Nokia Rattles Sabres At Apple And RIM

Tough talk from Nokia. An exec recently said in an interview that the company will "be on par with Apple and RIM" in 2011. Whoa. Watch out Cupertino and Waterloo. Oh, and the company thinks it is going to sell 500 million phones this year.Nokia still commands the overall lead around the globe when it comes to handset sales. That's not in question. Nokia has lost nearly all of its market share in the U.S. over the course of the last few years, but according to Rick Simonson, head of the Nokia's mobile division, that's going to change. Eventually.

In an interview with the India Economic Times, Simonson said, "Yes, we have lost ground in the smartphone space over the past 18 months, but the decline has stopped and stablised in the second and third quarters of 2009. The New Year will see [our] recovery in smartphones with the introduction of Maemo and the stabilisation of the Symbian operating system, which by the way, continues to be the platform for the largest number of smartphones, globally."

Has the decline really slowed or stopped? The latest financial quarters show that Nokia has still lost share in the U.S. RIM and Apple have stolen most of it, with Android quickly joining the anti-Symbian trifecta of smartphone platforms.

Simonson continued, "By 2011, our efforts will start producing results, as we will be at par with Apple and RIM in smartphones. Not only [will] we draw level with them, we will also win the war because, in addition to e-mail, we will be adding content, chat, music, entertainment and several other features, which will soon become very critical for success of any company in this space."

Nokia's most recent flagship multimedia devices, the N97, N97 Mini and N900, fail to live up to the iPhone's level of ease-of-use and success. Those are the devices Nokia came up with to compete with Apple more than two years after the iPhone was first announced. Does Nokia not think that Apple will continue to innovate and turn industries are their respective heads?

In 2011, Nokia may finally catch up with what Apple was doing in 2009. By then, however, Apple will have moved on and done something else new and exciting. Nokia has to do more than be "on par" with Apple and RIM by 2011 if it really wants to compete...at least in the U.S.

[Via AllThingsD]