurry, but it’s a hurry to do the right thing.”

People have been speculating about the direction Nokia might go with tablets when they do. Microsoft has poured a giant amount of cash on the Finnish mobile phone company and that should jump-start the production of Nokia phones running WP7 in 2012; but it doesn’t outline precisely how we can expect them to approach tablets.

Nokia does have a lot of different platforms to work from with both Symbian and Linux-based MeeGo, but those seem to have been reduced down to subsistence levels with recent troop movement within the manufacturer to make good on their deal with Microsoft. Suspicions seem currently good that Nokia will not go with Android for any tablet they produce even though they do make good time to market and the platform beat Symbian in Q4.

According to PCMag, Elop has already given his moratorium on Android as a technology due to its narrow margins. “Even if a company is making all sorts of money with Android, it’s very well understood that … margins will come under increasing pressure,” he said. Although, with that over $2 million of seed money from Microsoft’s deal, narrow margins might not be a strong deterrent in the short term.

But, as we’ve seen with the “burning platform” memo, Nokia has every intention of thinking long term.

What we do see is that developers have already started to flock to WP7 and that might be a powerful factor (aside from the giant wad of cash) in Nokia’s decision making as to what OS and technology to go with for a new tablet. The only problems they might be facing is that WP7 happens to be something of a monoculture OS and doesn’t stand out well, especially against the iPad.

To lend guesses to where the Finnish company will go with this we might need to watch them for acquisitions of UI development companies and other stand-out technologies.

Meanwhile, Nokia will probably focus on their deal with Microsoft in order to build a solid foundation for them to strike out into the tablet market.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU