Think sexy, think carrier, and think hardware to win America?

why doesn't Nokia just buy someone like T-mobile .. going price about $5billion .. then you can have as much of the market as you're prepared to loss-lead into.

but seriously .. Americans aren't spoiled .. they're trapped into carrier contracts of 2 and sometimes 3 years .. with rather poor handset choices .. lets not forget they have terrible 3G coverage .. no sir .. freedom is not to be found in america ..

Yet surprisingly, a lot of hollywood action flicks have showcased nokia handsets - Matrix, Die Hard 4.0, The Dark Knight, to name a few.

The American market is different, so is the European, Japanese, Chinese, Canadian, Australian,... market.

If they want to have a market share there they will have to adept to the market there, marketing, buzz and carriers seem to be more important there, the hardware is more then capable enough i think.

You could also ask why some phones have such a success in the us but have a marginal share outside of the us, a whole different way of consuming.

In the second half of this year with symbian^3 and a new "meego" devices they could take another shot and try to start up a hype, verizon nokia anyone.

Honestly, I don't think Nokia prioritizes the US, because they can afford not to.

I clicked on the link expecting some good points of advise for Nokia but all I see is the same old American point of view of the cellphone industry.

Americans just want
1 Good looking
2 Restricted
3 Feature phones
4 Subsidized by their operators

that market is just not ready for full fledged Smartphones that Nokia is trying to provide them. I think Nokia should stop pushing Symbian and Maemo in America and give them some Razor thin, cheap, touchscreen numbered phones running on S40 and they'll be happy.

Ouch!! It seems we are all pretty shallow here in the minds of most of the folks commenting on this article. Unfortunately it is close to the truth. But maybe things will change a bit over the coming months. The comment that we depend upon our carriers to provide us with dirt cheap phones and then lock us in to long contracts is pretty much on point...but...we looked at "upgrading" my wife's iPhone the other day and I was shocked to see a $499 price tag in addition to signing another 2 year contract. That is not the way it was when she got her first iPhone...and I can do more with my N97 mini straight out of the box than she can do after loading apps for 2 years. However, other than the freedom to jump ship if I want to I am still obliged to pay for a data plan if I want to use my Nokia phone for the stuff I use it for. So maybe the multiyear agreements with the "cheap" phone business model still works for the carriers here. After all, in business school we were reminded that Gillette will happily give away the razor in order to get the annuity of the replacement blades.

Lord knows Nokia could do a better marketing job in the US but after watching my wife and her friends happily pecking away at their iPhones and playing with the "pinch-and-stretch" interface to look at each other's grandkids I contend that the key to success here is a very simple, very intuitive user interface. I kind of have fun messing with the menus and reconfiguring my UI every few weeks but for the average user if they don't get it right away they won't mess with it. And, even if it is stupid, there had better be "an app for that"....whatever "that" is.

Police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.

In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that "a customer's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records" that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

Those claims have alarmed the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice Department's request and plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that Americans' privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than what the administration has proposed.

"This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st century," says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who will be arguing on Friday. "If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment."

Not long ago, the concept of tracking cell phones would have been the stuff of spy movies. In 1998's "Enemy of the State," Gene Hackman warned that the National Security Agency has "been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the '40s--they've infected everything." After a decade of appearances in "24" and "Live Free or Die Hard," location-tracking has become such a trope that it was satirized in a scene with Seth Rogen from "Pineapple Express" (2008).

The Federal Communications Commission's "Enhanced 911" (E911) requirements allowed rough estimates to be transformed into precise coordinates. Wireless carriers using CDMA networks, such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, tend to use embedded GPS technology to fulfill E911 requirements. AT&T and T-Mobile comply with E911 regulations using network-based technology that computes a phone's location using signal analysis and triangulation between towers.

