The new Ashas might be enough to keep NOKIA on life support a little while longer.

The problem for NOKIA is IDC has now categorised the Asha touch devices as smartphones, they may well become NOKIA's best selling smartphones (or will their markets to be limited to try and prevent that?)

Elop may then have to conjure up another burning platform memo to keep his lord and masters at Microsoft happy.

Asha is Series 40, and Series 40 is without discussion Nokias biggest OS. It's not really a smartphone OS, though, is it...

IMO, the main reason Nokia want to classify it as a smartphone is so that it boosts the units in the quarterly reports hence they wouldn't need to specify explicitly the success of Lumia series...

Its a way to market the devices as well as a safe fall-back for Elop who can cover up the fallings of Lumia if they don't really sell well...

After all, I think the Asha series gives around 10% margin just like what Elop expects from WP series phones whereas Symbian and N9 gave him 20-30% margins...So with same margin it would be more difficult to get the real Lumia sales figures...

I tend to agree, when compared to powerful multitasking operating systems like MeeGo or Symbian Series 40 doesn't seem like a smartphone OS. However, when you compare Series 40 to (artificially) restricted, single-tasking operating systems like WPx and iOS I think the distinction is not so clear.

Either way if IDC have categorised the Ashas as smartphones I guess they'll start to appear in their statistics as such.

The Ashas do look good value for what they are.

But in the olden days, S60 would show up in the "Nokia smart phones" stats, and the S40 phones wouldn't. So changing this "mid race" is just boosting the smart phone numbers to look more competitive, and makes comparison of numbers before and after this shift more or less meaningless.

Another nail:

Nokia: Analyst Sees No Value Outside Cash And Patents

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavi...h-and-patents/

In Q2 2012 NOKIA's gross margins were:

Smart Devices 1.7% (yes, one point seven!)
Mobile Phones 24.1%

Source (scroll down to about half way).

You are right in essence though, getting the Ashas bumped up to smartphone status would help Elop disguise the disastrous mess he's making of NOKIA's smartphone division.



But it's IDC's decision not NOKIA's. As I understand it there is no standard definition of what makes a phone a smartphone, IDC have their own in-house definition, Gartner have their own in-house definition, etc...

Presumably something added/altered in the latest range of Ashas has made them fit the IDC criteria.

it will be difficult for Nokia or Jolla for that matter to break into the top tier. none of the products are revolutionary and most of them are iphone imitations, including N9. price breaks and small differentiations will help fractionally increase the consumer base. until something revolutionary comes, the top tier will be iOS and Android. i am not sure that Nokia has that revolutionary spirit left in its bowels. so ashas and taleban phones will remain its best bet.

Lumiaman,

What you don't see is Jolla are not targetting top tier yet; while Nokia were top-tier run down by an idiot...

How would you have revolutionary spirit left when you have people being fired left, right and centre just because of one man's idiotic decisions...

I'm still of the opinion Elop could have chosen an all-inclusive strategy of building on existing+WP instead of WP-only...After all, haven't Google succeeded with a "throw noodles on the wall and go with what sticks" strategy? Android is similar for them; it stuck so they push on...

Also, your latest comments give me the impression that you have given up on Nokia ever improving; so are you literally writing-off your investment in NOK?

I am sticking with Nokia as i think they will get to 10 a share in 2-3 years. what i am saying is that it will be very difficult for them to be top again. i do believe that synergism between Nokia and WP may make them the third ecosysytem, but i dont see much revolutionary stuff coming out