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The Age — “Nokia has been losing ground to all other major cell phone makers, a survey by market researcher Gartner Inc. has said, adding that the Finnish company is suffering from a lack of catchy designs, innovative new models and partnerships with operators.”

Do we believe what Gartner says, or do we look deeper? I suggest we look deeper. Daniel Szuc has suggested that Nokia usability has degraded. While I don’t think it has degraded I do think that Nokia phones are getting less and less usable in comparison to other phones.

Sidebar: Measurements of usability are often highly subjective. They are also highly dependent on context, and relationships between other comparable products and services. We tend to judge the usability of all e-commerce web sites in relation to, for example, Amazon. When you raise the bar for one major site you raise the bar for all other sites. When you talk about usability, you often need talk about how one thing compares to something else. That’s how users work. The conclusion is that usability is hard to objectively and absolutely measure, but if you understand the context and landscape, you can still do a good job measuring what you need to measure.

Daniel Szuc also thinks that SmartPhones might be eroding the traditional phone market, thus hurting Nokia. From what I know, the SmartPhone market is small but growing rapidly. My discussions with mobile device experts make me think that Daniel is on to something. SmartPhones are going to start seriously eating into sales of traditional phones and PDAs.

Read the article…

Another version, if you care.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2004 at 9:23 am and is filed under GeneralComments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.