Is Nokia Releasing a QWERTY Nseries?
It’s impossible to create one smartphone that will appeal to everyone. Michael Mace wrote a great piece roughly a year ago comparing the smartphone industry to the automobile industry in that there will never be one model that everyone agrees is best.
Nokia always seemed to understand this and put it into practice by (among other things) dividing their Series 60 smartphones into two categories: Eseries & Nseries. The idea was that Eseries devices would appeal more to the enterprise user who needs things like a QWERTY keyboard and corporate email support and Nseries devices would appeal to those looking for lots of multimedia features like high end cameras and quality music support.
However, according to Boy Genius Report, it looks like Nokia might break slightly from this recent tradition by offering an N Series device with a QWERTY keyboard. This yet-to-be-named device will reportedly be similar to the E61i with a 5+ megapixel camera and DVD quality video recording capabilities.
It’s still in speculation mode (perhaps we’ll hear something more formal at CES). BGR says we can expect to see this device on the market in late 2008.
Comments
I agree with you and I sort of feel like Nokia knew that was going to happen from the beginning. It'll be interesting to see how Nokia goes forward with E/N Series devices in general as they implement their reorganization. Such a definite separation between devices and software will present some interesting challenges (and probably some heated internal discussions) for Nokia.
Posted by: Jason | January 14, 2008 01:42 PM
I think you can start wiping out the E & N-line division pretty quickly.
What seemed a good idea at the time didn't really work as you had models crossing over the division lines all the time.
Now, the division between the two seems artificial, stiff and serves no selling purpose in my opinion.
Posted by: Pål Bråtelund | January 11, 2008 04:01 AM