Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashutoshm | Hacker News Reader

nokia is ubiquitous in India.heck the subaltern has a song about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpKodZMQr8

About 3 years ago in the UK, business people had Blackberrys and everyone else had Nokia or Sony Ericsson phones. Fast forward to now and business people have iPhones or Blackberrys while teenagers tend to use Blackberrys (they're cheap and good at messaging). Others have iPhones or Androids with the exception of people who haven't upgraded their phone in a while who still have Nokia or Sony Ericsson devices.

Nokia has very little presence here in North America for reasons I haven't been able to fathom.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that most people in the UK will have have owned a Nokia at some point in the last 10-15 years. The brand really is that common. It's the cheap first phone you get, or a fast replacement if your smartphone dies and you still have a contract to uphold, or the phones parents buy their kids 'for emergencies'.

Nokia owns much of the GSM standard, and thus dislikes making CDMA phones. This limits their major models to the AT&T network in the USA.

Nokia also dislikes selling phones trough carriers -- they prefer marketing directly to consumers, not tying their phones to carrier-specific plans.

Together, this means that in the US there is only one carrier where their major model phones work, and that carrier considers Nokia's strategy to be openly hostile to them.

So no wonder they don't sell much.

Nokia also doesn't cut deals with carriers to subsidize the cost of their phones like many Android phone manufacturers do. "$520 for a phone? I can almost buy a laptop for that!"

My coworker from USA couldn't believe that I have paid 200$ for smartphone. I'm from Europe.

You can comfort yourself with the fact that after comparing the contracts, he probably paid a lot more for his.

Never thought that the word 'subaltern' would ever turn up in tech discussion. Good one. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com