Nokia's chance to muscle a comeback

It’s a hard life being a Windows Phone fanboy these days.

Vodafone is infatuated with the iPhone, and Telecom appears dedicated to pushing Android (in any shape or version) as the best alternative. There appears to be no room in the bed for the otherwise excellent Windows Phone operating system.

Apart from polar-opposite sales numbers, Windows Phone feels a bit like the early days of the iPhone. There’s a small group of local developers building apps for the platform, some making money, some doing it for fun. There’s growing interest in the enterprise space, both as an alternative to Blackberry and as a platform for .NET developers to go mobile with the languages they know.

Carriers apathetic
All of the local Windows Phone aficionados are very excited about Nokia’s new Windows Phones: the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710 (Nokia has yet to announce an NZ release date for either handset).

You see, the mobile phone business is all about give and take. The carriers (Telecom, Vodafone and others) don’t take unless there’s someone giving.

They often won’t display and sell a phone in their stores unless there’s an incentive to do so. It might be intangible (e.g. Apple’s ability to attract customers, or Android’s well-known brand), or tangible (for example, marketing dollars).

Combine the poor history of “brand Windows” on mobile phones with very low market penetration and probably very low marketing spend, and there is low-to-zero incentive for the big two to even put a Windows Phone on display in their stores.

The sligthly confused gorilla
Enter Nokia; the 800-pound, slightly confused gorilla of the mobile phone space. Roughly 1 in every 4 mobile phones sold today is a Nokia – they sell 100 million of them a year.

Earlier this year, after seeing their smartphone market share almost halved by competitors, Nokia made the decision to use Windows Phone as their “smartphone platform of choice”. Last week we saw the first fruits of that relationship in the form of these two new phone models.

We know the software on these new phones will be great, because David Pogue says so.

Nokia’s hardware is spot-on too: the Lumia 800 is heavily based on the very well received Nokia N9.

So the phone will be as good as any other smartphone on the market. But to be honest, I’m more excited about Nokia’s marketing muscle.

You just need to look around at the way the Nokia N9 is being pushed in the New Zealand market.

Nokia has announced a big general push for Windows Phone, and some direct promotion for the new devices. The day after chief executive Stephen Elop’s announcement at Nokia World, UK chain Phones4u had devices in store for users to test, and Nokia also “took over” four top stores in a full marketing blast:

“Four of Phones 4u’s ‘top’ UK stores – Oxford Street, Stratford Westfield, Birmingham High Street and Leeds Briggate – will receive full store takeovers that include Nokia demo hubs with live devices and plasma TVs, and 3D Vortex Windows, all showcasing the new Nokia Lumia 800. A dedicated hero pod with live demo device will also feature in ALL Phones 4u stores across the UK”

If Nokia bring the same marketing muscle to New Zealand with their new phones, I think Windows Phone is coming back, in a big way.

Watch this space.

Ben Gracewood is a solution architect with Intergen, an Australasian Microsoft technology partner. He is also co-creator of Codemania, a conference for software developers.