Just watched the video review of Nokia Lumia 800 on youtube and I must say I was quite impressed with what Nokia managed to roll out in such a short period of time. That said, however, the internet world thinks that it's the "doomed" phone. Rightly so, because it hasn't attracted that much attention anyway. Must be heartbreaking, specially for their engineers, to see their efforts almost go down the gutter. But I guess this is how the consumer market is. Apple could come up with a small tweak and still sell millions of copies and folks like Nokia could come up with a whole new product lineup and still sell only a handful.
However, after all said and done, one thing that every handset manufacturer seems to be missing is that they're not giving their customers anything new. The Apples made a huge paradigm shift in the handset market when they came up with a touchscreen phone and it's been like that for like forever now. Obviously, it's not everyday that you can roll out a new operating system and a pool of half a million apps but there are bunch of other things you can actually go creative with...
New hardware design: I agree that there isn't much scope for getting creative with the design of handset, but then the same is true for the cars and the automotive industry has been able to surprise people every year for decades now. I strongly believe that a creative handset design that's got good aesthetics stands a great chance unless there are other showstoppers. For example, Sony Ericsson's Xperia X10 was a real eye candy when they revealed it. I and quite a few people I know were pretty much looking forward to buy it right away. Unfortunately, it sported Android 1.6 as against Samsung's Galaxy S which sported Android 2.0 at that time. A real showstopper, specially with the lousy touchscreen response. Bottomline - a great hardware design with latest OS version of whatever platform.
Camera: It's no secret that people dig phones with good camera. Not only that, recent
studies show that point and shoot camera market has perished because of the smartphone cameras. So, clearly, give people the best main camera and a good front facing camera and that must give consumers a strong incentive.
Content: This pretty much covers everything. Games, Audio, Video, Books and Apps. Now, surprisingly, no one has been able to integrate smartphone, PC and a tablet all that well. There's a lot of scope for apps to get more intelligent, hardware permitting. Siri being a quintessential example. Siri, however now is a thing of the past. With hundreds of apps flooding the market each day, there's no doubt whatsoever that we have enough developers. All companies have to do, is start an ambitious open source project that's interesting enough and has some incentives for the developers.
Media:
Smartphone as a music player has a lot of potential and the capabilities need to be integrated deep into the OS itself. Android has that capability but it's quite rudimentary. Players need to be smarter, like Apple's genius (although I haven't had much of a luck with it, but I believe with proper content, it must work). Smartphones haven't done a lot in terms of online gaming. People are getting lazy and more lazy these days and specially the ones like me don't want to spend too much money or time on my music selection. This is where things like Pandora and Slacker or even Spotify comes into picture. These things need to be integrated well into the OS itself. Phone manufacturers or service providers might have to manage their own content library but cutting the deal with companies like Amazon with huge media library should not be impossible.
Games:
Sony and Microsoft have infrastructure in place already but somehow they've failed to bring the glory to the phone platform. Multiplayer gaming with phones could be really cool.
Books:
Quite honestly, I don't see myself reading a book on my phone, no matter how big the screen is. So efforts in that direction is clearly a waste of time for me and for like minded people.
Innovation:
As said earlier, innovation is the key. People need to see their phone do something new. Controlling their thermostats for example. Goes without saying that innovation without utility isn't an innovation at all. Vlingo for example was there for quite some time, but it was Siri who made the cut. Same for the facetime. Phones need to act more like a personal assistants than just a fancy device in your pocket. This means, they need to do a value addition to your work, organize stuff for you, communicate with your cars, act as your credit cards and these are just a few ideas. Increasing the megapixels on the camera or increasing the screen size alone is not going to help anymore, there's a huge scope for innovation and that's where companies need to target.
