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Mobile giant Nokia is expected to launch its two widely anticipated smartphones E7 and N8, among others, at Nokia World event in London that will be held on September 14-15.
Nokia, whose shares have plummeted as much as 50 percent in the last one year, is betting on these two models for the revival of its fortunes.
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In a Sept. 6 post on Nokia Conversations, the official Nokia Blog, said "Last year, it was the Nokia N900, X6, N97mini and Nokia Booklet on the hardware side. On the software and services side, it was where we first heard about Nokia Money, the Ovi SDK and navigation API. We don't know what could possibly be in store this year, but we're hoping for several magnitudes of awesome."
Nokia's Worries
Nokia, which once had a commanding presence in the US, lost its market share to Apple's iPhone and Google's Android-powered handsets.
Coming under pressure from competitors like Apple and Blackberry maker Research In Motion (RIM), Nokia has been focusing on developing market-winning devices.
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Nokia's failure to roll-out successful smartphones, which have fatter margins, resulted in the company lowering its profit outlook for two successive quarters as rival products ate into its market share in recent times.
According to research firm Gartner, Nokia's mobile phone market share has dropped to 34.2 percent from 36.8 in the last year. Its share of the smartphone market dropped more sharply, from 45 percent in the second quarter of 2009 to 37.4 percent currently.
However, IDC said with shipments of 24 million units and a 38.1 percent market share, the company retained its top spot in the smartphone sales in the second quarter.
Last year, Apple overtook Nokia as the handset maker generating the largest total profit, despite selling only one iPhone for every 13 phones Nokia sells.
Moreover, it's been a while since Nokia has really competed in the high-end smartphone market as its last major release, the Nokia N900, not delivered sales as expected.
With these two products, especially with N8, Nokia hopes to effectively compete with top smartphones, such as the iPhone, HTC Desire and the Samsung Galaxy.
The success of the new smartphones would also play an important on the career of its CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo as there have been reports that Nokia is looking to replace the executive.
N8
N8, which had been unveiled in April, will mark the launch of Nokia's new Symbian 3 operating platform. The device sports a 3.5 inch AMOLED touchscreen, comes with 12 megapixel camera with LED Flash and Carl Zeiss optics, but the processing speeds are said to be slower compared to Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy S.
Nokia N8 also offers the users to make high-definition videos and edit them with an intuitive built-in editing suite. In addition, the Nokia N8 enables access to Web TV services.
With a 16GB internal memory, the memory can be expanded up to 32GB via a microSD card. There is a TV-out option too, apart from social networking integration, internet access and Wi-Fi/3G connectivity, and a secondary camera for conference calls.
N8 has connectivity of Bluetooth 3.0, with a 1200 milliamp hour lithium-ion battery. The battery has 12 hours of talk-time in GSM with a standby time of 16.25 days. The company claims the music playback time in offline mode with 16 GB internal memory is 50 hours.
Not only Nokia, but also the market is betting big on Nokia's N8, with Morgan Stanley upgrading the company by two notches to "overweight" from "underweight", and lifted its price target to 9 euros from 6.50 euros.
The brokerage said recent checks with retailers and suppliers suggest a better-than-expected take-up of the upcoming N8 smartphone at a lower discount than feared.
Nokia N8 will be available at the end of September 2010.
E7
Though there is not much information on E7 specification, the device is expected to feature a 4" touchscreen, 3G, Wi-Fi, 8MP camera with dual LED flash, an HDMI port and full QWERTY keyboard.
E7 is also rumored to work on a Symbian 3 platform, 1 GHz processor and will apparently feature a 640×360 display.