T-Mobile, for instance, uses a GSM technology called Uplink Time Difference of Arrival, or U-TDOA, which calculates a position based on precisely how long it takes signals to reach towers. A company called TruePosition, which provides U-TDOA services to T-Mobile, boasts of "accuracy to under 50 meters" that's available "for start-of-call, midcall, or when idle."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10451518-38.html

Question, does NOKIA really want to be in the US Market? I don't think so, because the new market's are around Canada and the US.

I'm sure cell location tracking and location has been used in criminal investigations and evidence in many parts of the world already. Including the UK, I recall reading about one such case only last year where criminals attempted to evade this by switching off their phones. The police were able to prove that all the gang switched their phones off at the same time and at the same place and so they were caught anyway.

But, back to the comments in this thread. I am shocked that a whole nation will stand for 2 year lock-ins on phone contracts. I use pay as you use non-contract where topping up the credit enables a month of free data connection. Then I buy used phones from Ebay. It is the cheapest way for me to use smartphones by far. I gave up contracts as soon as they went to 18 months and 12 month was all but phased out. If enough people refuse to play then the networks will be forced to offer reasonablr terms. Unfortunately people just walk into contracts because it's so easy at the start.

After seeing what I can do with an unlocked, generic smartphone, why would I want AT&T to remove "features" it doesn't like? If they decide they want to "push" the iPhone and Apple products and give them favorable rates and low starting prices it's really unfair and should be illegal. Phones that give you features that network operators used to charge you for make them unwilling to subsidize them.

Look what happened when they tried to integrate Skype into the N97 and how carriers screamed? I hope they can produce a mass-appeal phone that both T-Mobile and AT&T carry so that their will be more apps created for Nokia phones that I can use on an unlocked, carrier customization free phone.

How about the simple fact that the carriers (a) want to control the features of the phone because they're too worried about creating their own product line, (b) Nokia, thankfully, does not want to them to take away features from the phones, and (c) if the carriers do finally agree to release a phone, it takes them a year to "test it" and by the time it does come to market, the excitement for it has died down. There's also (d) Nokia's touchscreen phones are thought to have poor software, but, I don't see the carriers cutting WinMo out of their lineups.

From Paul Boutin's reasons:

"Nokia was too cocky in negotiations with U.S. operators": This in all likely hood stems from the whole carrier manufacturer power struggle. Nokia does not want to give in, I think, fearing that its phones will be kicked down a few notches from what they truly are, and consumers will end up looking at Nokia as a not so great brand. Look at the N75, E61, and E71x as examples.

"Nokia�s phones are no longer the sexiest": Purely subjective, and pure trash. Anybody seen the Eseries lately? How about the Nseries? How about the 6700, 6600, 6500 Slide, or the 8000 series?

"Nokia no longer leads on features": I dare you to find me a phone on any carrier that matches the features on the N97, let alone it's spec sheet. The Droid comes close, but still falls short. Find me a phone with the feature set of the E72. Can't do it. Find me an 8MP smartphone on any carrier. Find me a candybar smartphone with a 5MP shooter. You can't. The only thing Nokia doesn't have yet is a touchscreen device with multitouch. That's the only feature they're missing. For the most part though, you can't find a match for a good number of their smartphones on any carrier.

I want Nokia to win back America, but I don't want it to happen at the expense of great features, and B.S. phones being created just for the U.S. market. I want the same unlocked phones we have now, with the same exact feature sets, and unlike most people, I'm willing to drop $300 no problem for it. Why? Because if AT&T is looking to cut the price of the phone by cutting features, I'll gladly pay a higher price for one.

Another problem in the US is Nokia's geeky product numbers. Americans are attuned to buying iPhones, Androids, Mythics, etc etc. We don't cotton to N97, 6354, 3716, etc. Even when Nokia tries to be cool, they can't give up their beloved numbers: 5800 XpressMusic et al. Worse, these numbers mean almost nothing...there's no obvious sequence or model line. What's the relation between, say, the N95 and N97. From a consumer POV, those should be very closely related...while in fact, they are not (S60 3 Ed and 5th ed, respectively).