Nokia is building a tablet, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. But don’t expect this tablet to be another me-too tablet. It’ll be different!
That’s what they all say, right?
When asked about his company’s tablet plans on a Finnish news show, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said the following:
“We have a number of options in the tablet computing space given the changing strategy that we have. For example, we could take advantage of Microsoft technology and software and build a Windows-oriented tablet, or we could do things with some of the other software assets that we have.
Our team right now is assessing what’s the right tablet strategy for Nokia—how does that fit in? I will tell you this that’s most important: There are now over 200 different tablets on the marketplace. Only one of them is doing really well. And my challenge to the team is: I don’t want to be the 201st tablet on the market that you can’t tell from all of the others.
We have to take a uniquely Nokia perspective, and so the teams are working very hard on something that would be differentiating relative to everything else that’s going on in the market.”
The reporter then said to Elop, “So you’re not in a hurry,” to which Elop replied, “We’re always in a hurry to do the right things but we’re mostly in a hurry to do the right thing.” That’s not a typo and, no, I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.
But Nokia’s tablet strategy is a smart one, and one that should be adopted by any big company looking to bring a tablet to market.
Apple’s been eating everybody’s lunch so far, and competitors haven’t done much to fight back except for bringing tablets to the market that are either overpriced, too rough-around-the-edges or, in most cases, both.
Our own Harry McCracken summed the current state of tablets up well in his review of the BlackBerry PlayBook, saying:
“So far, only Apple has managed to release a tablet that doesn’t have a slightly experimental feel to it.
Now that the PlayBook is out, the next major milestone for tablets will likely be the release of HP’s promising TouchPad. All HP says about availability is that it plans to ship it ‘this summer.’ But you know what? After having used the Galaxy Tab, the Xoom, and the PlayBook, I’m in no rush. If the company needs more time to make the TouchPad as good as it can possibly be, that’s fine by me — and it just might be the smartest long-term strategy for HP, too.”
That appears to be the same long-term strategy that Nokia’s taking here, and it’s the right strategy because there aren’t really any notable advantages to rushing new tablets to market any more.
Samsung earned itself a slight advantage by being the first to market with a big-name Android tablet in the Galaxy Tab; Motorola earned itself a slight advantage by being the first to market with a big-name tablet running Google’s made-for-tablets Android 3.0 software; and BlackBerry earned itself a slight advantage by being first to market with a big-name tablet running an all new operating system. Now it’s time to bring tablets to market that are priced affordably and work well right out of the box.
Since there are now very few “slight advantages” to be won, it’s in tablet makers’ best interests to release tablets that don’t feel even the least bit experimental. I’d argue that the only exceptions to this rule are tablets that are priced so aggressively that people will put up with minor (minor!) kinks that still need to be worked out. Acer’s $450 Iconia tablet was a good start and Asus’ $400 Transformer tablet is even better. But anything north of a $450 starting price is just asking for trouble in the current tablet market.
It’s unclear what we can expect from an upcoming Nokia tablet, but the company has experience building affordable, consumer-friendly tablets stretching all the way back to 2005.
Did anyone here have the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet? I did. I actually just donated mine to the school my wife teaches at for the kids to take apart in their after-school computer club.
Even in 2005, the Nokia 770 “only” cost $360. It had a big (for the time) 4-inch screen AND YOU COULD SURF THE WEB ON IT! And there were apps!
Nokia also did a commendable job of making itself stand out from the crowd when it released its Booklet 3G netbook in 2009—a time when the market had already become relatively saturated with netbooks.
It was made of aluminum, ran Windows 7, had a 10-inch HD display, was less than an inch thick, weighed 2.75 pounds, and had a battery life of over 10 hours—all of which were unheard of for netbooks at the time and are arguably still pretty decent specs by today’s measures, too.
Unfortunately, Nokia fell into the same trap that tablet makers are falling into nowadays and decided to outfit its netbook with a 3G chip and sell it through wireless carriers. The end result was that unless you bundled it with a two-year contract, the $300 selling price turned into a whopping $600. The fact that Windows 7 ran like me doing long division (very slowly, if at all) didn’t help its case, either, but the machine’s design was certainly impressive.
If Nokia can manage to cobble together an ahead-of-its-time tablet like the 770 was and use ahead-of-its-time design and features like the Booklet 3G had, while at the same time avoiding the pitfall of pricing itself out of competition—NOTE TO TABLET MAKERS: QUIT PARTNERING WITH WIRELESS CARRIERS—the company might be able to make a decent dent in the tablet market.
More on TIME.com:
How to Sell a Tablet: Apps and Price First, Tech Specs Second
Nokia and Microsoft Partner to Build Windows Phone 7 Devices
The BlackBerry PlayBook: Another Interesting Unfinished Tablet