Mostly smoking, but he has a point.

Nokia are nowhere in North America, and losing more market share by the year - North America represented 4.5% of worldwide sales for Nokia last year, a reduction of 16% year on year, and worldwide Nokia lost 3% market share year-on-year in Smartphones (compare with RIM up 82%, Apple up 328%).

As far as Smartphones are concerned, North America is now where it's at both in terms of hardware, operating systems and services and just at a time when Nokia is more out of the game (in North America at least) than ever. Symbian, S60 and Ovi are frankly a disaster by comparison and the bolt-on touch additions are going to make Nokia competitive in the same that Win Mobile 6.5 is failing to sweep the floor with the competition.

What is happening in North America translates very easily to Europe, that's beyond debate (RIM and Apple are wildly successful in Europe, Android is very successful and only likely to improve as more devices arrive, with only Palm and WebOS as the unknown in Europe). The North American-based devices are flying off the shelves and European developers are creating interesting applications and services for the North American devices, just as the North American developers have done before them.

If Scoble means that Nokia doesn't matter when he refers to "Europe" then I think he has a point - Nokia are no longer at the center of the mobile universe. Nokia will continue to sell low-end phones by the truckload but in terms of smartphones they are on the verge of no longer being relevant. Nokia need to re-invent themselves soon in order to make themselves relevant and regain the significant mind-share that has been lost to North American companies. Perhaps Maemo is the solution, if so they will have only one shot with Fremantle so its execution had better be flawless.

In addition, Scoble could be referring to Symbian which can be seen as a European operating system - Symbian as the smartphone operating system of choice is now on life support, the guys from Symbian Foundation reckon they'll have a new release out in 12-18 months time, will anyone care by then? I doubt it.

As Hempel from CNN Money/Fortune Magazine points out: